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http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/07/04/mark-levin-on-the-constitutional-convention-the-framers-would-have-never-voted-for-the-government-as-it-exists-today/

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Mark Levin - , executive editor of the Conservative Review and star and producer of - joined SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon for the American Revolution Special on Breitbart News Daily.

Levin, as a scholar of the Constitution, spoke of how the Founders emerged from the Revolutionary War knowing that a great intellectual and philosophical battle lay ahead. A gathering of warriors, philosophers, and lawyers who were deeply skeptical of centralized government were now tasked with creating one.

"They were very possessive of their state authority, as former colonies, and you can understand that," he said. "They had these Articles of Confederation, and the Articles of Confederation were fine, except for the fact that the new country was going bankrupt with its war debt. The British, the French, other countries were killing us when it came to trade and so forth, because we had our states fighting with each other - fighting over navigable waters, where they shared rivers, and borders, and so forth, taxing the hell out of their own goods."

"One of the delegates who didn't sign off on the Constitution was, of all people, George Mason - one of my favorite of the Founders and the Framers," Levin said. "He was the architect of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and he had a lot of say about what was going on. He spoke up a lot about the Constitution. He was the one who argued most vociferously against a listing of rights."

"People need to understand, the Bill of Rights came later. There was no Bill of Rights, it wasn't called the Bill of Rights. It came later, at the insistence of the ratification conventions in the states," he explained.

Clad in heavy wool clothes and wigs, the delegates endured a hot Philadelphia summer in the same building where the Revolution was declared, with some of the same men in attendance. Levin organized them in two camps, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, warning that the first and most confusing thing to understand about their conflict was that "the Federalists were really the anti-Federalists."

"The Federalists were pretty good at marketing, because the Federalists were really more the nationalists," he explained. "The Anti-Federalists - you know, the Patrick Henrys and the Masons, and by the way Monroe, and to some extent Jefferson - they were really the 'federalists,' who believed in federalism."

"The ratification debates in New York were so brutal, that's how we got our Federalist Papers," he said. "Two of them were from New York: John Jay and Hamilton. They started writing essays, as did Madison of Virginia, to persuade the states to adopt the Constitution. New York, the Constitution ratification was expected to lose. Virginia - Virginia! - it was expected to lose. New Hampshire was a close call. Adams and Madison eventually speak to each other, and they say, 'we're going to lose this thing.'"

In order to get the Constitution passed, and avoid a fresh round of debates that might have left the convention back at square one, Levin said the delegates agreed that "when the first Congress would meet, they would go back and consider a number of these objections that were raised by the states, and this, in essence, is how we got the First, Second, Fourth, all these amendments to the Constitution."

The initial crop of seventeen proposed Amendments to the Constitution from the House of Representatives was whittled down to twelve the Senate, of which ten were ratified by the states. Levin cited that process to support his fierce declaration that We, the People "own this Constitution."

"It belongs to It doesn't belong to the Supreme Court, which has almost no power under Article III of the Constitution," he pointed out. "The federal appellate courts and federal district courts, they're not even the Constitution. They were created by Congress through various judiciary acts. Their jurisdiction is given to them by Congress. Meanwhile, we sit back, and we say there's nothing we can do when some court issues some decision. can do something. It just do something."

"When you look at the power of the President, executive orders - the purpose of an executive order is to institute, for the Executive Branch, some statutory requirement or some management requirement. It's not to be in lieu of legislative activity," Levin asserted.

Marbury vs. Madison had "an enormous effect on this country, in terms of what has become, in my view, a judicial oligarchy," said Levin, noting that Thomas Jefferson would eventually come to view the lifetime appointments of the Supreme Court as the "undoing" of Constitutional order. Levin himself advocates, in his book The Liberty Amendments that a supermajority of state legislatures should be empowered to overturn Supreme Court decisions.

