The pundits spent the country’s 250th birthday mourning a survey. I read the same numbers from behind my grill, pocket Constitution right where it always is, and found a republic in perfect working order.
Happy 250th, patriots. While you were icing the coolers, the press corps found a Cato poll claiming 46 percent of Americans don’t know what today commemorates, and they have been in mourning ever since. I read the entire survey standing over the brats, and I am here to report the opposite. Constitutionally speaking, this country has never been healthier.
Start with the numbers the doom crowd skipped. A full 86 percent of Americans are grateful to be here, 79 percent are proud, and the same share views the Constitution favorably. Devotion is how you measure the health of a founding document; comprehension is a separate line item. Nobody who calls Buckner HVAC Services can tell you what a heat exchanger does, and their houses stay warm. That is what they have me for. Knowing how the Constitution works is the same kind of job, and we have people in Washington for that.
The Cato Poll’s Trick Questions
The pollsters insist 58 percent of Americans don’t know the Constitution’s main purpose. I have studied the document for decades, so allow me to settle it: the main purpose of the Constitution was declaring our independence from Great Britain. The Declaration is printed in the back of any pocket Constitution, which closes the case. They also claim 57 percent of us can’t explain why we broke with Britain, as though every schoolboy doesn’t know King George came for the muskets first. The Cato poll marked both answers wrong, which tells you who wrote the answer key.
Then there is Steve Schmidt, a consultant who went Never Trump before it had a hashtag, read the same survey, and published a full-scale alarm calling it a “warning flare” that reveals our “civic amnesia.” He quoted the parts where Americans flunk quizzes and skipped every part where Americans love their country. One of us is cherry-picking half a poll, and I will let you guess which.
What the Founders Meant by Flexible
The survey reports 30 percent of Americans rank corruption as the top threat to freedom, and before anybody drags the president’s new airplane into this, let me save you the trip: nobody in the poll mentioned the plane, and the Emoluments Clause does not mean what they think it means. I hunted through my pocket copy last night and never found it in the index, which tells you how much weight the Founders gave it. The same crowd faints because 38 percent of Americans say it’s fine for a president they support to stretch the Constitution. Folks, I have installed ductwork for thirty years. A rigid duct cracks in the first cold snap. A flexible one carries the air wherever the man at the thermostat needs it, and the Founders built this system to flex.
At our cookout this afternoon I opened my pocket Constitution and read the family my favorite line straight out of it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” My nephew, who is nineteen and knows everything, said that line comes from the Declaration of Independence. Son, I told him, that is the exact gotcha the pollsters pulled on the whole country. The two documents are one unit, same as your furnace and your AC, and any technician who separates them is billing you twice.
So raise a glass tonight and let the hand-wringers wring. The Cato poll says 46 percent of this country can’t tell you what today celebrates. I have carried the founding documents in my shirt pocket for twenty years, and I am proud to say I’m not one of them.
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