In fact, I think 500 years from now, the two Americans so far who will be remembered are George Washington and Neil Armstrong, who, amazingly hasn't been paid very much attention.

A 'living constitution' is a dead constitution, because it does not do the one and only thing a written constitution is supposed to do: provide parameters around the power of officials.

There are a lot of things that are done in the federal government that are done because Washington did them.

I don't think America needs 28,000 men on Okinawa. I don't think we need an army in Germany. What's it for, to protect Germans against the Russians, to protect the French against the Germans? It's just there by inertia, that's my reading of it. I don't think we need an army in South Korea because North Korea is absolutely no threat to South Korea.

I think there's no doubt that George Washington was the most important American to this time.

In fact, we haven't ever really recalibrated our foreign policy commitments since the end of the Cold War. We still have alliances throughout Asia and across Europe that were devised to tame the Soviet Union, which, last time I checked, ceased to exist more than 20 years ago. Today, of course, we have a commitment to go to nuclear war with Russia in case Russia invades Latvia. To me, that's complete and utter nonsense. There ought to be a reconsideration of our posture in every region of the world.

Some things have changed, but there's a lot of what went on in the Washington administration that's just been done ever since because that's the way we do things.