Rick Green [00:00:07] This is the intersection of faith and culture. We appreciate you joining us today on The WallBuilders Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And this is that one day of the week where you get to pick the topics. So be sure and send your emails to us radio@wallbuilders.com. That's radio@wallbuilders.com and you might have a question about the constitution or the founding fathers, history, application of the Bible to the issues of the day, whatever you got, send it to us. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton, and I'm just going to start firing the audience questions at them. First one comes from Rich and he said, regarding impeachment and pardons. Article two, section 2.1 says the president can issue a pardon except for cases of impeachment. Can an impeachment be done post pardon? For example, president Biden had a bunch of pardons, including for federal employees who could have been subject to impeachment. Can Congress now impeach those employees? And if the Senate convicts... Have them subject to prosecution for the criminal offense. I realize it's probably just a thought exercise since the possibility of having the Senate convict anyone is minimal, but who knows, perhaps the right party will have a super majority after the next election. And so guys, I wanna clarify in the question, I guess I have a question. I've never thought about employees being impeached or removed because of impeachment. I would have thought that would only be someone in elected office, or perhaps I guess appointed office. But employee just I guess conjures up a different image in my mind. So you might touch on that one as well What do you guys think? 

David Barton [00:01:35] There's kind of a sequence here. And generally, if you can prosecute someone, you generally don't impeach them. Now the president's an exception to that. If something happens in the term of office over the four years, which the Democrats tried twice to do, but generally you don't impede someone and then convict them of offense after that. So impeachment is a way to remove them from office. And generally impeachment goes for folks that are not really directly accountable to the people. So I was looking back historically There's 22 times that the House of Representatives has impeached someone and that's where it starts federally is the House or representatives has to bring essentially an indictment against someone and a majority of the house has to say hey, we're going to impeach this person because we think they've done something wrong But it can't be something like murder or bribery or whatever if you can be prosecuted criminally that's done through the Justice Department now You can also impeach on top of that, say, hey, you're now a convicted felon. We don't want you in office. So you can take a person out if they've done something. But just looking at it, there was one occasion where a senator was impeached. That was back in the 1790s. It was a signer of the Constitution, William Blount. He got involved in the Aaron Burr kind of stuff where it looked like Aaron Burrr was starting to create a separate nation. Outside America taking Mexico and Texas area, et cetera And so Congress tried to impeach and it went to the judicial process and the founding fathers on the court said no That's that's not why we did impeachment. It's not for this kind of bad stuff You can't impeach a senator if you don't like what he's done then have an election get rid of the guy So essentially that was the only time they've gone after senator. They haven't done it since then that was kind of That's off limits is what the founders kind of said on that. 

Tim Barton [00:03:30] Well, and dad, it's probably worth pointing out too, that even for Aaron Burr, he was not found guilty of anything because he had conspired to do a lot, but hadn't actually done something. Um, and so even though Aaron Bur was going to take, in essence, Louisiana territory, he wanted to be the king of that region, uh, and he definitely had supporters along the way as you're mentioning, but I do wonder too, if part of, part of what the drawback was, wasn't just, you can't use impeachment for this because as you mentioned Impeachment is a political tool, it doesn't take the place of the justice system when someone breaks an actual law. That's what the Department of Justice and the justice system is for, is to enforce the actual laws of the nation, but you can apply some political consequence to someone that breaks the law as well. And so if a president, or in this case, even a Senator had committed a criminal act, they could be impeached as well, but I do wonder and this is probably like in the weeds of nerd details, but I do wonder if Aaron Burr would have been found guilty, if he might've been found guilty in the Senate as well, but because Aaron Burrr wasn't, then I think probably even his defense attorneys, whoever, or is even trying to defend him in the center would have said, guys, you know, there was a conspiracy about this, but you don't, you don't impeach someone for having conversation or having ideas, uh if they didn't take decisive actions or steps, et cetera. That might be incorrect, but I do wonder if that played a part in it. 

