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This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute. I call this one, We the People.

September 17th is Constitution Day in America.

Because on that day at the end of summer in 1787, after four months of deliberations, 38 of the 41 delegates

present, representing 12 states at the Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall in Philadelphia,

placed 39 signatures on the Constitution they had drafted,

which they proposed to become the Supreme law of the United States of America.

This was the end of one historic deliberation, but it was the beginning of another, because

as James Madison, the man who would become known as the father of the Constitution, wrote,

the Constitution would be of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written,

unless it was ratified by the people of the United States.

The words have become so familiar to us that we sometimes forget what an epical political

fact it is that our Constitution begins with the phrase, we the people.

It was the people's representatives who wrote the Constitution,

and only the vote of the people's representatives

would make it the supreme law of the land.

From Philadelphia, the Convention Secretary carried the text of the proposed Constitution

...