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We are joined now by David Bob, who is the president of the Bill of Rights Institute.
Welcome to Washington Journal.
It's wonderful to be with you, Kimberly.
Can you tell us a little bit about your organization, what you do, and why it was needed to set it up?
The Bill of Rights Institute teaches history and civics.
We equip young people especially to be able to live out the principles of the Declaration, of the Constitution, so that they can see a just and free society come about.
It's important to learn about the past, but it's also important to take the principles of our founding and put them into practice.
That's why we were started.
Teachers have a hard job when it comes to being in the classroom and talking about these ideas.
It's always been challenging because we have to learn from our past.
We have to think about these ideas.
These ideas don't come naturally to us.
Maintaining a free and just society is a learned skill and practice.
And so we were started to be able to help teachers to come alongside them in this Very important task of teaching history and civics.
We've been doing it for about 25 years.
We're excited because we have 77 ,000 teachers across the country that rely on the free curriculum and the teacher training programs that the Bill of Rights Institute offers.
So let's talk about today, Bill of Rights Day.
Can you just remind us an overview of what the Bill of Rights is and when and why a day to honor it was established?
The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.
The story is complex, but to boil it down, when the Constitution was being debated, and the idea that maybe we should have a supreme law of the land, the people across this country looked at, well, what do we want to put into it?
You know, when you write things down, it tends to memorialize them.
We hadn't had an effective Constitution up until that point.
So there was a Constitutional Convention, four long, hot months in the summer of 1787, and a bunch of delegates got together and debated this.
And what they started to see as their negotiations ended is that there was an emerging group, a minority voice to be sure, but a pretty loud minority that was saying, we need to protect individual rights more in this document.
And so the people who debated that thing sent it out to the states for ratification.
And there was a pretty bruising battle, and a lot of the states were saying, we're not going to approve it unless there is.
A more concrete statement about what kind of rights individual human beings have.
Take a step back to the Declaration of Independence, right?
That document, which declared our independence, talked about the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So I think there was a through line here to the debates that happened after the Constitution, and what the people across the country said is, you've got to do better.
And so some of the politicians initially who were not in favor of a Bill of Rights, notably Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, We're good to go.
I think?
Now then, according to this year's Annenberg Constitution Day Civic Study, only 7 % of respondents could name all five rights.
Thank you.
Why do you think that people aren't more aware of what both this amendment and some of the others in the Bill of Rights actually have in them?
One of the things that I've seen over the years, and it may be particularly true in Washington, D .C., where we are now, is that the sense of the Constitution being for the people, of the people, and by the people is lost a little bit.
It's complex, right?
There's a lot of court cases.
There's a lot of complexity to it.
At the end of the day, though, it's not the province of attorneys and judges.
It's a document that if you sit down and read, it takes about a half an hour.
We've made it a little bit more complicated than we've needed.
Also, we're not devoting enough time in our schools.
For example, an elementary school teacher has maybe, if she's lucky, 20 minutes per week to talk about these things.
So we need to start with the stories.
Start with the Declaration of Independence.
It said something that no government in the history of the world had said before, which is that people have rights because they're people, because they're human beings.
And it took us longer than we wanted.
It took a long time before we...
We're good to go.
I think?
And speaking of this...
Topic mattering to our current state of affairs.
You had a recent opinion piece with the headline, Election Highlights Need for and Warnings about Civic Education.
What exactly are these warnings?
Well, I think one of the things that I just mentioned, the need for more time in our schools.
We have a challenging system in this country, but it's a good one, and that is that education is local.
That means that there's a lot of decision makers.
And we're negotiating these decisions all the time at the local level.
Think of it.
Parents are the first educators.
They can entrust their kids then to different schools and then teachers complement the work that parents do in learning about history and civics.
How do we make sure that every child in America is growing up with a sense of what this country is about?
That's a big challenge.
And the further we get away from the local level, the more that Washington D .C. or even state capitals Governors insert themselves into these things in a political or ideological way, the worse off we're going to be.
