There's a stunning unreality to the right-wing attack on John Boehner as insufficiently conservative.

As we witness yet again the brutal and bloody consequences of religious intolerance in the form of ISIS, we have a majority of Republicans pining for a Christian America. Proponents of converting the United States into a theocracy do not see the terrible parallel between religious excess in the Middle East and here at home.

From the very beginning, the fabric of this country was woven with the threads of fear and division. In creating "a more perfect Union," as the preamble reads, we Americans still have a long way to go. The end of the path is not yet in sight.

If Alexander Hamilton were here, he would tell us that this is the way it should be. The Constitution is designed to prevent the people from having their way. It is a fundamentally undemocratic document designed to prevent change.

In its structure of combining selection and election, the emergent Hong Kong system is a kind of middle way between democratic consent and the idea of meritocratic guidance. In fact, the mechanism proposed to choose a chief executive is not so different from the Electoral College designed by American democracy's Founding Fathers. The idea, spelled out in Federalist Paper #68, was to "refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens." But there needs to be a proper balance not yet achieved in Hong Kong.

The following questions were taken from the list of 100 civics questions. Admittedly, these are some of the harder ones. Could you pass?