Recent months have given ample opportunity for elected officials to cite references to some of our country’s most important documents. These are the very documents that elected officials are expected to adhere to in performing their jobs.
Unfortunately, during these recent months, what has been shown is that there are a lot of elected officials who do not know what those documents were designed to accomplish in general, much less what they contain specifically. I’ll not name names here, but I feel sure there is some egg yolk dripping off a few faces in Washington these days!
I am all about helping elected officials improve their job performance so….
Straight from the University of Oklahoma College Law website site here is a chronology of U.S. Historical Documents.
I am working my way through all of them. (I will warn you that some of them need to be read only on those nights when insomnia strikes and nothing works to help you get to sleep.) What is interesting to me is simply looking at these documents in order and seeing where things have been adapted from earlier documents, been deleted from earlier documents, or have been directly countered from earlier documents.
Also, as I read them, I do a Google search for historical events, populations, businesses, trade, general economics, and social structures that were in place at the time the documents were written.
Interestingly, I found the Iroquois Constitution to hold some interesting ideas from the Pre-Colonial era that could be very useful today.
Of course, I don’t expect elected officials to start actually reading and learning some of these documents. I simply hope that citizens will take the time to read them. Although, it might be nice if every candidate for public office had to pass a basic high school civics exam before being able to run. A citizenry that is as, or more, informed as the people elected to represent them can be a very powerful thing!
