Manatee County RLC 5th Annual Constitution Day Breakfast

September 27th, 2025, 930am-12 noon for the Manatee County RLC 5th Annual Constitution Day Breakfast!

This will truly be an educational event. There will be two panel discussions. First, we will have what is sure to be an enlightening discussion with Dr. Jason Jewell, Chief Academic Officer and Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives of the State University System of Florida. Prior to that, he taught for more than 20 years at Faulkner University, where he chaired the Department of Humanities and directed the Center for Great Books and Human Flourishing. He serves on the governing boards of the Philadelphia Society and Ivy Classical Academy and the advisory board of the Ciceronian Society. This panel will focus on the history of constitutions dating all the way back to Greco-Roman times and then showing how our Founding Fathers used those forms of government, plus other historical examples, to produce the recipe for our great American Constitution.

The second panel will consist Richard Tatem, Manatee County School Board Member leading a discussion with Berny Jacques, Member of the Florida House, and Manatee County Commissioner Tal Saddique. The three of us will discuss the concept of “Subsidiarity“: “a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as ‘the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.'” The conversation will focus on how federal and state government overreach impinges on good local governance.