Hello, and welcome to ATPs, Really Dumb Things They Said. I’m Barry Nussbaum.

Joe Biden just made a profoundly wrong statement, “Our Constitution opens with the words, as trite as it sounds, ‘We the People’. It’s time we remembered that ‘We the People’ are the government.”

Not true, Mr. President. You probably need a new speechwriter. The person that the Constitution is to protect is the people from the government. We aren’t the government. In general, we are to be protected by the constitutional clauses from excessive taxation, and from them passing of laws that take away the rights of the people. Those rights are enumerated in great detail both in the Constitution and in all the amendments.

The first ten of which we call, The Bill of Rights. Those rights are for the people. They act as protection for the people from the government.

Sorry, Mr. President, but the founders were quite clear on this subject, and they wrote about it extensively. The citizens of the country need protection from the government. The citizens are not the government. It was a dumb thing to have said, Mr. President, and it’s constitutionally and historically incorrect.