Only 12 years into our Republic, America had reached a major constitutional crisis. The election of 1800 was one of the most divisive in our history. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr both ran on the newly formed Democratic-Republican ticket. When the electors met in December, they were given two votes: the winner would become president, and the second-highest, vice president. The Democratic-Republicans concocted a plan to make Jefferson president by having an elector withhold a vote, but at the last moment, the vote was deadlocked at 73 electoral votes. This threw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Federalists, having suffered the rejection of John Adams, chose chaos. Through 35 ballots, the House deadlocked between Jefferson and Burr until Alexander Hamilton convinced several Federalists to change their votes to Jefferson on the 36th ballot. The election, sometimes called the Revolution of 1800, more closely resembled a modern election than one in the 19th century.

The election had been a bitter political struggle fought by two competing parties for the first time in our history. In the years leading up to the election, Jefferson built Republican opposition to President John Adams and the Federalists. Republicans thought the Federalists pushed the federal government too far, through taxation and the Alien and Sedition Acts, while Federalists saw Jefferson and his movement as a threat to the federal government. When the House finally chose Jefferson, we witnessed the first transfer of power in our nation’s history.

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When Jefferson took his oath on 4 March 1801, he clearly saw the deep political rifts. He had been elected to bring change to government and intended to follow that mandate. Yet his First Inaugural spent little time celebrating victory. Instead, he described our country as emerging from a “contest of opinion” settled through the Constitution.

Jefferson did not use his inaugural to relitigate the campaign or humiliate the Federalists. He asked Americans to distinguish political disagreement from something more fundamental. “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” he told them. They had “called by different names brethren of the same principle.” Then came the line that defined the speech: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Though Jefferson had won a bitter election, he began his presidency by reminding his fellow partisans that their opponents were still loyal citizens.

Jefferson won a campaign in which Federalists portrayed him as a danger to the country, while his own party labeled the Adams administration a threat to liberty. of abusing federal power. The Federalists in the House then spent 35 ballots trying to keep him from the presidency. His speech could have easily reflected bitterness as he began his administration, but he chose honor instead.

Jefferson acknowledged how uncertain his own judgment could be. “I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment,” he told the country. “When right, I shall often be thought wrong.” Winning the election did not end every argument over his ideas or character. He expected those disagreements to continue while he was in office and allowed for the possibility that his critics would sometimes have a point.

Unthinkable in our modern politics, that humility shaped the way he spoke about his political opponents. Jefferson would lead his party, but he also aimed to persuade others “by doing them all the good in my power.” Rather than expecting them to yield to his views as the victor, he sought to earn it through the way he governed.

Jefferson was unquestionably a Democratic-Republican. After years of opposing Federalist policies, he had no intention of abandoning his work on assuming the presidency. The Federalists could and would likely continue to oppose him and his policies. What changed on 4 March was that their well-being, by his election, had become part of his duty.

Jefferson offered a unique proposition to the American people in the face of such deep divisions. He was not challenging the losers to unite around him because he won. Instead, he was publicly challenging himself to govern people who might not agree with him and, in fact, viewed his policies as dangerous.

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More than 200 years later, we have a full grasp of Jefferson’s actions versus his deeds. He was the leading voice of freedom, while personally owning slaves. The political system he led excluded much of the population from choosing its government. His view of who enjoyed full citizenship was far narrower than the lofty language he used in his inaugural.

Those contradictions not only defined Jefferson’s presidency in his lifetime, but remain attached to his legacy today. But the words were not limited by the man; instead, they became ideals embraced for the causes of equality, justice, and freedom.

Nothing in Jefferson’s election or his inaugural ended the new party system. The Federalists continued to oppose his administration, and Jefferson continued to pursue the changes that brought him to office. Neither side surrendered its principles simply because the transfer of power was complete.

That makes Jefferson’s promise to his opponents more striking. He had spent years trying to defeat the Federalists and had just survived their effort to deny him the presidency. Yet once he held the office, he did not ask them to submit to the victor. He said he would try to earn their confidence “by doing them all the good in my power.” Jefferson had won the election. He chose to let his conduct in office determine what kind of victory it would be.

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On September 17, 1787, 39 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the new U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia. Their work was only the beginning. Nine states still needed to ratify it, sparking another debate over the government the framers had proposed.

More than 150 years later, Congress enacted “I Am an American Day” to celebrate American citizenship. In 1952, the holiday moved to September 17th, the date the Constitution was signed, and renamed Citizenship Day. In 2004, Congress changed the name to both Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. So on this historic day, it seems like a good excuse to spend a few minutes with the document that’s governed us since 1789. Take notes; there will be a quiz at the end.

Of course, most of our attention is focused on the Constitution that we have: seven articles and 27 amendments accumulated over more than two hundred years. But another history of the Constitution exists just off the main text: amendments that never quite made it. Well, and one that did two centuries later.

