In the years and months leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, townhall meetings took place in homes, churches, and barns as people debated what course America should take. As were the meetings of the First and Second Continental Congresses, those discussions were often loud and bitter. They were debating the most fundamental issues that affect people’s everyday lives--what kind of government they would have and how responsive it would be to the people.

Ever since, townhall-style discussions have been an honored American tradition, acted out everyday in home-owner and parent-teacher association meetings, in townhalls held by candidates for office, and by those held by elected representatives. They're where citizens can meet face-to-face with those in whom they have entrusted responsibility and express their opinions and complaints in front of their fellow citizens. It’s what America is all about--representative government listening to the represented.

What has Americans riled up this summer is what got them riled up 235 years ago. They're concerned about what kind of government they have and how responsive it is to their concerns. Large numbers of people, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, speaking out at townhall meetings, want a government that spends their tax dollars responsibly and that isn’t intimately involved in every aspect of their lives, particularly their healthcare. They believe President Obama and Democrats in Congress are squandering their money and moving too fast to enact legislation that will “transform America” in ways they don’t want it transformed.

It is the extent to which the federal government has become involved in the everyday lives of Americans that would blow our reincarnated founding-fathers minds. Once someone sat down with them and explained everything that’s happened since their time, perhaps they might grudgingly accept some of government's encroachments. I doubt, however, they would approve of the trend.

Given time to gather their wits and read the thousand-page-plus healthcare reform bill before the House, I have no doubt they would join others at the meeting shouting “read the bill”; and they wouldn’t need Republican political operatives or insurance-company lobbyists to put them up to it. They would see the bill for what it is--a quantum leap in government social engineering that will cost trillions and won't produce better healthcare.

The founding fathers, in the Constitution of the United States of America, gave us limited and balanced federal government, not only because they distrusted strong central government, like the one they were rebelling against, but because they understood it's limits. They knew what federal government couldn't do well, and they feared one side of the political spectrum with too much power lording its beliefs and values over the other.

The average American, like the majority of people participating in townhall meetings, isn’t a constitutional scholar. Nor does he or she understand all the nuances and intricacies of energy or healthcare reform legislation before Congress. They do understand, however, the importance of reading and fully understanding bills with such far-reaching implications as those now under consideration before voting on them.

While most members of Congress haven't read them, many voters have. They're showing up at townhall meetings with copies in brown-paper bags or held together with ribbon. They may not completely understand them, legislative language often is difficult to read and understand, but they don’t like what they do understand. Moreover they don’t like getting the bum's rush.

Why the initial reaction of Democratic strategists in the White House and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was to behave like Tories and label those who disagree with them as a managed mob, organized by the healthcare insurance industry, is puzzling. Perhaps they just want to change the subject and get people and the media talking about anything but the substance of their proposals. Nevertheless, it hasn’t advanced the Democrats’ plans to reform healthcare and it hasn’t helped President Obama’s poll numbers.

Certainly many who oppose Democratic healthcare reform have been encouraged to show up at townhalls and protest. That, too, is an American tradition, one practiced by Barack Obama when he was a community organizer. Indeed people on the Democratic left are masters of the practice. Few anti-war demonstrations over the past 40 years or protests of Republican presidents’ policies haven’t been organized by political operatives.

This argument misses the point. It’s not who encouraged people to attend townhall meetings--I encourage everyone who reads this column to attend one--or whose car or bus they ride in to get there. It’s why people are protesting that’s important. People are protesting at Democratic senators and representatives townhall meetings because they're angry and fearful and because they want the people who represent them in Washington, DC, to hear and act on what they have to say. Their elected representatives and the White House would do well to listen to them and not attempt to demonize them. King George made that mistake, and it didn't serve him well.