"The Constitution is inspiring. It is a magnificent document," Levin pronounced. "And if we would adhere to it fifty percent, even thirty percent, what a different society this would mean, for the better. We have this massive bureaucracy with two million employees, it's not even in the Constitution. For the most part, that came about as part of the New Deal. We have these all-powerful courts, not only Marshall but Woodrow Wilson talked on, and on, and on - particularly in 1908, before he became President - that real revolutionary change from the Left, from his perspective, was through the courts."

He pointed to the Supreme Court's most recent session for more examples of "preposterous opinions that come down, and we're told to move along."

What they came up with was a system that divided power both vertically and horizontally, with different branches and levels of government holding each other in check. "What's happening today is, the government is devouring the civil society - exactly what the Framers and the ratifiers rejected," said Levin.

He likes to contrast the American Revolution with the French Revolution, which he described as "mobocracy."

"The American Revolution was different," said Levin. "The American Revolution was about God-given natural rights. The American people, all the way back to the colonists themselves, have always been a beneficent and tolerant people, as we are today."

The road back from our post-Constitutional society will be a long one, stretching across several generations to come. Levin said he was heartened to see more resources than ever for helping young people appreciate the history and wisdom of the Constitution, thanks to the Internet.

For example, he recommended The Avalon Project , which has many links to important historical documents. He commended historian Pauline Maier's book Ratification as an excellent narrative about how the Constitution was debated and ratified.

"What kind of a republic is it, where we all sit around, in the early weeks of June, wondering if we have our liberty?" he asked, referring to sessions of the imperial Supreme Court. "What kind of a republic is it, where one man or woman can vote one way, or the other way, and we either have a fundamental right, or we don't have a fundamental right. Can somebody please point out to me in the Constitution, or anyplace in American history, where such a grant of power is supported? Of course not."

"We revere the Constitution. We don't revere what they've done to it," Levin said. "The problem is, tyranny is easy. Liberty is hard. Once liberty is lost, it's very difficult to get it back, particularly when it's taken from within by a government - a government that's supposed to be a republic."

He warned that it was difficult to fight back against "a government that uses the power of the law to destroy the law."

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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Mark Levin on the Constitutional Convention: The Framers Would Have Never Voted for 'the Government as It Exists Today' | Breitbart

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Mark Levin, as a scholar of the Constitution, spoke of how the Founders emerged from the Revolutionary War knowing that a great intellectual and philosophical battle lay ahead. A gathering of warriors, philosophers, and lawyers who were deeply skeptical of centralized government were now tasked with creating one.

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Museum of American History & National Archives

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Declaration carried around because signatures could be used as treason. The famous statement Franklin uttered “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

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The Declaration of Independence
Although Thomas Jefferson is often called the “author” of the Declaration of Independence, he wasn’t the only person who contributed the important ideas. Jefferson was a member of a five-person committee appointed by the Continental Congress to write the Declaration. The committee included Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. All five of these men played a large role in the creation of the Declaration of Independence. The final Declaration of Independence was sent out to the world on July 4, 1776, assuring the War for Independence, and could be later known as the American Revolution.

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The Bill of Rights
The Virginia delegate, George Mason proposed to add a bill of rights which he thought would allow the people to be quiet. Most other delegates rejected his proposal due to them wanting to go home and they thought it was uneccessary because most state constitutions already included some form of guaranteed rights. After the convention of the signing of the Constitution, Anti-federalists saw it as a fatal flaw and many states only ratified the Constitution if a Bill of Rights was promptly added.

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The Constitution
A compromise shown in the article by James O. Horton is the cooperation between the delegates from non-slave states and the delegates from the pro-slave states. They argued how the slaves would be counted within the states, determined by the population size. The slave states  created the three-fifths compromise to increase the Southern political power, allowing for the protection of slavery. A provision was also enforced into the Constitution that assisted slaveholders in the recovery of fugitive slaves. This fugitive slave clause protected a slaveholder's human property, making resisting a fugivitve a Constitutional offense.

