“A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.” Ben Franklin’s response to a Philadelphian who asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced indicated that those who wrote the Constitution knew the vessel of American self-governance they had launched was fragile.
Successive generations of Americans have met Franklin’s challenge and “kept” America’s constitutional republic for 233 years — by acting in ways consistent with sustaining a common enterprise: America’s representative democracy. Unfortunately, that sense of Americans sharing a common democratic enterprise has waned in recent years.
The founding generation, led by George Washington, established constructive precedents and examples for how to make the American republic work, such as the peaceful transfer of power following contested elections and governance based on the rule of law, not the dictates of popular leaders, such as Washington.
Subsequent generations maintained America’s representative democracy, despite a bloody Civil War, domestic political and economic shocks, and threats from abroad. They did so by generally adhering to the founding generation’s governance model and also by expanding Constitutional rights and protections to a growing number of citizens, for example by ending slavery and instituting universal adult suffrage. As a result, the American constitutional republic has, since 1789, made progress towards becoming a “more perfect union.”
But past progress is no guarantee of continued success.
...A federal grand jury in St. George returned an indictment today charging a Utah podiatrist and two nurses who worked for him with fraud for their roles in a $29 million Medicare false claims case....