Today is James Madison’s birthday, his 259^th. This small man (5 feet 4 inches, less than 100 pounds) had a huge impact on our country. Not only is he credited with being the “Father of the Constitution,” he is also known as the “Author of the Bill of Rights.” Some scholars have even argued that Madison used the process of drafting and ratifying the first ten amendments to the Constitution in order to save the Constitution.

That’s because many anti-Federalists, who had failed to block adoption of the Constitution, were gathering strength to radically overhaul the Framers’ work in 1789. They sought to amend away some of the newly adopted Constitution’s provisions, ones that had been so carefully crafted at Philadelphia.

James Madison had to fight to get elected to the First Congress. Virginia anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry and George Mason—revered patriot leaders—were working to defeat Madison. They carved out a district for the U.S. House of Representatives in which it would be harder for Madison to be elected. Today we call this practice “gerrymandering.” The word came from Massachusetts anti-Federalist leader Elbridge Gerry, who carved out some districts that looked like salamanders. Gerrymanders, they were and still are.

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God bless the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady. She’s a defender of liberty. Her March 1^st column, “Viva Zapata,” urges us to remember the Cuban human rights champion, Orlando Zapata. This humble stone mason died in a military prison in Havana last week. Zapata was only 42. He had gone on an 84-day hunger strike to protest Fidel Castro’s inhuman treatment of thousands of prisoners of conscience in Cuba, one of the last of the Stalinist regimes in the world.

I say “one of the last” in a spirit of hope. Surely China is a Stalinist regime. So is North Korea. What does it mean to call Castro’s island prison a Stalinist regime?

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. Then, Fidel Castro was already planning an invasion of his homeland. The bearded revolutionary had not yet brought down his iron fist on Cuba, the “pearl of the Antilles.” Orlando Zapata had not even been born yet. Nor had any of today’s tyrants in Beijing or Pyongyang.

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This is not, I hope, a trivial pursuit. We have now lost the meaning of “March Forth!” But from 1793 to 1937, Americans recognized the pun–and the date. March 4th was not so much a military order as it was Americans’ Inauguration Day. That’s why all those Presidents, from George Washington’s second term to FDR’s second, were inaugurated on that day.

The long delay between Election Day–by tradition, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November–and Inauguration Day on March 4th was originally intended to permit an orderly transfer of government. Recall that the Founders’ plan was for Presidential Electors to be chosen on Election Day. They would then have to have several weeks to assemble in their respective state capitols. Electors still do this, in obedience to the Constitution. It could take weeks in those days for Electors to travel from the mountains of (Western) Virginia to Richmond or for those near Buffalo, New York, to make their way to Albany. Once the Electors had cast their ballots, it would take more weeks to carry those sealed ballots to the nation’s capital. New York was the first capital (1789-90), followed in a year by Philadelphia (1790-1800), and only after ten years by Washington, D.C. (1800-present).

Once received in the capital, it would be the duty of the Vice President of the United States to open the envelopes and read the results to the Congress. A few times in our history, this responsibility would fall upon a man who actually lost the recently concluded Presidential campaign. These included John C. Breckenridge in 1861, who lost to Abraham Lincoln (and who later became a Confederate Brigadier General), Richard Nixon in 1961, who lost to John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey in 1969, who lost to Nixon, and Albert Gore, who lost to George W. Bush in 2001.

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The New York Times Magazine is at it again. They’ve just published a long article asking “How Christian were the Founders?” Their short answer: Not very. My response would be: Very.

Let’s start with George Washington. Washington was termed by biographer James Thomas Flexner “the gentlest of Christendom’s captains.”

Flexner was referring of course to Washington’s deeds, not his inner faith. Still, try to imagine this situation: Your army has been driven out of New York by the British and their Hessian mercenaries. These German-speaking foes regularly refused to give “quarter” to young American soldiers who threw down their weapons and surrendered.

Instead, they cruelly ran our boys through with their 17-inch bayonets. These same Hessians chased your army across New Jersey. Once, they captured one of your army chaplains, a Presbyterian. The Presbyterians were especially hated by the British for fomenting revolution from their pulpits. The Hessians stripped the unfortunate cleric and stabbed him thirteen times, leaving his naked body in the road. They then proceeded to rape their way across New Jersey. When, on Christmas Night, you defeat these same Hessians and take eight hundred of them prisoner, wouldn’t that be a time to exact revenge? If only to show your enemy that their cruelties would not go unanswered?

