“Our new constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency", Benjamin Franklin, who hosted the constitutional convention, wrote two years later.
"But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
Quite what Franklin and his contemporaries would have made of modern day US politics is anyone’s guess.
Given that they served alongside Alexander Hamilton, who prior to being killed in a duel with the vice-president had been involved in a high-profile sex and bribery scandal, maybe they would have barely blinked at Republican nominee Donald Trump defending himself against allegations from Democratic Party President Joe Biden that he had the morals of an alley cat and had slept with a porn star, levelled during Friday’s first presidential debate.
However, that tawdry moment, in a debate replete with them, was not the biggest sensation of the event.
Nor was the constant and consistent lying and refusal to answer even basic questions by Mr Trump — by now, sadly, most are inured to his capricious relationship with coherence and candour.
Instead, it was President Biden’s unco-ordinated, incoherent statement about the national debt which will dominate post-debate debate.
"Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with – look, if – we finally beat Medicare", looks innocent, if inarticulate, on the printed page.
But on live television, the stammering President’s vacant stare as he mentally stumbled while looking desperately for the point he was trying to make, spoke volumes.
At that moment President Biden lost the debate, and possibly all hope of a return to the Oval Office following the November election.
But what Mr Trump did present was vitality and energy. While his ramblings may be even less comprehensible than those of the President, they at least occasionally bore some recognisable features of complete sentences.
This was a debate that was expected to be about death and taxes — abortion rights and the state of the economy specifically. But instead it was dominated by whether 81-year-old Joe Biden will be fit for office if re-elected.
A televised debate is a limited sample for voters to judge on, but it will be far from the most stressful situation the next President of the United States will have to face. President Biden will face questions about whether he can withstand the rigours demanded of him in what is a 24/7 role for the rest of the campaign, although many will have already made their mind up.
The Democratic Party now faces an awful dilemma: whether or not to replace the President as its nominee at this late hour.
They do have an opportunity: the convention to ratify him as nominee is yet to be held, but the decision to replace him comes with many ramifications.
Even though there were few viable alternatives, the President did win the candidacy through a democratic primary process, and replacing him now would be a few overturning the votes of millions.
It would also raise the spectre of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution: if the President is not fit to run again, is he indeed fit to still be in office?
Replacing the President as nominee would have all the hallmarks of desperation, but for millions terrified of what another four years of Donald Trump, aged 78, as president might bring, desperate times have already called for desperate measures.
In one of President Biden’s better moments in the debate, he noted that a recent survey of academics rated Mr Trump as the worst president of the 46 men who have held the office.
President Biden ranked 14th, elevated by comparison to the preceding president.
But he now faces arguably the most critical decision in a presidency full of trials and travails: whether he should seek four more years, or not.
And there is nothing certain about how that decision, be it yes or no, will play out.
