President Biden at Philadelphia

President Biden will step onto hallowed ground on Thursday to deliver what the White House calls “a primetime speech on the continued battle for the Soul of the Nation.” The setting will be no less than Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was approved and the Constitution was drafted. Let us just say that there was hardly a man in the room back then who would have been comfortable in today’s Democratic Party.Nor are there many, if any, Democrats today who would have been comfortable with the men who created our country in Independence Hall. Today’s Democrats just carted out of City Hall at New York its heroical statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the historic patriarch of their party. Today’s Democrats feel his negatives as a slave-owner outweigh his virtues as a revolutionary.The presider at the Philadelphia convention, George Washington, has likewise come in for cancellation, with statuses of the Father of Our Country recently ripped down at Portland and monuments threatened on campus quads and town squares, with nary a peep from Mr. Biden. The doctrine that our Republic was born in sin — the 1619 Project — emerges from a Democratic intelligentsia that sees Independence Hall less as a shrine than as a crime scene.The Democrats’ distaste for the men who gathered in Philadelphia goes beyond the symbolic. Forced to borrow from France to pay for the Revolution, the Continental Congress could not pay back their debts fast enough. Hamilton led the effort for the federal government to assume them. Today’s Democrats favor debt forgiveness. And mock the monetary standard of gold and silver set up in the early years of our independence. It’s not just about the men and the money. Large swaths of today’s left have turned against the very Constitution that was crafted in the hall Mr. Biden will be visiting. In 2011, the New York Times called a plan to open Congress with a reading of the national parchment “a ghastly waste of time” and dismissed Republicans’ “vacuous fundamentalism” as “mere eyewash.” They wondered “what message is being sent.”It’s not just the Times of course. The sneering against our Constitution in the Democratic papers has been going on for a decade or more. One of the Washington Post’s most famous columnists once tried to suggest — before backpedaling — that the Constitution was not a binding document. Yet a new line of attack is being aired in the pages of the Gray Lady, one that calls on Democrats to “radically alter the basic rules of the game.”This is the piece by two law professors — Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale — who demand to know: “Why justify our politics by the Constitution?” Especially since, in their opinion, that parchment is “broken” and “inadequate.” The wave of anger in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggests a fidelity to the rules that obtains only if the Democrats’ side wins. Mr. Biden enjoys talking about the “soul of the nation.” This has been a summer that has left it worse off, and much of the blame accrues to his party. The January 6 committee, unbound by the strictures of a courtroom (and the constitutional prohibition against attainder), is pursuing a criminal case on television. President Trump is not required to be innocent for the damage to have been done. The essence of America’s soul certainly embraces the principles like due process, the prohibition on bills of attainder, and the protection of against double jeopardy. In other words, the promises of the Constitution written down at Independence Hall so they could be, if not amended, enforced for generations. All of those have been endangered in the push to prosecute President Trump. President Biden has yet to speak up.The speech Thursday will likely expand on Mr. Biden’s newest neologism, the idea that the Republicans have become the party of “semi-fascism.” He has to do something like that. His own party will not — cannot — embrace the Founders who were so revered by Americans that Philadelphians covered the streets around Independence Hall with dust so that the wagons could pass by without making noise that might disturb the making of the Constitution.

President Biden at Philadelphia

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