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In the late 1990s, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a book called Lost in the Cabinet about his admitted misadventures as head of a major federal agency.

Now comes his latest missive, an article in the left-leaning American Prospect Magazine called “What Happened to Democracy.” In it, he decries industry lobbyists and back-room negotiations – pretty standard fare for a liberal who is as yet un-mugged by reality.

No one wants “closed door” deals or unfair benefits for any company or group.  But then Mr. Reich takes us into the intellectual thin air with this statement: He calls for “adequate public financing for congressional and presidential candidates who refuse private funding, more constraints on lobbyists, tighter rules for who must register as a lobbyist, fuller disclosure, and tougher rules on the revolving door between public service and private gain.”

Let me see if I understand: The federal government will pick and choose what candidates are viable for public office (that’s the basis of public financing) but people representing private corporations and business associations (that would be lobbyists) merit “more constraints.”

Then Mr. Reich leaps beyond the ether into stratospheric terra incognita and gets thoroughly lost in political space: “Yet nobody seems to be talking about these sorts of reforms. They don’t appear on Obama’s agenda. True, they don’t generate lots of public excitement, and they’re murderously difficult to enact. But without them our democracy doesn’t stand a chance.”

Conservatives have, for decades, been calling for full and immediate disclosure of campaign contributions.  No argument there.  But does Mr. Reich honestly believe that without federal financing of elections and tighter rules about lobbying – it’s already illegal for lobbyists even to buy a Congressman a cheeseburger; how much more “constrained” can the rules get? – “democracy doesn’t stand a chance?”

We live in a republic, not a democracy, a political sphere in which people govern themselves through elected representatives at the local, state and national levels.  Our Founders were terrified of democracies, considering direct self-rule an invitation to mobocracy and social dissolution.  They believed that representative self-government is the only sure way for honorable, or as they put it, “virtuous,” citizens to maintain ordered liberty.

My good friend and former colleague Bill Wichterman will be addressing this theme at the Family Research Council in a speech titled, “Did the Founding Fathers Establish a Democracy?” this coming Thursday, February 4 at 11 a.m. ET.  The speech will be Webcast and can be viewed at frc.org.

I hope Mr. Reich will join us.  Perhaps together we can learn a thing or two about representative republican democracy.

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Most of us recall the story of Joan of Arc, the young French maid who donned male armor and battled the English to save her country during the Hundred Years’ War. Another famous story from that war involves the Burghers of Calais. This coastal town was abandoned by the French Army in 1347 and faced annihilation by vengeful English troops under King Edward III. Six of the town’s merchants—or burghers (from which we get the word bourgeoisie) offered their own lives as a ransom, if only the King would spare the town his wrath.

The King agreed to take these men’s lives and spare the city. He fully intended to hang them, as a terrible example to other towns who resisted his might. But the King’s young wife, Queen Phillippa, fearing for their unborn child, begged the King to spare the Burghers’ lives. The King relented.

The Burghers of Calais were memorialized in a famous group of statues by the great 19^th century French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. We have a copy of the statues in Washington at the Hirschhorn Museum.

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OK. I’ll admit it. I skipped the President’s State of the Union Address last night. It’s not the first time I’ve done that. Since I have to be up before five to get to the pool on time, I decided not to lose sleep over Barack Obama. And, with the wonders of technology, I knew I could get it all online. Which I did, over a strong cup of morning coffee.

I managed to see Justice Alito mouthing the words—simply not true when the President totally mischaracterized the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on free speech and campaign finance. Alito was so right. His silent dissent thundered through the House Chamber. If this President is going to make a charade of the State of the Union, there are obviously others skilled at the game of charades, too. How proud I am that I worked to get him confirmed.

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This week marks the 21^st anniversary of President Reagan’s Farewell Address to the Nation. It’s especially appropriate to recall it today, for the wisdom he shared, for the good feeling he evoked. There are many parts to the address I could recommend. I especially liked the part where he warned about a loss of national memory. He wanted Americans to remember their history. “If we forget what we did, we will forget who we are.”

