Posted BY: Patrick J. Gibbs

The issue of who runs this country is one of the central issues, if not the central issue, of the 21st century.

Begin with the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”

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The people’s representatives meeting at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 clearly considered the sovereign power of this country to reside with its people acting through their elected representatives in the State and Federal governments. That is the very definition of a constitutional republic.

Many constitutional conservatives are thus rightly annoyed when “democracy” is used to refer to this country’s form of government. The framers of our Constitution considered “democracy” to be a discredited concept because they knew the classical history of Athens. It did not take long before Athens turned into an oligarchy with imperial ambitions to conquer other city-states.

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