Oh, on an entirely unrelated note, the U.S. Constitution was signed 221 years ago today – happy birthday! Okay, it wasn’t ratified for a couple of years after that, but still…
If you’ve got some time, take a read. It’s still the most impressive government document I’ve ever read.
A few years ago, I wanted to start a project that took the individual clauses of the constitution and traced the arguments for and against them back to the original sources or at least to the debates between the signing and ratification. The Federalist Papers , Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison and many of the documents collected in the two volume Library of America’s Debate on the Consitution would have featured prominantly. Never did have the time to kick that off.