The United States Constitution begins with the three simple words, “We the people…”, but how profound they are. It assumes that the country would be run by ordinary people, not career politicians with law degrees who claim that the little people can’t run their own lives without governmental intervention in every area. Not surprisingly, the founding fathers had much to say about this very thing. Thomas Jefferson said,
I consider the people who constitute a society or nation as the source of all authority in that nation…All authority belongs to the people. (Albert Ellery Bergh, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson [Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907], 3:227; Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols [New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1892-99], 10:190)
Jefferson was talking about people just like us! He says again,
The people, especially when moderately instructed, are the only safe, because the only honest, depositories of public rights, and should therefore be introduced into the administration of them in every function to which they are sufficient. They will err sometimes and accidentally, but never designedly and with a systematic and persevering purpose of overthrowing the free principles of the government. (Bergh, 15:483)
So, common citizen, be encouraged, and run for office if you are sick and tired of seeing someone, Democrat or Republican, forgetting those three simple words, ‘”We the people”.
Source: The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution”, by W. Cleon Skousen, (Idaho: The National Center for Constitutional Studies, 2007)