Because one of the things that we've seen is we've become more polarized and we think we're more divided than we actually are.
Americans actually anchor around the principles of the Declaration and Constitution.
But we perceive that we're very, very divided.
And when politicians seize on that and use civics as a means to kind of stoke disagreement, that's a problem.
And what we don't want, I don't think, is for Washington, D .C. to take these things over and to say, here's the kind of official civics we're going to have from the government.
That's never been a part of our government, and I think it's a real strength.
For example, in tyrannies globally, we've just seen the toppling of the dictator in Syria.
But even in regimes that aren't dictatorial, oftentimes what they'll do is have a big fight over who gets to write the textbooks.
And when you have that fight, what you tend to do is to reduce the value of the civics and history, because people just say, well, that's just the politicians, and that's what they want me to think.
Civics and history has to be about people taking these ideas, making them their own, and then putting them into practice in everyday life.
The more that we make this an ideological or political thing, the worse off we're going to be.
I'll point out that some other resources for teachers when it comes to civics education come from C -SPAN directly on c -span .org.
We have a program called C -SPAN Classroom, which includes free video -based materials for social studies teachers on various civics -related topics.
You know, how do you think, especially in our politically divided environment, civics might be able to help bridge that divide?
You know, we've been pleased to partner at the Bill of Rights Institute with C -SPAN Classroom.
The resources are excellent, and there's nothing better than going back to primary source documents.
When you ask Americans, you know, what do you anchor on?
It's that sense of that the Declaration and Constitution do matter.
The way to bridge political divides is by having conversations that matter, by not shirking that and ducking them.
You know, two out of five young people in this country who are in high school Feel uncomfortable disagreeing with their friends and their peers in the classroom.
That's got to change.
What we have to do, I think, is disagree better.
Let young people know that if they disagree on matters of significance, it doesn't mean you're going to lose your friends.
And for young people to take that seriously, they're going to have to see more models of that kind of thing.
It's the kind of deep civility.
It's a civil discourse and it's a valuing of free speech that says it's okay to talk about religion and politics.
And financial things.
You have to do it in a way in which you're respecting the other person.
And bringing these controversial subjects into the classroom, when you anchor on primary source documents, it kind of gives a new footing to those conversations where young people can say, you know, I do want to see your viewpoint.
It may be different than mine, and that's okay.
I want my perspective to be challenged by yours because we're sharper, we're better off, and critical thinking results from that.
We're taking your calls with questions for David Bob of the Bill of Rights Institute.
Our number for Republicans, 202 -748 -8001.
For Democrats, 202 -748 -8000.
And for Independents, 202 -748 -8002.
You can also send us questions via text or social media.
We received a text message.
comment, really, from Diane in Morristown, New Jersey, who says all Americans should be able to pass the citizenship test.
What do you think of that?
You know, I think it's, as a mental kind of model, it's the right idea.
For those of you who aren't familiar with this, there's a hundred questions.
It's about pretty basic things related to what it means to be a citizen, and it's given to those who want to become...
There have been efforts to institute this as a kind of mandate in states.
I don't know that we have to do that.
But I think that all Americans, if you just Google it and take the test, you'd see that it's a worthwhile exercise because it's trying to anchor you on the things that really matter.
Now, it's important to know those facts and figures, but we also have to know why.
And that's something that the naturalization test does not get into as much as we'd like.
Great civics, great history learning.
It's a good start but I think we can do
You know, I think it's hard not to be fascinated by the 9th and 10th Amendments.
They don't get as much attention maybe today, but taken together they're kind of the The taproot of what we might see as popular sovereignty, the idea that the people rule in this country.
Think of what humility it took so you have the drafting of the Constitution and then you send it out to the people.
That's not been what typically happens in other countries.
A lot of countries, it's the elites who rule and we never see a change from that.
So what the founders were trying to do is say, could we get away from that kind of system in which accident and force rules the day?
Could we be ruled by reflection and choice?
Ultimately the 9th and 10th Amendments say that the people retain rights.