One part of that January 11, 1989 address jumps out at us—or should. That decade began with great tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Reagan was heavily criticized. Liberals feared he would get us into a war. They feared World War III. They didn’t want him to take tough action against the Soviets and their aggression. They nearly wilted when he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Yet, at the end of the decade, the Cold War was over. The tensions had eased. And everyone breathed a great sigh of relief. President Reagan had a warning here too:

We must keep up our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust. My view is that President Gorbachev is different from previous Soviet leaders. I think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix them. We wish him well. And we’ll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one.

What it all boils down to is this. I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don’t, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It’s still trust but verify. It’s still play, but cut the cards. It’s still watch closely. And don’t be afraid to see what you see.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see. How many times have we recently heard people from the current administration referring to Abdulmutallab as the “suspect,” or the “accused.” They say he “allegedly” tried to bomb the incoming Northwest Flight 253 on its final approach to Detroit.

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Franklin Roosevelt is not a hero of mine. Arguably the father of today’s big government and a president who never let the Constitution get in the way of his political agenda, FDR summoned a weird confection of Leftists, liberals and disaffected, vulnerable citizens to obtain election to the presidency no less than four times.

His legacy has led to serious problems in the courts, the economy and the way Americans understand their federal government. Yet there is still much to admire about the Democratic Roosevelt – the way he heartened Americans with his optimism, the masterful manner in which he spoke to the hopes and fears of ordinary people, and even his unabashed invocation of the God of the Bible in times of national need.

FDR was also nothing if not decisive. He did not dawdle in times of crisis. For better or ill, he acted. People knew that they had a leader in the White House.

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I have made friends with a German journalist. Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto wants to interview me about a story from World War II that determined the course of my father’s life, and of course, my own.

My dad, who would have been 99 today, was torpedoed by a German U-boat (U-516) sixty miles due east of Durban, South Africa, on 17 Feb 43. We memorized that date when we were kids, like a family birthday. In a real sense, it was.

Dr. Siemon-Netto is interested in what the U-boat skipper did that night. Korvettenkapitän (lieutenant commander) Gerhard Wiebe held off sending in a second torpedo so that that my father, Leslie Morrison, and his shipmates could clamber over the side of the sinking S.S. Deer Lodge and make it toward the lifeboats. Had Wiebe sent in his second “fish” immediately after the first, he could easily have killed most of the doomed vessel’s crewmen.

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I never wanted to be a fly on the wall. I saw the original Sci Fi cult classic, The Fly, and it gave me the creeps. A scientist was trying to enter his newly-invented transporter—you know, like the ones later made famous on Star Trek. He thought to have himself broken down to his atomic particles and reconstructed later, elsewhere. Except a fly got into the ointment. Our scientist friend came out, uh, changed.

I never wanted to be a fly on the wall, but I do admit I’d like to have had Inspector Walter Thompson’s job. Inspector Thompson spent nearly twenty years guarding the life of Winston Churchill. The Scotland Yard policeman got an unparalleled opportunity to observe greatness—up close and personal.

A friend just gave me a copy of Assignment: Churchill, Walter Thompson’s fascinating 1955 memoir. Thompson describes himself as “tough as a telegraph wire” as a young police officer. He had to be. Many a time, he waded in to hostile mobs and menacing would-be assassins.

One of eleven kids born in a London slum, “Tommy” Thompson dropped out of school at age 8 to help support his family. If this is how English grammar school dropouts can write, I suggest all English lads be put out at eight.

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Today is the 146^th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I was reminded of this date yesterday when I took some visitors from Australia and New Zealand to visit the Lincoln Cottage in Northwest Washington. President Lincoln spent almost a quarter of his four-year term at this rural getaway. He and his family spent summers and early fall days there in 1862, 1863, and 1864. It was at this refuge—a retirement home for old and disabled soldiers–that he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation during that fateful summer of 1862.

Lincoln was not the featured speaker at the dedication of the Gettysburg Cemetery that cold November day in 1863. That honor had been reserved to Harvard’s former president, Edward Everett. Everett was regarded as the greatest orator of that age of great oratory.

