in schools and colleges and also elementary school, et cetera, et cetera, is accurate? a lot is inaccurate. starting with the progressives attack on the constitution. that the founders were not motivated by putting together a document that had eternal truths in it. that one generation should follow, the next generation should follow and so on. but it was a self-interested document that the founders wrote it and designed it to protect their economic interest. right. it became also that when you say eternal truths that god was not really there. it doesn t matter. the declaration of independence shouldn t even be read today. didn t, wasn t it wilson r.j. do you remember? wasn t it wilson that said the preamble of the constitution should never be read and the deck lar rition of independence has zero relevance to any other age other than 1776? yeah, wilson said if you want to understand the real
but what other judgments said the law means. it s a case law approach. it would be like if you re repairing or restoring a car, and you never go back to the original schematic of the car, you just see all of the repairs and what everybody has done no the to the car. a 1965 mustang, 200 years from now if you are only basing what you are doing on all of the repairs, it ain t going to be anything like a 1965 mustang, right? right. this is why you see during the supreme court confirmation hearings all of the progressive senators are really worked up about precedent. they re obsessed with precedent. what that means is they want to make sure the potential justices are going to be guided by what other liberal judges have said over the last 80 years about the constitution, not what the constitution actually says. glenn: all right. now let me go to woodrow wilson. bring a picture of wilson up. it hate this. this i mean i got to tell
the founders, the most brilliant thing i think the founders did when the constitution is changed, you don t erase anything. you add it. for instance, the progressive prohibition is still in the constituti constitution, it s just repealed later. so you leave the scars of history and you can see, we made a really bad mistake here. when did we stop, when did we stop talking in public about changing the constitution? for instance, healthcare in the 1930s f.d.r. said we got to have a second bill of rights. when did that happen? when did we unplug really? between the end of world war ii and the end of the great society. that s where you start to lose the concept that you re actually dealing with a constitution and not just whatever some president or
ever-sewa ever-evolving and living. that was not the original intent with the founders and it s really the definition of the progressive movement. back with our panel. we re looking at progressives. america, i and i want to go to the law here. i want to go to r.j. r.j., help me out because my memory is sketchy here. i m trying to remember the name of the guy, i believe he was the head of harvard law in about 1920. he s the guy who made a fundamental change in america. they no longer studied the constitution or constitutional law or the founders. they changed to study case law, which again no revolution. just evolution. so we never, we slowly but surely keep moving away from the constitution and the founders. and we end up just looking at the last case.
tradition of the american founding. franklin roosevelt did that as well. so to the extent that people become aware of what is really at work in the progressive movement, both of yesterday and today, that is the only hope we have. at hillsdale college where r.j. and i both teach we have a required course on the constitution. i think if we had colleges and schools across the nation requiring courses on the constitution, studying the document, what does it say and then what do other people say that it sasays, people can see dichotomy and how they different and go from there. glenn: the interesting thing if you read democracy in america or if you read anything from the 1800s, you will see that people in pubs or in bars or, you know, on the street and offices, they actually discuss the constitution. they absolutely talked about it and said well, no.