So let me just read them quickly.
So the Ninth Amendment says the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
And then the Tenth Amendment says the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people.
If you take the Ninth Amendment, one of the big debates over the Bill of Rights was, well, wait, what if we start writing them down?
If we miss one or don't write down everything, will people think that they don't have those rights?
That was some of the objections, and that was a reasonable objection.
If you look to history, even, the Soviet Union had a beautiful Bill of Rights.
Many of the tyrannies that exist around the globe today do.
Just writing down rights doesn't make them put into practice, though.
People have to actually believe them.
And so we don't have a written confirmation of our right to say, for example, get in your car and I can today drive into Maryland and Pennsylvania and keep going.
But I do have that right.
So what's important is to think about the Declaration's promise that because we're human beings, they adhere in us as human beings.
That's what the Ninth Amendment is saying.
The Tenth Amendment is a restriction, as are many of these.
We think of them as giving away rights, but in fact it's restricting and saying to the federal government, You can't interfere.
You can't overly involve yourself in the affairs of human beings because the founders again saw, I think it's been confirmed by history, that too strong a government, too invasive a government is going to be a bad thing, right?
When they were colonists, what happened with the British is that they could search their property for any reason at all.
And that's a pretty invasive sense of what power means.
So the 9th and 10th Amendments are restrictions on power.
Yes, and you made reference to...
Basically what's in the Fourth Amendment, right?
That's right.
This one says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." Let's go ahead and get to your calls.
I'm sure people have lots of questions here.
We'll start with Oki in Crab Orchard, West Virginia, on our line for independence.
Good morning, Oki.
What I wanted to say is that your guests and just about everyone else of the inalienable rights that are mentioned in our declaration, but that's an incomplete sentence.
It's almost as if it's out of context.
The entire statement says that those rights endow the most important, and that's all I wanted to bring up.
Thank you, Oki.
That's a great observation, and you're absolutely right.
The Declaration itself has four references to God, and I think they tell an interesting story.
Two of them were included by Jefferson, and two were added by the Continental Congress.
That first reference to Creator is...
The one that I think is probably the most pivotal, you're right, that we're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.
They can't be taken away from us, right?
They can't be stripped from you by government.
Their life lived in the pursuit of happiness.
That has a sense of the executive.
Also, the legislative kind of component of God's nature was the laws of nature.
That was the second reference.
There's also the supreme judge of the universe.
That's the third reference.
Think of it.
The executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch.
And the Declaration's argument is pretty simple in one respect.
It's saying that this prince, King George III, has become a tyrant.
Why?
He's become a tyrant because he takes the executive, legislative, and judicial function and pulls it into his own orbit.
And supposes that he can operate in that way.
And I think what the Declaration is saying is, without getting specific to any one religion, it's saying, if there's a superintending God, if there's a supreme being,
it would be only that being that would be able to handle all of this power.
No one human being, no one human committee could take the executive, legislative, and judicial powers.
All right, now let's hear from Gary in Winter Haven, Florida, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Gary.
Good morning.
I wanted to talk about the Second Amendment.
One thing a lot of people don't remember is earlier this year there was a school shooting in Iowa, and Donald Trump's response was you just have to get over it.
And then recently there was a shooting of a UnitedHealthcare CEO, and you could hear the meltdown on the right.
California's restrictive gun laws...
All right.
Well, let's look quickly at the language of the Second Amendment, which says, So one of the great concerns that people had at the time this was adopted is,
were we going to have a standing army or not?
And many of those who were anti -federalists, that is, they were opposed to the ratification of the Constitution, especially without a Bill of Rights, were worried about a standing army.
This was adopted, and it was not until very recently, in a couple of cases, including that of Heller, that the Supreme Court weighed in to say that the right...
To keep and bear arms was an individual right.
So for most of our history, there was not much litigation, not many cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
What we do at the Bill of Rights Institute with the Second Amendment, for example, is bring this into the classroom so that teachers and students can learn the history, they can study the primary source documents,
they can engage in the kind of debates that help sharpen their understanding of This thing.
