Casey Mattox on Why the Constitution Still Matters and How We Can Defend It

Casey Mattox (0:01)

Connecting people to opportunities to engage with elected representatives. Even more kind of fundamental, even behind that is the work that all of you and that so many people around the country do all the time to build up all the other institutions.

In your church or communities, those are, if you're defending a republic, a republic isn't just the government, it's all of the other institutions of society that we help to make happen, that create a country where all of our answers don't have to come from. Because we are providing answers to other means. That is, I think, fundamental to the future of the Constitution, future of the republic is that we don't turn everything into a problem for government to solve, and the way we don't do that is by solving those problems in all the other areas of our lives.

SPEAKER_2 (1:02)

Americans are capable of achieving extraordinary things when they have the freedom and opportunity to do so. This is American Potential.

David From (1:14)

Everyone, welcome to the American Potential Podcast. I'm your host, David From. Today is Constitution Day, which is the founding document of our government. So we're going to be talking about the Constitution.

Do you know who the writers were? Do you know what about where they polled inspiration from? Or what about the amendments that have been added? These answers and more are going to be part of our discussion today with our guest, Casey Mattox, who's a senior advisor for Americans for Prosperity. Casey, welcome back.

Casey Mattox (1:42)

Hey, thanks for having me on, David.

David From (1:45)

Thank you. Well, I know those of us who are constitutionalists, limited government guys, really love the Constitution, and I know you love it more than most and know more about it more than most. So the Constitution was signed 11 years after the declaration was signed, which obviously being our 250th anniversary, we're celebrating that like crazy. But the Constitution obviously is vital to our nation's functioning and how it's progressed.

What were some of the debates about how government should run and that shaped the Constitution?

Casey Mattox (2:22)

Yeah, well, obviously at the time of the founding, I mean, first of all, when they called the Constitutional Convention, it was called as just an effort to try to fix the system they had at the time, the Articles of Confederation, which was the system we had at the time. And so they called it as an effort to try to fix the Articles of Confederation. We pretty quickly realized that the only way to fix the Articles of Confederation was to scrap the Articles and move on and just create a whole new Constitution.

Because the Articles of Confederation basically set it up. So you had 13 totally independent nations, right? And each of the colonies. And they were sort of supposed to be kind of voluntarily working together. But that created all kinds of problems. And so you had to have a system that would work. And our Constitution is actually what came out of that.

David From (3:15)

So who were the kind of the key players, the founding fathers, let's speak, who were most involved in shaping the Constitution?

Casey Mattox (3:22)

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a long list. I think most of the, one of the things that people don't really appreciate, though, is that so many of these people were a lot younger than you think they were.

I think James Madison was 25 years old. He's sort of thought of as the principal drafter of the Constitution. Really? And he was 25 years old, which is, in part, how you get the, if you look at some of the ages in the Constitution itself, right? So how old do you have to be to be a United States congressman? And the age chosen is 25

Is it any accident that the guy who is writing the document says, I think about 25, we don't make it older than 25 25 sounds about right.

But I think it was Thomas Jefferson back here. Thomas Jefferson was in his early 30s. Most of these guys were pretty young. I think it was only Ben Franklin who's the elder statesman of the group, was in his early 70s. Most of them were, there were a handful of them that were in their 50s. Most of these guys were in their 40s and 30s. And some of them, as young as their 20s. Alexander Hamilton was 21 years old. He signed on to a constitution that made him ineligible to be a member of the House of Representatives for four more years. Wow. So very young. But I think, obviously, Madison comes to mind immediately with the Constitution. But then the founding, or the Federalist Papers, right? Where, as anyone who has seen Hamilton knows, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and Madison were the drivers of the Federalist Papers. People like James Wilson was from Pennsylvania, was also one of the primary framers of the Constitution. But it was fundamentally some committee work, basically. It was written by committee in a lot of ways.