David Barton [00:04:59] Yeah, it could have been. It's one of those things that the records aren't really full of what happened, but the precedent was set. So you've had one Senator that was impeached and that was dropped. You've had a Secretary of War that was impeached that was under Abraham Lincoln. The Secretary of war, Congress is really dissatisfied with what he was doing with Confederates and how he was treating them or not treating them the way they wanted. So they tried to impeach him, get him out. Secretary of Homeland Security, Mayorkas was. They brought impeachment charges on him for not closing the borders, not enforcing immigration laws. That did not go anywhere. That did no go to a trial. There have been four times that a president has been impeached. One was Andrew Johnson in Reconstruction. He was a Democrat vice president, became president after he was vice president for the Republican Abraham Lincoln. And when he got in, he was really super lenient. To all the Democrats and the House and Senate didn't care for that. So they tried to impeach the president. That didn't complete. But then you had Bill Clinton who went through impeachment and no conviction there. And Trump has been through it twice and no conviction there. Then where it usually happens is federal judges. And there's been 15 occasions where the House has impeached a federal judge. And these are the guys that are there for the duration of good behavior. They do not have lifetime appointments. But they don't have a set election date. So to hold them accountable, this is where you see most of the action. Of the 15 judges that have been impeached, seven were convicted and removed from office. Three others resigned before they were convicted. And there were five that were found not guilty. So impeachment is kind of an extraordinary thing in the sense that we don't do it near as often as we prosecute criminal activity. But most of that comes through the Justice Department. So, there's not really a scenario where that impeachment is going to be used to get some people out and then they'll be prosecuted thereafter if there's something for it, they're gonna try to prosecute them first and then if they don't resign then they don't peace now I've got to say one of the weirdest things out there is Al C Hastings was one of The Federal Judges out of Florida he was a federal judge who was impeached and convicted and removed from office and After he was removed from Office, and I think it may have been bribery something like that after he was removed from office, he turned around and ran for Congress and got elected. And so that's just one of the ones that boggles my mind is you get impeached because of bad conduct, misbehaviors, what the Constitution says, and then you immediately get elected to Congress. And he was in Congress, I don't know, 10, 15 years, a long time. But that may be the strangest one, but that's kind of the overview of impeachment and how it's used and where it's gonna be. 

Rick Green [00:07:48] Yeah, this is the guy that, uh, what was it? $50,000 and quite literally cold, not necessarily hard, but cold cash. Cause it was found in his freezer from some bribe or something. It was, that's the one thing I remember about the Elsie Hastings still and why he got impeached, but crazy, crazy, well, good question. Nicholas has the next question for us. And, uh this one's a fun one. I'm going to enjoy hearing y'all answer this because I remember David, some of these stories that you told 20 years ago that our family just adopted. We love These stories of young people doing amazing things in earlier generations, but Nicholas said, good afternoon, walluilders trio love listening to your show and all the insight you bring. I was wondering, it seems that back in the founding era or in the time of the pony express people who were teenagers back then were accomplishing things that we now consider adult task. When did that change and was there an underlying reason? 

