...you become a dope; that is unless you already were one.

Uninformed right wing politicians ( Is there any other kind?) love to quote our founding fathers in order to defend their lousy ideas.

The latest such gaffe happened on Fox & Friends on Thursday. In the course of a discussion about Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy's bill to revamp the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, Vice President Mike Pence backed up his argument with these words: "Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Government that governs least governs best.’" Except Thomas Jefferson didn't actually say that.

The quote is commonly associated with the small federal government ideology espoused by Jefferson's political party, the Democratic-Republicans. But, while the phrase has been found in Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience," law professor Eugene Volokh says that Thoreau was not quoting Jefferson. Instead, he was quoting a man named John O'Sullivan — also the coiner of the term "Manifest Destiny" — who used it in the first 1837 issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review.