It's political campaign season again

It's political campaign season again and time to focus on making constitutional compliance an issue in the election. We are also focused on organizing Constitution Day events for September 17. While it is easy to get people to express reverence for the Constitution, it is much more difficult to get them to see the ways present practices and political platforms are inconsistent with it, and to get people to treat that inconsistency as important.

That is the problem. Most people are aware that the Constitution is being violated, but their priorities put other issues higher, especially during an election campaign. Only the candidates of the Libertarian and Constitution
Parties are trying to make it an issue, and their support among the electorate is still very low. We hope to get people to understand that the solution to almost every other problem we face depends on constitutional compliance, without which we will never be able to mobilize the consensus, commitment and deliberation that solutions to other problems require.

We are doing our part, within the limits of our resources. Already political organizations and journalists are reading the materials on our site to get constitutional information. Teachers and their students, ranging from the
level of elementary school to graduate and law school, are using our site as a primary resource, since the find their textbooks to be inadequate. Scholars are citing our documents in their journal articles. I am being asked to write articles, such as the one that recently appeared in the 4-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership on the "U.S. Constitution".

And the Constitution has been receiving more attention as people research online for such topics as "declaration of war" and "war powers". Our site is one of the most highly ranked by the major search engines, and is visited
often. We are approaching 50 million visits since we opened the site in 1995.

But all this takes money. Labor is not enough. If your financial circumstances don't permit you to help, we understand. Most of our donors from the past are worse off than they used to be. Some need help themselves. But you may still know of others who can that you can forward this message to with your suggestion that they donate.

I've just set up a Donation Plans page to allow donors to make recurrent donations through PayPal. A donor may select one or more monthly payment plans and cancel whenever he wishes to do so. He or she may pay through their PayPal or eBay accounts, by MasterCard or Visa credit or debit cards, by e-Check, or by any of several other methods. If you have a PayPal account, you can set up a similar system by clicking on "Merchant Tools", then on "Subscriptions and Recurrent Payments", and following directions. I have made a few cosmetic
changes to the forms they generate that you might like to imitate for other sites you support. Just copy the page and replace my email address for the address used for the PayPal account for that site.

You can also donate $10 per month to us using this link that can be put in email (although your email client may break it up):

https://www.paypal.com/subscriptions/business=jon.roland%40constitution.org&item_name=Level+0+Recurrent&item_number=0000&return=http%3A//www.constitution.org/donate/thanks.htm&cancel_return=http%3A//www.constitution.org/donate/goodbye.htm&no_note=1¤cy_code=USD&a3=10.00&p3=1&t3=M&src=1&sra=1

Our page is at http://www.constitution.org/donate/donate.htm . Take a look and perhaps try it out and see what you think.