An odd claim for someone supposedly well-versed on the subject, with several books under his name on the Constitution.
Source: Washington Post
It’s a common misconception that Thomas Jefferson participated in drafting the United States Constitution in 1787. But as Republican presidential candidate and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson points out in his latest book, “A More Perfect Union,” Jefferson was “missing in action,” serving in Paris as minister to France.
That did not stop Carson from praising Jefferson in a C-Span interview Sunday as one of the most impressive of the Founding Fathers because he “tried to craft our constitution in a way that it would control peoples’ natural tendencies and control the natural growth of the government.”
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Carson’s grasp of the founding era has proven weak in the past. Earlier this month he asserted that “every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience,” an outlandish claim considering that all the members of the Continental Congress, which approved the Declaration, had been elected by Colonial assemblies and that the primary author of the document, Thomas Jefferson, was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, John Adams to the Massachusetts Assembly, Ben Franklin to the Pennsylvania Assembly and Roger Sherman to the Connecticut General Assembly. The Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler counted 27 signers of the 51 who had at least some elected office experience.