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The 13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment states that slavery will not be allowed in the United States, no matter what circumstance, and will only be used as a punishment toward others who have committed a horrible crime. Based off the gradual abolition of slavery in New York in the year of 1799, the people of the New York delegation discussed that any born child of a slave within this state after the following Fourth of July will be deemed and born free. As given from excerpt from the Alabama State Constitution discussion in section one, the General Assembly shall have the power to prevent slaves from being brought into the State as merchandise and make the owners of the slaves to treat them with the case of humanity.

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The Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights is the first ten Amendments of the Constitution. James Madison introduced these amendements to the United States Congress and were adopted on August 21, 1789 by the House of Representatives. The Bill of Rights guarantees essential rights and civil liberties, such as freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.  The 12 amendments were ratified on June 8, 1789.

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The 15th Amendment
Secondly in the 15th Amendment, the whites began to create a poll tax. The tax was two dollars, in which this hurt the blacks because they were very poor. Although this was a cheaper tax for the white the legislators "forgot" to tax the whites who came to pay the tax. Later, the whites began to get violent towards the blacks. For example, they created the Klu Klux Klan and used violence because they worried about the blacks getting voting rights.

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The Constitution
The creation of the Constitution came from when Ademn Randolf declared that they should "throw" out the Articles of Confederation and create a new Constitution. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met to create the Constitution in secret. Nothing was to be discussed outside of the writing room. The core idea given from James Madison was that there would be a central government with the dispersion of three branches; a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary branch. Not one branch is allowed to become more powerful than the others. Article V of the Constituion would allow for the various Amendments that would create the whole Constitution. The original Constitution lacked the Bill of Rights due to the amount of delegates that just wanted to go home and did not want to argue anymore.

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The Declaration of Independence
The main ideas of the Declaration of the Independence are people have rights and ours are violated, the British king is taking away laws and using violence to maintain powers of the colonies. The colonies were forcefully seperated and are now a seperate country. The revisions of the Declaration showed the struggles to achieve what the colonists wanted. Lastly, the words "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" changed the country in so many positive and negative ways. The Declaration mainly uses the words laws/legislature/legistlation/legislator and war/violence an excessive amount of times throughout the whole document. It also states how the goverment gets its power from the consent of the governed, allowing to pass laws given from the governers.

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The 13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. Abraham Lincoln made a constitutional amendment that helped the passing of the 13th Amendment.  Many individuals, such as Mr. Hutton, did not want this to pass due to his brother's death in his early life. Most individuals do not like the passing of this Amendment due to the freedom the blacks will recieve. The black individuals are not used to the freedom they are going to have because they do not have a "master" telling them what to do within their slave homes.

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The 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was the way all the people, no matter what race, would be protected by the law. The San Francisco laws discriminated the Chinese by not allowing them to operate their Laundromats unless they had an approved permit and they had to be made of brick. This caused many of the Chinese individuals to place a plea to get a permit, but all Chinese individuals who placed a request for a permit were denied. The Caucasian people who also wanted a permit, were accepted and all received permits by the San Francisco county officials. The Chinese people that were placed in jail would be forced to have their hair cut, even though it was disrespectful and embarrassing to the Chinese culture.

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The 15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment declares that the right to vote cannot be denied because of race. This amendment was the last Civil War Amendment that helped to begin the equality to all African Americans. Florida made it very difficult for the black to vote, no matter what circumstance. Florida adopted a white primary, grandfather clause, poll tax, literacy test, long residency requirements and other obstacles for the black individuals. First Florida's legislators would use tissue ballots or undersized ballots in area that had a high amount of black voters. The legislators also required voters to place eight separate ballots into eight separate ballot boxes. Due to the blacks being illiterate they could not place them in the correct boxes, therefore their vote didn't count.

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The 14th Amendment
The San Francisco officials created an ordinate that created any ships who disembarked from the San Francisco port would have to pay an extra tax per Chinese person. A scenario that allowed Congress to see what has come to pass the 14th Amendment was the process of Yick Wo. His allegation was about not being able to get a permit for his laundromat because he was Chinese and that his building was made of wood and not brick. This caused his case going to the United States Supreme Court. They realized that they should pass the Amendment to allow everyone, no matter what race, independence.