That's the essence of what good history and civic education requires.
As an organization, we're not taking a stance on how the Second Amendment should be interpreted, but we think it's very important that young people and teachers should be equipped with the tools to be able to look at the document, and that goes to just what you did, Kimberly,
which is reading the text and trying to understand the text and have a conversation around those topics.
Tom is in Rochester, Washington on our line for independence.
Good morning, Tom.
Yes, mine is mostly on the education of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
My daughter is a school teacher and we live here in Western Washington, which is a very liberal area, and she's not allowed to teach these.
And this goes back all the way till the Civil War when the Democrats lost the war.
Formed the KKK and they formed an agenda to actually not infiltrate, but to indoctrinate the children through the school systems and not teach that.
And this has been proven by the stats that's been stated on this program this morning on people not even being able to label them.
And you can ask four, six -year college graduates.
We're good to go.
Kind of indoctrinated in schools to not teach these, not teach Christianity or other religions and all that.
And I think that shouldn't be taught in school.
That's a personal thing.
But people need to remember history and understand that I think it was 1909 when the first agenda of the Democratic Party Tom,
let's give David a chance to respond to some of these points.
Okay.
The overwhelming number of Americans today believe that civics and history will lead to critical thinkers and informed citizenship.
I think it's on that agreement we talked about polarization and disagreement that we need to seize on and say How can we create more space so that teachers are supported by parents?
What does this support mean?
You know, a lot of times if a teacher is using, let's say you want to teach the Second Amendment or talk about things that are happening in the news that are controversial, you need to be able to say, on one hand, this is a position, and on the other hand, here is a different position.
It's called viewpoint diversity in teacher, the language of educators.
We build that into our curriculum because it's from that kind of...
Iron sharpens iron mentality, that we think we get the kind of citizens that are open to other people's ideas.
How do we do that?
We need more time in schools.
We need more trust.
When we, as parents, can trust our teachers and say, if you're committed to viewpoint diversity, we have your back.
We need to talk to our principals and say, carve out more time in the school day for these kind of conversations.
Build in activities in which young people can Build the skills that allow these principles to be put into practice because ultimately what we're looking for in civics is a change in the habits of heart and mind.
We want young people who are committed to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
You know, John Lewis in his famous speech in the March on Washington in 1968 said that our task is to complete the Revolution of 1776.
And I think there's something really powerful in that and there's something that can unite us around that effort If we take it seriously.
Pat is in Keyport, New Jersey on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, Pat.
Hello.
You were speaking about how the 10th Amendment is really a protection against the growth of the federal government.
But hasn't it all pretty much been eviscerated by Supreme Court decisions such as McCulloch v. Maryland, which said Congress had unenumerated powers?
They could do whatever they wanted, regardless of what the Constitution said.
Thank you.
Well, I think the historic record actually shows that the enumerated powers of Article 1, Section 8 still very much are in play.
I think that there have been, I think, and this is again one of those debates that at the Bill of Rights Institute we teach, a back and forth over many, many generations about just how broad a scope are you going to give.
We're good to go.
The kind of will of the electorate that's ultimately going to say how seriously are we going to take this?
I'll say just one other thing about this related to the education.
What's great with young people and this is the kind of thing that I think we need to bring out more for them is put a question to them.
What is the right relationship between the national government and the states?
And one of the ways that I think young people can really start to understand that best is actually if they get involved at the local level.
Because then they start to see Okay, it's really difficult to start something like a farmer's market.
Why is that difficult?
Why is it difficult to solve some of the problems, like homelessness, or pick any one of the things that are really important to people of any age in this country, but especially to young people?
We have a contest at the Bill of Rights Institute called My Impact Challenge, and it takes students through three things.
The charitable sector, business, and then also constitutionally limited government.
So raising these questions around the size and scope of government.
But it asks them then to get involved in their community at the local level, to start by looking at a problem, a challenge, and seeing if they can solve it using founding principles and civic virtues.