Tim Barton [00:08:41] Well, I think there's several parts to this question. Certainly, when we look at when things changed, I think we could point to a lot of the progressive era, the takeover and the take over education specifically, and they had a different agenda and therefore they created something quite unique in education that hadn't been done up to that point and it produced a very different outcome and result, which kind of did away with a lot stuff. If you go back to early education, there was a lot things that were fundamentally different the way they are today. Not the least of which there weren't grades, there were levels. And you could have called them grades, that's fine, but in the way they operated, think of them more as levels because that's a more accurate description for understanding purposes. When you go to school, everybody starts with level one and it doesn't matter if you're three or you're 13, if you are four or you are 40, when you start, you start with level 1 and you don't go to level two until you have mastered the content for level one and that might have been subjective based on the teacher and the teacher thought all right You're ready for level two you would go on and some of the levels were fairly well defined level one For the majority of early America would involve something like a little horn book and the New England primer a little Horn Book was a little board it would have on the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer as an example you had to memorize the alphabet in the Lord prayer and that was part of level one, then you would have a New England Primer And the New England Primer, you would have to learn all the content in that, which was exceedingly and profoundly religious. And once you'd mastered that content, you'd go on to level two. And because there was no department of education, there wasn't total uniformity in education, but the, the common themes, the uniformity was in theme, not directly in textbook or the testing of standards, but the theme was religion, then morality then knowledge, and what you find very common is the first two levels were heavily reliant on the Bible, and virtually you could argue in many cases that was pretty much all the students did was learn from the Bible. Learn Bible stories, Bible lessons. Now, they're learning to read and write, but everything they're learn to read and write is from the bible, and so it's religion as the foundation, then it gets into morality, and of course they're kids are learning to write and that expands and you're adding more components into what they're doing, but there's an underlying emphasis on morality. So we're learning what is right from the Bible. We're learning, what is truth. We're learn what's wrong from the Bibles. We're helping kids develop and form a system of morality. And really it wasn't until you start getting to level four or five that you see a heavy emphasis on knowledge. And I say that not that they abandoned religion and morality, they're still underlying tones in it. But in the first several levels, all it was was religion and morality. Now the reason all that matters is they only had eight levels and most students finished those eight levels between let's say 10 and 13 years old. And at that point, when you finish school, there's two options for you. Either you get an apprenticeship, you go get a job, or some students would want to go to college. They would want a further their education. And it's not uncommon when you look at some of the early Colleges between 13 and 16 years old. These kids were going to colleges. Some kids were graduating at 16 years old from universities or 15 years old from universities. And so things happened at a very different level and age back then. And we might could point out that even though the life expectancy was a lot shorter back then, that, that did not take away from the fact that you had seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, that we're doing things academically and levels five, six, seven, and eight that arguably most college students could not do today. And when I say arguably, I can at least acknowledge anecdotally every summer when we have college students in, we will show them some of the, questions and tests from some of their early students and none of the college students are able to answer it. And, and they're just sample questions and examples. We don't always even use the same questions for each group of students. But the point is that what they were achieving was so remarkable. And so. When you are finishing school between 10 and 13, and then the expectation is, hey, it's time for you to grow up and get a job, it's not surprising at that point that you see younger people doing very impressive and incredible things, because there was a different idea and expectation on young people. Also, when you have people that are growing up in early America, where if you don't work with your family, your family might not survive where every spring the family's out working and you're planting in the garden and every fall you're harvesting and everybody has a job that this is way before the days of the allowance system right that i mean that like life was so different back then we weren't giving anybody anything if we didn't work together as a family our family might not survive this coming winter if we don't have enough food and if we don't Have enough fuel and whatever else there might be the work that has to be done And I say all of that because it was also not unusual. That when a kid, we would call them a kid right? When a kid was seven, eight, nine, 10 years old, they might be told, hey, take your gun and go out to the woods and get us some meat for dinner. And literally you would have kids taking their guns and going to the wood providing meat for dinners with what Annie Oakley did when she was eight years old. Her dad had died and she went out by herself for the first time at eight years and she shot a rabbit. Now, her whole story is remarkable and fun. We don't have time for that right now, but the point of all of this is When progressives took over, they said, you know, what we really need is we need kids in school for longer. And so you begin to see the introduction and expansion of high school. And then you have guys like Rockefeller, who in 1903 starts the very first educational foundation. This non-profit, he puts a million dollars into it. The first year, by 1970, put over $90 million into it and the whole purpose of this educational foundation is to change the way education works. Now there's a lot of thoughts surrounding this as well, because this is part of the second industrial revolution. This is when you have the assembly line and you had people saying, we just need, we need people in our factories that will just take orders and do what they are told. And so this was part of what education was working to produce was people that would memorize and repeat, take orders, and do it, you're told. And to help assist in this, progressives introduce things like fill in the blank, multiple choice, true faults, which all of those are surrounding the idea of how well can you listen and repeat what you are told, how well you can memorize and fill in the blank. Which one of these multiple choice that my teacher say it was and when progressives took over, the idea wasn't that we need to grow up these really bright, creative, well-grounded young people to go do incredible things, be amazing entrepreneurs, skilled producers, etc. No, we want people that simply can memorize and repeat, they can take orders and do what they're told, we need them to work in the factory, and that's part of what the progressive system did in education. And that's largely why we don't see as as much of the same kinds of things in our that we would back in the 19th century. If you go back to the 19 century, again, it was not unusual for a kid to get on a horse, take a gun and be gone, come back with me. That wasn't a weird or unusual thought, especially in the West. Now, depending on, right, if they were in the city, that might be weird and unusual, but generally speaking, there are so many accounts of young people doing things that today we would look at and go, that's crazy, they shouldn't be doing that. And it doesn't mean that, you know, there weren't abuses in the system. Um, obviously the reason that, you know, there was even some unions and things started in the early 1900s was to try to stop all of the, the children workers that were being used for very corrupt, greedy individuals, just trying to profit off the backs of people that they were basically oppressing. And so there obviously is context with this, but the big picture is The reason things were so different is there was a different design in education. There was a difference expectation from culture, a different expectation from parents, and even the idea of what students could achieve most of the time the, the bars and the standards, the expectations that young people have are the ones that adults put on them. It's not the ones based on their capability or their physical abilities. It's, it's what adults say, oh, that's not safe. Don't do that. Ah, well, we're going to wait until you're a couple of years older to explore that concept or teach you this thing. In early America, there wasn't a lot of, let's wait till you're older. There was your six years old, get behind this plow and help plow this field. And until you were thrown into the deep end as a kid, you had to learn, but because of that expectations were different. Because of the education system, the structure, there was just so much that encouraged young people to do far greater things than what modern culture and modern education encourages today. 