Everett, a former Secretary of State, and former ambassador to England, was certainly a distinguished speaker. His resume looked a lot more impressive than prairie lawyer Lincoln’s did.

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Once again, the Internet is alive with pictures of the President of the United States bowing low before some foreign monarch. Barack Obama first showed the world his behind as he bowed before the odious King of Saudi Arabia at a London summit last winter. That was bad. The king of Saudi Arabia rules a desert fiefdom where those who convert to Christianity are beheaded while the regime looks the other way. Bibles are banned. Jews are not allowed even to enter the country.

That bow was atrocious. But Obama’s low bow before the Emperor of Japan over the past weekend was bad enough. Barack Obama apparently never memorized the Pledge of Allegiance as a boy. He has told us many times of his grade school education in Indonesia and how his devoted mother taught him U.S. constitutional law before dawn. Apparently, he never learned “…and to the republic for which it stands…”

To secure our Independence and to found a new republic, a country where “We the people” ruled, was the Glorious Cause for which the Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. How actually to be republicans with a small “r” was not easy.

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President Obama spoke to an interviewer about the Ft. Hood shootings. He had just come from the Memorial Service for the fourteen people whose lives were taken by the terrorist, Nidal Hasan:

OBAMA:  In a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable, even within the extraordinary military that we have. I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress.  There are going to instances, in which an individual cracks.

Forget, for the moment, this confused part of the statement that seems to psychologize the killer’s actions. I want to focus on the “inexplicable” part.

This is a serious problem for liberals. They are forever finding such murderous acts inexplicable. They often employ words like “random” and “senseless acts of violence.” One of their favorite bumper stickers is “Practice random acts of kindness.” Random is okay if it’s kind. But if kindness and terror are truly random, what’s the moral difference?

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President Obama is not in Berlin today. Very proper, I think. He’s not there to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. He’s not going to say anything about how freedom triumphed over totalitarianism in 1989 and how “we” won a great victory.

President Obama is showing a decent respect for the opinion of mankind. Or, at least, he’s not showing the kind of shamelessness that Bill Clinton regularly shows. George Stephanopoulos often said that Bill Clinton has no sense of shame—and that is a tremendous advantage in politics. Bill Clinton likes to claim credit for the West’s victory in the Cold War—a victory he and his political supporters did everything in their power to throw away.

If the liberals had had there way, there would be no celebration in Berlin today. That’s because the liberals of Western Europe and the United States in the 1980s were all backing something called the Nuclear Freeze.

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Ronald Reagan brought two things to Washington that were very much out of fashion, I enjoy telling student interns at Family Research Council: brown suits and freedom for a hundred million people in Eastern Europe. When Reagan swept into office in a landslide in 1980, the reigning view of Washington’s foreign policy elites toward Eastern Europe was that expressed in the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine. State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt in the 1970s was a disciple of Henry Kissinger. TIME Magazine explained Sonnefeldt’s ideas:

He was quoted as saying that U.S. policy in Eastern Europe should “strive for an evolution that makes the relationship between the Eastern Europeans and the Soviet Union an organic one.” The use of the word organic seemed to imply that he was advocating that the Soviet Union and its satellites should form one whole—a position calculated to infuriate not only G.O.P. conservatives but also ethnic groups with roots in Eastern Europe.

In simple American English, the U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe should not rock the boat.

Ronald Reagan’s view could not be further from those espoused by the Kissingers, Sonnenfeldts, and the foreign policy establishments of both political parties. Reagan had told Richard Allen, who would one day serve in the White House as Reagan’s National Security Adviser, that his idea of East-West relations was simple: We win. They lose.

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Last year, I voted. I joined the 125,225,900 other Americans (at least, I hope they were all Americans) who voted for President. It was the 40th anniversary of my first vote in a Presidential election. My vote is worth, correspondingly, less now than it was worth then. In 1968, I was one of only 72,054,692 citizens who exercised the suffrage–that old-fashioned word for the right to vote.