What we find after 500 -some projects is that young people are really committed to trying to figure this thing out.
They don't want, and I don't think the American people as a whole believe, that all of our problems are going to be solved by Washington, D .C.
All right, let's hear from Stan in Loyola, Kentucky, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Stan.
Yes, a caller from West Virginia a few minutes ago called in and misquoted the Declaration of Independence, and then you also misquoted it.
It does not say endowed by our creator.
It says endowed by their creator, which is a big difference.
Did you have a question as well?
No, I just would like...
Alright, let me pull up the exact language of the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives.
Let's see, where's the part with the Creator?
Second paragraph.
Second paragraph.
Let's see.
Well, we'll just read it.
Why not?
We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and...
So you're right about our versus their.
I think the distinction, though, is one without a difference.
I think the affirmation is that there is, and this was Jefferson's language ratified by the Continental Congress, that there is a superintending being.
There's lots of controversy about just what the relationship of God is to human beings.
But they're saying we're not God.
I think that's the essence of it.
And we're not the author of our own rights.
It's saying that these rights are not positive.
They're not given to you just by government.
But there's a natural basis, and you can actually know them through the natural law.
That's the key point, I think.
Robert is in Waldorf, Maryland, on our line for independence.
Good morning, Robert.
Good morning.
Merry Christmas.
This is a great subject, very informative.
My question is, if any of the two of you can answer this one, anywhere in the Bill of Rights, does it authorize or grant the right to an abortion?
Does it authorize the right to free health care?
Anywhere in the Bill of Rights, does it authorize the right of a living wage?
Can any of you show me that in the Bill of Rights?
Now, I know that you can't, but maybe, like you say, we can educate these young kids that nowhere in the Bill of Rights is it a right.
Nowhere in the Bill of Rights is free healthcare a right.
Nowhere in the Bill of Rights is a living wage a right.
And I think you are a dead on the money, sir, in educating the public.
Thank you, and have a great Christmas.
Well, I appreciate the caller's passion around this, and I know that this elicits a lot of strong opinions.
I'll tell you how we approach it again in an educational context at the Bill of Rights Institute.
Each one of those topics that you raised is one that young people and people of all ages in this country are going to continue to debate.
We're a nation of 330 million plus people.
We have the task of managing disagreement, not eliminating it.
So, for example, when you go to the Bill of Rights Institute, YouTube page, you can find a video about Roe v. Wade.
The New York Times, when they needed to rely on a video for their coverage of the Dobbs decision, pulled this video because it's telling you what that case said.
Our job is not to weigh in on each of these disputes, but rather to go into the place where teachers especially can be equipped to go to primary source documents.
We should read these documents from the founding era and from each era of our history carefully.
We should equip young people to be civically literate so that they can engage in the kind of conversations and debate, recognizing that first and foremost, we see this in the First Amendment, we have a guarantee of free speech.
I think that guarantee of free speech has to go hand in hand with the responsibility of civil discourse.
And what we want to do, I think, in our civic learning, In classrooms and out of classrooms is to equip all Americans to be able to have these conversations but be able to do so with a recognition that we are going to disagree about certain things.
The question in my mind is can we agree about core things?
Can we agree about the fact that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are critical?
We're going to have policy disagreements for sure.
But the question is, what are we united around?
And I think that's the central challenge of our day, to point young people and people of all ages in this country back to those core, big questions.
Stephen is in Norcross, Georgia, on our line for independence.
Good morning.
Stefan, excuse me, Stefan, good morning.
Hi, hi, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I listen every day, so I'm a little nervous.
That's the first time I've ever called in.
I really think it's a great... Show, and I appreciate the guest's points, but one thing I want to point out is that the Declaration of Independence, as important a document as it is historically, and it is, it is not the law,
and it is not codified into law.
And one of the reasons I think that's important is that, in relationship to the Constitution, is that when people do, let's say, try to insert religion or establishing a religion, Stefan,
thank you so much for your question.
