This weekend’s late-night spending vote in Congress seems like another in an endless series of sequels to a bad suspense movie. Just at the brink of “disaster,” just before the stroke of midnight, Congress pulls off a miracle and passes an omnibus bill to save us from a “government shutdown!”

The heroes have saved the day!

According to “Britannica,” multiculturalism is “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgment of their differences within a dominant political culture. See this.

The idea that the federal Bill of Rights is the only thing standing between freedom and tyranny in America is deeply ingrained in the American mind. It is ubiquitous in our speech, for instance, as can be seen in how we use phrases like “my Second Amendment rights” or “I want to plead the Fifth [Amendment].” It is also assumed that unless the federal Supreme Court has intervened to declare that a legal right exists, then the right is virtually non-existent within the American legal system.

In the early evening of October 8, 1882, one of the richest men in the world was about to eat his supper in his private dining car. The train to which he was attached had just arrived in Chicago from Michigan City, Indiana, but before he could pick up his fork, a brash young reporter, freelancer Clarence Dresser, burst into his car asking for an interview. He wanted to know the railroad’s guidelines for establishing freight rates.

“I’ll talk to you after supper,” William Henry Vanderbilt told him.