David Barton [00:17:37] You know, and it was so amazing to me, Tim, you pulled out some things here a few weeks ago that looked at, that we looked at. But you had Thomas Jefferson, he becomes, he really kind of becomes the father, the godfather, if you will, for his nephew, Peter Carr, because Peter's father had died and part of the family, so Jefferson takes him in. I think he's either 14 or 15 at the time. And he said, all right, Peter, I'm now in charge of helping you be prepared for life. And there's some things you need to do with education. Here's what you really need to with education." And so Jefferson gives his 15 year old a list of the things that he needs to be working on and studying as a 15 year-old. And then the other one that you pulled out was John Quincy Adams. 

Tim Barton [00:18:18] Yeah. And by the way, all of those were things that he was telling Peter Carr to do before you go to college. And so, so usually Erik Hanson is a guy that works for us and he studied classics in college. He now for fun is like in a Greek and Hebrew. He learned Latin. And so I make him read this because some of the names like I, when When you read it to me, I'm like, oh yeah, I know who that is. But I, I don't think I could pronounce some of the, the words that are Latin and other things that, that Jefferson's telling him, here's, here are all the things you need to know as a 15 year old before you go to college. You should be very familiar with all of this. And it's, it's not just like the, the Socrates, the Plato, the Aristotle kind of things, although those are included, it's things that most of us would never even ponder. And Jefferson also encourages a, and make sure you always read them in their original language, because if you don't read them in the original language and you might not fully understand what they're trying to communicate in these books. So that letter is worth going to and worth reading. It is crazy. It's August 19th, 1785 is that letter from Jefferson to Peter Carr. And again, the things he includes in there are things that most of us today could not even fathom going through as adults, much less saying, hey, this is just basic. Before you go to college, if you don't have this, you're not ready for college, is what Jefferson tells him. And then there's a similar thing when John Adams is writing to the president of Harvard. John Quincy Adams has been with his dad over in Europe throughout the revolution. And so he was homeschooled. But he didn't have a traditional education and because of that he wasn't John Adams was sure that Harvard would take John Quincy Adams And so John Adams starts telling him all the things he's done and he starts listing all of the the books he's read in those languages and the essays. He's written in these other languages Because John Quinzy Adams was fluent in multiple languages. And so he's studying in French. He studying in Latin, he's studying and Russian all these things and again this was This was John Adams saying, hey, would you please accept my son? I know he hasn't had traditional education. He has done these things. Is that good enough? Which really speaks to the incredibly high standards universities used to have. And both those letters are worth going back and reading. The one from John Adams to the physics professor at Harvard University was April 23rd, 1785. If you guys want to look those up, they are quite remarkable, but it does again, give an indication of what early education used to look like. What was the? That the expectation and standards in early America compared to where we are today and where that changed was progressives thinking we need people that are better workers in the factories, not necessarily better thinkers. And that's part of why they introduced a change in academics to create a generation or generations of people who would memorize and repeat, not who would be critical thinkers and problem solvers. 

