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The Constitution is born

DAVID BARTON, WALLBUILDERS, FOUNDER & PRES.: George Washington got a bunch of them together and said we need to look at redoing the Articles of Confederation, which led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 where they did get together and redo the articles. Federation, they looked at it and said let's scrap it and start again. And that's where it became the Constitution.

When you look at the Founders' idea for the nation, it was that the people would be in charge through a representative federal government. And out of the forms of government, the Founding Fathers went through and said, democracy is worse than anything. It's worse than anarchy. Democracy is worse than a monarchy. And we know what they thought of monarchies.

I mean, democracy was on the bottom of the rung because it allowed human emotion to get through. People make decisions when they're angry or when they're happy or when they don't have all the facts.

So, in a representative republican form of government, everything slows down. We complain about the pace of to government, but that's really good because now you have to debate. You have to get two sides in there. You have to look at all the aspects. You have hearings on it get all the information. It's a slow process but it keeps the feelings and emotions out.

But they wanted the people to have the power. The Constitution forbids America from becoming a democracy. And the federal government means that we share the powers in a vertical direction.

The purpose of government

BARTON: Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, he went through the presidency and said, the purpose of federal government is five- fold things. And in his inaugural address, he listed the five things that the government was supposed to do.

He said, number one, is to acknowledge and adore God. It's interesting -- Jefferson said that but they all believe if you don't start with the acknowledgement of God, you don't understand inalienable rights.

Second thing is for the government to exercise frugality -- frugality in spending and power and authority. Be a frugal government.

He said, third, is to restrain the infliction of injury. Government exists to keep bad guys under control. It's not to regulate the good guys. It's to keep bad guys from hurting somebody.

He said, the fourth thing the government is supposed to do is to encourage entrepreneurship and free enterprise, is to be business friendly and -- because that's where the prosperity comes from, that's where jobs come from.

He said, the fifth thing government should do is to protect property and the earnings of citizens. They consider the money you earn is your property and they couldn't take your money away any more than they could take your house or your property or anything else away.

And he said that's the five-fold purpose of government. Government exists for those five reasons. We've shifted so much away from what they envision, which was a small, limited government with five primary responsibilities where we the people were in charge of all three branches. That's what they wanted for America.

And if we read and study the Constitution and get back to that plan, that's what caused America to be the most prosperous, stable nation in history of the world.

BECK: I'd also like to point out here that not all progressive presidents of the 20th century were Democrats. As you know, Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican. Teddy Roosevelt was the beginning of the progressive party. He started it.

And who else? Herbert Hoover. And the Hoover family always gets angry at me when I say this, but Hoover was a self-described progressive who believed in regulation and actually started the first New Deal.

Progressives are Republicans, too!

NAPOLITANO: Herbert Hoover has this historic reputation as a champion of the free market whose way had to be corrected by FDR. He was a progressive in Woodrow Wilson/Theodore Roosevelt vein. He attempted central planning of the economy which was picked up by FDR. It was he who imposed or the Republicans under him ruined this tariffs which made it impossible to import goods at reasonable fair market values, which caused retaliation from other countries, which made it impossible to export goods at a fair market value.

I don't know how this happened but one of my goals is to correct this historical misreading of Herbert Hoover. He was as bad as Theodore Roosevelt and he laid the groundwork for Franklin Roosevelt, and he was a Republican in name only.

BECK: So, what constitutes an offender of the Constitution? And does it take to become a defender?

What makes someone an offender or defender of the Constitution?

BARTON: Someone who is a defender of the Constitution is someone who understands complete philosophy of the Constitution. And to be a defender of the Constitution doesn't mean you just want limited government. It also means you want to protect individual rights just as much as you want to limit government.

So, you have Ronald Reagan who -- and today we would call him both a social and an economic conservative. In other words, he wants deregulation, he wants the federal government smaller, he wants it doing less, he wants business as being encouraged, he wants prosperity. It comes from free enterprise. That's all good.

He wants less regulation. He wants less intrusion. But on the side, he understood the inalienable rights.

If you look at someone like Eisenhower -- Eisenhower, I mean, he desegregated Washington, D.C., but he understood the Southern mentality of the kind of racism there, but he went and took the federal government and made sure that 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were going to be upheld in Arkansas, and in Tennessee and in Texas after the desegregation case in 1954 where the Supreme Court actually got right decision through the wrong logic, but they upheld the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments.

Here, you got Eisenhower saying, I don't care what my personal views are. This is a constitutional issue. And I'm going to do it with constitutional means. So, people can criticize him for taking in the National Guard and federalizing it, but he was still upholding the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments.

And that's really how you have to judge between the defender and an offender of the Constitution is whether they use constitutional means to try to solve the problems or whether they got these brilliant ideas and went around the Constitution to try to solve the problems. And that nearly always characterize the difference between the good guys and the bad guys on constitutional issues.

NAPOLITANO: Amongst those of us who study the Constitution for a living, you could find violations of it, significant violations of it in virtually every single presidency, starting with George Washington and up to President Obama.

The strongest defenders from the Constitution from those of us who study it for a living typically are only two: Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland. Jefferson, of course, plainly argued that many of the things that the federalists had done, like the Alien and Sedition Acts, he simply would have nothing to do with.

Grover Cleveland, on the other hand, vetoed many, many pieces of legislation, more vetoes because of the absence of authority for the legislative act of the Constitution, than any other president of the history -- an unsung hero for constitutional law.