Robert E. McDaniel: A promise kept on the anniversary of America’s 250th

To The Daily Sun,

It was my first serious promise as an adult. I was 18 years of age. A mere 13 days earlier I had graduated from high school in Meredith.

It was July 4, 1969, and it was oppressively hot. I was standing on the Parade Ground at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, alongside several hundred future classmates. Fewer than half of them would graduate four years later.

We were there to take the oath of office and officially enter military service.

We raised our right hands and swore:

“...to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States...

and bear true faith and allegiance to the same...”

I did not know a great deal about our Constitution at the time but would learn much more when I completed law school in Washington, D.C., some 15 years later.

But a lingering thought stayed with me: Of all the things that we could have been asked to swear allegiance to, why was it the Constitution? Why not the country? The flag? The government? The president?

Was answer as simple as this: The Constitution is what protects us all. It is our most important treasure.

Yes. That is the answer.

In the years I served in the military, and as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, I was often drawn back to this language from the 14th Amendment:

"...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."

This is only a tiny portion of the entire Amendment. But note how it applied to “any person.” It does not say “any person not supporting the existing administration," or "any person who is not an immigrant."

“Any person” means everyone.

This is why, when the federal government rounded up hundreds of “any persons,” put them on airplanes and flew them hundreds of miles away, deported many, and shot and killed people in Minnesota, I thought of the oath I took 57 years ago.

So how do I keep that promise? How to I help “preserve, protect and defend” our most precious Constitution?

I talk to people.

And I write this small essay.

And I will not stop.

Robert E. McDaniel

Meredith