David Barton [00:21:11] Tim, while you were doing that I went and looked up the letter on Jefferson and this is embarrassing I cannot pronounce most of the things he says in here, but I'm gonna give a shot 15 year old he says first read Goldsmith's history of Greece this will give you a digested view of that field then take up ancient history in the detail read in the following books in the following order Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xenophontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. 

Tim Barton [00:21:38] So some of our friends right now are already laughing dad they're like you come on guys pronounce that correctly but this is the point but there's like five 

David Barton [00:21:45] of words I can't pronounce and he's saying this is your first stuff and he gives him a second it's ridiculous it's crazy I love it 

Rick Green [00:21:53] Well, as we're going to break before our final question of the day, I just had to point out that you guys were able to talk about all of that and how much tougher and stronger and smarter and all that without one time, either of you saying that you walk to school uphill both ways in the snow that I'm impressed. All right. Hang on folks. We were right back. You're listening to the WallBuilder show. 

Rick Green [00:23:19] Welcome back to The WallBuilder Show. Thanks for staying with us on this Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Got time for one more. This one's from Kendall. She said, greetings, WallBuilders from Alabama. I really enjoy listening to y'all's show. Had a quick question for you. 18Th Amendment prohibited the making and selling of alcohol within the United States and gave the authority to enforce it to both the states and Congress. But then the 21st Amendment reversed the 18th. So my question is, could Congress still restrict the sale of alcohol, for instance, not allowing alcohol to be sold in gas stations, or is that something that would have to be done state by state? Thanks for y'all's persistence and commitment to constitutional and historical education, Kendall. Great question, Kendall, I love it when people are thinking this specifically about the constitution and who gets to decide, or as our friend Ken Ivory says, if government, which government, which is really what Kendall's saying here. 

David Barton [00:24:05] Yeah, and quite frankly, what you can do with the Constitutional Amendment is anything that you can get two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-fourths of the states to agree to. So you could ban the sale of alcohol again if you wanted to, or anything else, or add it. You just have to get two thirds of the house and Senate, and three fourths of the states to do it. Now, within that framework, what she's talking about here is really fell under what used to be known as the Blue Laws, and the Blue laws were the state laws that regulated what you could do on Sundays. And so, even to this day, there's still a lot of states that say, hey, you can't sell alcohol on Sundays. That's on the books. They don't necessarily enforce that. But the blue laws allow states to pick and choose what they're going to do, what they are not going to enforce, and when they do that. So, a lot states that sell alcohol don't allow it to be sold in certain places, certain buildings, certain days, certain times, certain hours. That's all the stuff that can be done by the state. And that goes back to, Rick, as you said, Ken Ivory. It's which government? So those things can still be done today. And a lot of those things still are on the books. I mean, I think Texas even had a law in the book still that you can't sell bread on Sundays. That was part of the blue laws they had, and I don't think it ever got repealed. So there are a lot laws like that that are out there that states can do within the framework. But constitutional amendment, there's no limit on what you can do with the constitutional amendment if you can get the right amount of people to get behind it. 

Tim Barton [00:25:24] And that would be interesting, by the way, as it's kind of like a side note, I know we're out of time, but the idea that you can do a constitutional amendment, that the bill of rights was supposed to be protecting inalienable rights fundamentally. And if you can to a constitutional limit that actually violates in an inalientable right, technically that would constitutional, but it would violate the very spirit and intent of what the constitution was for. That's a question for another day. But that would an interesting one to dissect because certainly that the the bill of rights was supposed to reinforce and secure in people's mind the idea that government can never come against and take away your God given rights, which is why we have the ninth and 10th amendment, but, if you added a new amendment, there has been times when something was said, no, and then yes, we've already seen a switch on that and it could go again, again, topic for a different day, but that would be an interesting conversation. Yeah. In fact, I would 

Rick Green [00:26:15]  Yeah. In fact, I would highly recommend if people want to learn more about that kind of stuff. Hey I know this thing called constitutional alive or biblical citizenship in modern America Go to wallbuilders.com today and get your constitution class and you can dive even deeper into some of these great questions and of course always tune in on Thursdays to foundations of freedom Thursday, and please send us some questions we love hearing from you really helps us to know that we're you know Zeroing in on those areas that you're most interested in as an audience so radio@wallbuilders comm to send those in thanks so much for listening to the wallbuilder show