Revolutionary questions for Jonathan Turley

The weekend before America 250 Weekend, Mark Levin interviewed Jonathan Turley about our founding documents and Prof. Turley's book titled "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution." Levin opens the interview by saying "Your point is, I believe, they're now up for grabs. They're under attack. And if we lose these guardrails, we effectively have the French Revolution. Is that your point?"

Prof. Turley replied "Yes. The fact is, we have to answer that question. What then is this America? Not just who we were then. Who are we now at this moment? And you have many that want to change who we are. That's one of the reasons Thomas Paine was so interesting for me in the book. Thomas Paine came to this country just two years before the Revolution. Two years before he wrote Common Sense. He wrote it anonymously. The man who sent him here came upon him when he had failed at everything. He had been fired from every job he held."

President Trump is the quintessential 'no guardrails' person. If we're ok with throwing away the things that we fought the Revolutionary War over, then we'll deserve THE PUNISHMENT that will certainly be visited upon us. Further, I don't trust the experts' prediction that the filibuster is doomed. Keeping one leg of the stool (House, Senate or White House) stifles the Democrats' plans. If we want to throw away one of the IMPORTANT TOOLS that we've used to create the most stable, prosperous government in history, then we'll have earned the fate that certainly awaits us.

The Man Who Rescued Paine

He had gone bankrupt in every business he created. His marriages were disasters. And he found himself in front of a man as a smoking heap of human wreckage. And that man saw something. That was Benjamin Franklin in London and paid for Paine to come to this country. And told him to write. And within two years, he would be called the penman of the Revolution. And he wrote Common Sense anonymously. Maybe genius is required to recognize genius.

Still, the Revolutionary puzzle wasn't finished:

Because when John Adams was asked by his wife, people say she wrote him. You wrote Common Sense. And John Adams, who was no fan of Thomas Paine, said, I couldn't have written that book. But I think I know who did. I met a man named Thomas Paine. And he had genius in his eyes. That was the type of person that created this republic. Those are the voices that defined who we were. The question is, can we answer that question itself today? And I think that we can. These are revolutionary times. But we remain truly a revolutionary people.

The third piece of the puzzle was James Madison. Paine was required to start the Revolution but Madison was required to build this Republic. Jonathan Turley is required to remind us that we must overcome this period of hesitancy in ourselves and in this Republic:

Turley said in the interview that we've faced this enemy before and defeated this enemy before. There's an old saying that I've used since the Reagan presidency. My friend from Fingerhut had it in his cubicle. It said "the difficult, we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer." I once asked him what he meant. Kenny replied "We think that if we envision it, we can create it." That's part of the American DNA.