"a basic tenant" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to a legal tenant or a set of fundamental rules which you expect a group of people to follow, for example: “The basic tenant of the organization is to put customers first.”.
Since the discovery of Hawking radiation, physicists have thought that radiation would be emitted randomly, thus destroying any information encoded in anything that had fallen into the black hole which, perplexingly, would violate a basic tenant of quantum mechanics.
Our relationship with General McCaffrey is based on trust, a basic tenant of journalism.
Propaganda is a basic tenant of conversionism, something the evangelical Alphas are pretty big on.
Owning this album became just a basic tenant of being alive, like air or water or eating your feelings when you're sad.
Also, I have to love the malapropism in Gollust's email, where "trust" is said to be "a basic tenant of journalism".
If this had been a basic tenant of our foreign policy, we wouldn't have supported the forces in Afghanistan that gave birth to the Taliban.
We believe that justice is a basic theological tenant and as such it demands that communal damage be answered with communal repair.
The basic tenant of this modified hypothesis is that an intermediate misfolded form of Abeta, neither a soluble monomer nor a mature aggregated polymer but an oligomeric species, triggers a complex pathological cascade leading to neurodegeneration (Barghorn et al. 2005; Kokubo et al. 2005).
Another basic tenant of jokes in the office: they should never belittle an underling.
Just hours before the Netflix story broke, Comcast was accused of violating another basic tenant of the open Internet and the free market.
This suggests that the social vulnerability index has potentially wide applicability: the constituent variables can differ in different settings as long as the basic tenant of including multiple social factors relating to important broad domains is met.