The Declaration of Independence does not have the same standing as does the Constitution of the United States.
You're right.
Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
The Declaration is part, however, of the organic laws.
So the Northwest Ordinance, the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, these are part of the organic laws of the United States.
Abraham Lincoln, I think, gave us an interesting guide to thinking about how the Declaration and Constitution are related.
He said, quoting from Proverbs, the apple of gold, the Declaration of Independence, was made with a frame of silver around it.
I think that's an evocative image.
What he was trying to say is you set up the goal, the big picture, the vision, if you will, is that human beings have rights and that the government's job is to protect those rights.
It has to be powerful in protecting those rights.
So you can't forget about the promise of the Declaration.
That's why I've been anchoring on that so much today.
It's not so much to say that we should have, and I certainly don't think that we should have, an established religion.
That, in fact, is one of the great things that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did.
Notice, for example, that the King of England still to this day is the head of a church.
One thing that we did in this country through the First Amendment and through the structure of the Constitution was say that our president has no, to quote here Publius, no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.
That means that the realm of religion is one of an individual and a collectivist within civil society.
Government's job is not to dictate that.
That does not mean, however, that religion and politics can have nothing to do with one another.
In fact, we are given wide license in this country to bring religious perspectives and those that are born of non -religious sentiments into the public square.
That's a very important thing.
I know this is a complicated question.
I appreciate the nuance of your question, but I think it's really important to understand that the Declaration of Independence is a big part. of the understanding that we have about who we are as an American people and for that reason we put it at the core of what civics and history education means.
Since we referenced the First Amendment, we'll pull up the language for that as well.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Rick is in Woodville, Virginia on our line for independence.
Good morning, Rick.
My question is about the interplay between the Commerce Clause and the 9th and 10th Amendments.
It seems like Congress and the Court, particularly under the Warren administration, used the Commerce Clause to meddle in areas that the framers perhaps didn't intend Congress to have jurisdiction.
I'm wondering what your feeling is about the limits to the Commerce Clause and whether or not there's some primacy of it.
So the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, right?
An additional 17 amendments were added, so we have 27 amendments to the Constitution.
Even though they're all included at the end, it's of a piece.
So they really have to be interpreted together as a whole.
You can't have a disharmony between the Bill of Rights and the text of the Constitution.
That was something that really worried Those that were involved in that initial debate over the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Are we going to create a kind of disharmony between the things that we put at the end and the text of the Constitution?
You're asking, Rick, about the Interstate Commerce Clause.
This was used really as a bedrock for a long time to say that Congress will not be able to To interfere in the affairs of commercial activity.
There's a lot of different cases.
Wickard v. Filburn is one of them that we could look at.
In the 20th century, there's been a movement to allowing legislation to be deemed constitutional for questions that in the past Really, we're not allowed.
So to cut to, I think, the caller's point, we have a big debate today over how much Congress can actually interfere or be involved in questions of interstate commerce.
And this is one of those things, again, that at the Bill of Rights Institute, we take up that debate, put it to students, and let them dip into these different documents and try to figure out what the truth of the matter is.
Our point as an institute is not to come to a conclusion.
Patricia is in Virginia on our line for independence.
Good morning, Patricia.
What's your question?
My question was, standing on the Bill of Rights, I really didn't learn anything about, like, my heritage of Native Americans and why isn't,
like, Native American history For basing upon everything on like the whole Constitution and everything, why isn't Native American history being taught on our side versus,
you know, like the Civil War and all that?
Why isn't any of that being taught?
Because I didn't know anything about how my people died and why there isn't many of us left.
Except for when I was 50 years old, I saw a piece on, I think it was Nat Geo.
That's how I found out.
Now, Patricia, did you want to know more about how the Bill of Rights shapes what we learn in terms of different types of history?
Yeah, because it wasn't taught in school.
Patricia, I'm sorry that you didn't have that opportunity, and it's one of the things that we care a lot about at the Bill of Rights Institute.