Now, I take my vote very seriously. I have never missed once voting in an election in which I was eligible. I’m still not sure if I was eligible to vote in Connecticut by absentee ballot in 1984, since we moved to Maryland just one month before election day. I was afraid of missing the voter registration deadline in the Free State (Maryland), so I thought I should take no chances and cast my absentee ballot early in the Constitution State (Connecticut).

If that gets me in trouble, so be it. I was determined to vote for Ronald Reagan’s re-election. I was also under consideration for a post in the Reagan administration and it would not have served to have missed voting for the Gipper one last time.

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I’ve been on travel the past week, visiting with college administrators, staff, and students. I’m often asked by concerned young people: “Has it ever been this bad before?”

Oh, my yes. When I was your age, I tell them, 300 American cities went up in flames after Dr. King was assassinated, riots in the streets turned huge areas of America’s cities into no-go zones. Bob Kennedy was assassinated en route to a likely presidential nomination. Three hundred young Americans were dying in Vietnam every week, with no strategy for victory and no end in sight. Inflation was rampant and few Americans could see our country healing after such terrible divisions.

But heal she did. Last week, I witnessed American troops coming home from Iraq in two of our major airports. Welcoming committees cheered them wildly. What a great improvement on the sullen indifference that greeted too many of our returning Vietnam vets. One of my pool pals–guys I swim with every morning–was one of those Vietnam vets who came home to no welcome. Today, he joins the welcomers in applauding our magnificent troops. God bless you, Bob Hogan!

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I had the great privilege of studying under Merrill Peterson at the University of Virginia in the 1960s. He was even then regarded as a great national scholar. His first book on Thomas Jefferson—The Jefferson Image in the American Mind– won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 1960. It was especially important to have a professor of Mr. Peterson’s stature to speak up for civil rights during that turbulent era. He challenged Mr. Jefferson’s University to live out the full meaning of Jefferson’s creed. “No university in America, or in the world, has a clearer title to speak for that heritage in the present crisis than the University of Virginia,” he said in a 1965 speech in Jefferson’s Rotunda. But for great men like that, I would never have left my New York home for college in the still-segregated South.

The Washington Post carried a fine tribute to Mr. Peterson. But they appear to swallow whole the story of Jefferson’s alleged liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings. “He did not believe in any sexual connection between Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” said Peterson’s colleague, Paul Gaston. Gaston described Peterson as “distancing himself” from that controversy. The Post goes on to repeat the politically correct charge that the “evidence became more persuasive in recent years.”

What evidence is there and how persuasive is it? DNA testing has revealed that Sally Hemings’ descendants are related to a male Jefferson. The Jefferson-Hemings family ties are hardly new news. They were first broadcast by James Callender in 1802. Callender was a disappointed office seeker who had once maligned Adams and Hamilton while serving as a clerk in Jefferson’s State Department. When President Jefferson would not reward the alcoholic Callender with a higher federal job, he turned his poison pen on his erstwhile sponsor. Soon afterward, he was found dead in a shallow river in Richmond. Apparently, he had fallen into the water in a drunken stupor. Jefferson was clearly wrong to employ such a man. And Abigail Adams was right to rebuke Jefferson. The “adder” he had cosseted had turned on him and bitten him. Fair enough.

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President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for 2009. His nomination had to have been entered by February 1st of this year. At that point, as many incredulous pundits have noted, he had been President for just eleven days. Fast work.

Many commentators have ridiculed the choice. “Gobsmacked,” wrote the Washington Post’s serious liberal foreign policy columnist, Jim Hoagland. He employed a British slang term for “slack-jawed in utter amazement.” Liberal writer Ruth Marcus likened the award to Pee-Wee Soccer, where every child gets a trophy just for playing. The New York Times’ house conservative, David Brooks, jeered that Obama should have won all of this year’s prizes, including those for economics and literature. Even for chemistry. After all, Obama’s personal chemistry may be his greatest contribution to the world.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman called Obama “President of the Earth” and said he would accept in Oslo in December. Even long-time Obama promoters were hard-pressed to see the award as anything but miraculous–an effort, perhaps, by the Nobel Prize selection committee–Norwegian Leftists all–to create their own version of the Burning Bush. Saturday Night Live had fun. Their Obama lookalike noted that he had only nine months of experience “not being George Bush.

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