George Mason

In the weeks before, he had drafted a constitution for Virginia with a preamble listing the king's offenses, and the charges in that preamble and in the declaration are very close.

And on June 6, a Philadelphia newspaper printed the draft of a declaration of rights that had just been reported to the Virginia Convention, mainly written by George Mason.

Its first article read, that all men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural rights of which they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity, among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Mason wrote Equally Free and Independent.

Mason wrote Pursuing and Obtaining Happiness.

Jefferson wrote The Pursuit of Happiness.

By June 1776, these ideas were common currency among the revolutionary writers, and Jefferson did not need George Mason to think them, but the wording is closer than common property alone would explain.

And Mason's draft was in print in Philadelphia three weeks before Jefferson reported it.

And they impeached a number of royal ministers for the crime of essentially attacking the constitutional order, even though, of course, the ministers were actually doing what the king wanted them to do.

And that fundamental function of impeachment was one of the central things that the framers wanted when they put impeachment into the Constitution, and particularly what George Mason wanted when he inserted the phrase high crimes and misdemeanors into the definition of impeachment.

key to the whole idea of impeaching a president is that Congress must have the ability to protect the whole constitutional order against a president if the president is undermining the whole constitutional order.

We've never had a president who's tried to do that.

How about the United Nations drops theirs first? Thomas Jefferson was right when he said, no free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

In the 1700s, George Mason rightly said, to disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

Did you know that where guns are made mandatory, crime plummets? That means where communities own guns or a means to defend themselves, crime goes away.

In 1982, the town of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law requiring all able adults, except convicts that is, to have a gun.

But again, in the sense of their opposition, we the people, we have every right under heaven to hold them accountable for what they intend to do, and it's better to get at them concerning what they intend to do and what they unconstitutionally provide as an option concerning the agenda that they mean to push, concerning disarmament among the American people, it's best to get at them before and hold them accountable for their crimes.

Because as I said, the thou shall nots belong to our said representatives when it comes to the Bill of Rights.

Now, to disarm the people is the most effective and effectual way to enslave them, said George Mason, referencing advice given to the British Parliament by Pennsylvania government or Governor Sir William Keith.

This is found in the debates in the several state conventions on the adoption of the federal constitution, June 14th, 1788.

You take the power, and this was written into the pie.

This was written into the recipe by James Madison and George Mason and a whole bunch of Virginians who understood that a Virginian like Louise Lucas would come along one day, probably because there were people like Louise Lucas at the time.

We like to pretend that the people who founded this nation were all angels who put their lira down, or lyre down, or they may have had some lira.

But they put their lutes down and descended from Mount Olympus to create this country.

End quote.

A proud, three-century-old civilization, one which had produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, had collapsed into economic ruin and military subjugation.

Describing this wiping away of Virginia's economic system, the culture of old Virginia and all that it was attendant to it, Dabney notes, "...the value of Virginia's farms plunged downward in 1865, and land that brought $150 an acre before the war could be bought for $2." Farming was done on a smaller acreage than in the antebellum era, which was inevitable given the elimination of the slave system.

Between 1865 and 1870, the number of Virginia farms with at least 1,000 acres fell from 641 to 317.

The French Revolution was horrible.

And you could go right down the line, James Madison, George Mason, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, every single one of them was flawed.

You're not going to find anybody in human history who is not, but that should not stop us from acknowledging the tremendous virtue that they displayed and the tremendous accomplishments they achieved.

And Christopher Columbus, is one of those people that we should continue to honor as really part of the American legacy.