I recently watched on Wondrium a very interesting and worthwhile pair of courses on the US Constitution taught by Eric Berger, a professor at the University of Nebraska Law School. The two courses were:
I am currently in the process of watching:
While the US Constitution is not that long and is not that hard to read, reading it and understanding it are two distinct things. Both of the first two courses are good, but the second was more interesting to me as it explored the “sausage making” of our Constitution and the various amendments that have been added to it. The two courses are a wee bit redundant, they had to be, but it still is worthwhile watching both.
While the Constitution has guided us, more or less, through the last 235 years, being the world’s longest surviving written charter of government, it is far from perfect. It passed on the hot potato of slavery, resulting in a civil war a short 73 years later that killed two percent of the US population. Many of the compromises made, like two Senators for every state regardless of population, continue to give us problems. That compromise along with counting slaves as 3/5s of a person for census purposes, gave far too much power to the slave holding states of the south, possibly another cause of the Civil War. The Constitution left women, minorities, indigenous people as second class citizens or non-citizens… or worse. And I could go on. We have been fighting for the whole 235 years over the meaning of various passages in the Constitution, the Constitution being the slimmest of a skeletal guideline for a new government.
The Federalist Papers were a series of newspaper editorials written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in an effort to help convince folks to ratify the new constitution. The editorials are windows into the thought processes of the Founding Fathers. I read the Federalist Papers years ago and found them somewhat obscure. This particular course is removing some of the cobwebs, improving my comprehension of these important foundational documents just a wee bit.
Whenever, I picture extreme right Republican politicians, I always get a picture in my mind of those folks running around the floor of Congress like chickens with their heads cut off, a Bible in one hand and the US Constitution in the other. They treat both as if they were absolutely infallible, without error, and that everyone should be in agreement on their extreme right interpretation of the meaning and the importance of both.
I bring this up because Kevin McCarthy, Republican from California, has stated that if he becomes Speaker of the House (God save our souls) that one of his first acts will be to have the Constitution read into the Congressional record. I am sure that with his marketing degree he did not spend a lot of time studying the Constitution in college, but forty percent of the current Congress attended law school—54 percent of senators and 37 percent of House members have law degrees. I would also think any serious public servant would have already studied the instructional manual for his job, but I could be wrong, the operative words being “serious” and “public servant”.
Perhaps McCarthy and his ilk would be better served by spending some time with these courses rather than the political stunt of reading the Constitution on the floor of Congress. Eric Berger is an absolute genius at making sense out of our Constitution, I am betting even Kevin McCarthy,MBA could get something out of the courses.
And so it goes.
Test Your Knowledge of the U.S. Constitution
Quizzes from ConstitutionFacts.com The first quiz is only ten questions, they have longer, more interesting quizzes on the subject. However, you seem to have to go through the shorter quizzes to get to the longer ones. And yeah, I have no idea what the agenda of this website is.