You know, you can go to our website, myBRI .org, and you'll find a 500 -year history of the United States that touches on many issues and parts of the Native American journey in this country.
I think one of the key things that I'll say is that it's vital that each person in this country recognize that these rights apply to them.
Our journey in this country has been one that is not a straight line to the kind of realization of the promise of the Declaration.
One of the key things that I've learned over the years is in reading the writings of the founders is that they were aware of how rare what they were trying to do was.
And many of them lamented the fact that they were not extending To enslaved peoples, to native peoples, to others the same rights.
In some cases they lamented that they didn't do more.
And I think it's okay for us to recognize that that lament was true.
We wish that there had been more.
Take the perspective of somebody like Chief Joseph or Frederick Douglass.
Leaders that themselves knew the tyrannical force of government when it did not protect their rights.
That did not eliminate the fact that these individuals said these rights still exist.
And that goes back to our core thing today, which is that the rights exist before government grants them to you.
Human beings have rights, and it's government's job to protect them.
And when government fails in that task, it's up to all of us to call government to account.
And I think what civic education does well, and what it should do well, is let people know that we have to teach the whole of our history and we have to recognize where we failed, where we've lived up to this promise, and also to challenge everybody in this country to hold our government to account, that these rights are extended to each individual, regardless of where they live in this country.
And I'll point out that on your website you've got several lessons related to Native American history, including this one, "A Deep Stain on the American Character: John Marshall and Justice for Native Americans," as one of the lesson plans that's available there on the BILL OF Rights Institute website.
Last caller for today, let's hear from Horace in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Horace.
Good morning, my dear.
How are you?
Doing well, thank you.
To the young man that's just talking about all these Bill of Rights and civics and all this other stuff, I'm a 79 -year -old black man.
When I was born, blacks wasn't even allowed to vote, you understand?
Let alone learning civics and all this kind of stuff.
But gradually, gradually, I was allowed to People was allowed to vote and stuff.
But let me tell you something.
This guy, he's sitting there talking about all these rights and all this stuff.
This man was lucky.
He's right.
He was born with rights.
You understand?
So it's easy for a fellow to sit up here and say all these type of things about rights and all that stuff.
Unless, unless you was born without them.
You would appreciate him.
You know, as far as I'm concerned, you understand.
Education, you understand, is a good thing.
And yet, we got a man that was elected that wants to destroy the Department of Education.
You understand?
So, it's mixed up and it's crazy.
So, I don't understand what you're saying.
You understand?
Because it's unfair.
Horace, I appreciate what you're saying and I think I understand your perspective.
I'll say that one of the things that we take very seriously at the Bill of Rights Institute is to bring to bear the fact that, as you just pointed out, these rights have not been extended to people.
They have not been extended to people equally.
You are 79 years old and I appreciate the perspective that you just offered.
I mentioned Frederick Douglass a few minutes ago.
One of the key things that we anchor on is something that Douglass said in the speech July 5th, 1852.
The first half of the speech is about how wrong the United States of America had been to allow the extension of the institution of slavery.
It was a speech in which Douglass could not really say of his fellow citizens that they were his fellow citizens.
He felt estranged.
He felt estranged from that country.
And yet, in the second half of the speech, what he attempts to do is to say, yet I still have hope.
And that hope is based on the idea that there are certain principles that are there from the get -go.
Freedom and equality for all.
Do those principles not apply to all?
That was his argument.
He said if we can look to them as saving principles, they can save him from his plight as an individual who for the first 20 years of his life was enslaved.
And they can save the country from the awful scourge of slavery.
And I think what we've seen in the story of America is that by repairing to those principles in a herky -jerky, jagged line, a crooked line that has lots of false starts, we more than any other have been able to extend those rights to people and be a beacon of hope for others around the country.
That doesn't mean that we're perfect.
It doesn't mean that we have it all figured out.
But it does point, I think, to the centrality, as I believe you indicated,
Thank you so much.
David Bob is the president of the Bill of Rights Institute.
I appreciate your time this morning.
Thank you, Kimberly.
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