In 1982, Gregory Watson was a student at the University of Texas when he stumbled across a proposal that Congress had submitted to the states along with the Bill of Rights in 1789. It stated that any future changes to the pay of members of Congress would not go into effect until after the next election to a new House of Representatives. The amendment failed to receive the necessary ratifications and fell out of sight until Watson noticed that Congress had not set a deadline for it. Watson argued in a class paper that the amendment was still valid for ratification. His professor gave him a C.

Watson appealed the grade but had no success. So he decided to make his case elsewhere. He began a campaign writing to state legislators around the country, with Maine ratifying the amendment in 1983. By May 1992, enough states ratified the amendment to add it to the Constitution. More than 202 years after Congress first proposed it, Article the Second of the original Bill of Rights became the 27th Amendment, the most recent to be added.

This story has a nice postscript. In 2017, the University of Texas changed Watson's grade from a C to an A. The amendment took 203 years to get ratified. The grade change only took 35.

If an amendment could sit in constitutional limbo for two centuries and still make it, what else is out there? Quite a lot, as it happens. Congress has proposed 33 amendments since 1789, 27 of which were ratified and 6 of which were not. Article V of the Constitution calls for two-thirds approval from both the House and Senate to propose an amendment, and three-fourths approval from the states to ratify it. Congress may attach a deadline, although 4 of the 6 non-adopted amendments have no deadline, and one that expired is still contested today.

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The Almost First Amendment

The Bill of Rights didn't originally have 10 amendments. In September 1789, Congress sent 12 amendments to the states, with what is now the First Amendment originally being Article the Third.

Article the First dealt with the size of the House of Representatives, and the concern behind it was more important than the dry wording might suggest. The country's population was growing, and Madison worried that if the House did not grow with the times, it would become increasingly removed from the people it was supposed to represent. He had heard the same concern during the state ratification debates and later called this section of the Constitution "defective, though not dangerous."

The amendment sought to link the size of the House to the population. It established a ratio of roughly one representative for every 30,000 citizens, but as the House grew, the ratio would change, eventually reaching one representative per 50,000 citizens.

In modern terms, that ratio would create a U.S. House of 6,850 members representing a national population of roughly 343 million. Some might argue it would be a far worse cast of characters than we have today.

The amendment came close to ratification before falling short. Article the Second, which dealt with congressional pay, eventually re-emerged as the 27th Amendment. Article the Third became our First Amendment.

Congress stopped allowing the House to grow with the population and fixed its voting size at 435 members. So while Article the First never made its way into the Constitution, the question of representation remains. Today, each House district contains, on average, 761,000 citizens, probably too large to be the voice of the people.

The Phantom 13th Amendment

By 1810, the United States was growing increasingly uncomfortable with European influence. The Constitution already prohibited the federal government from granting titles of nobility and limited federal officeholders from accepting certain benefits from foreign powers without Congress's consent.

Senator Philip Reed of Maryland, a proud son of my native Eastern Shore, wanted to expand the limitation. His amendment would apply to every American citizen and carried serious consequences: anyone who accepted a title or other benefit from a foreign power without Congress's permission would have their citizenship revoked and be disqualified from holding public office.

The states couldn't muster enough ratifications, but printers gave the states a constitutional mystery. The proposal showed up in several printings of the Constitution over the next century as if it had been adopted. In 1817, copies printed for members of Congress included it as the 13th Amendment, and the confusion was serious enough that the U.S. House asked President James Monroe to determine if it had been ratified.

As we know now, it had not. Speculation about a suppressed or "missing" 13th Amendment keeps popping up, but the real mystery is that another proposed 13th Amendment just wasn't an amendment. But it makes for a great constitutional conspiracy theory.

The Other (Almost) 13th Amendment

The next near-miss is a bit less fanciful. By winter 1860-61, Abraham Lincoln had been elected president, Southern states were seceding, and Congress was looking for something it could do to hold the Union together. Ohio Representative Thomas Corwin offered one last-ditch effort.

The Corwin Amendment would have prohibited any future constitutional amendments from giving Congress the power to abolish or interfere with slavery in any state. The amendment squeaked through the House with barely enough votes to meet the two-thirds threshold and won ratification in the Senate by the same narrow margin. President James Buchanan signed it just before leaving office, even though presidents have no role in approving amendments.

Lincoln would be sworn in as president just two days later. In his first inaugural address, he said he believed the Constitution already implied such a limitation on federal power and that he had "no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." The Corwin Amendment did not preserve the Union and was not ratified. By summer, 11 states had seceded, and the Civil War had begun.

Four years later, at Lincoln's urging, Congress sent the states a different proposed 13th Amendment, and this one abolished slavery. In just four years, America had gone from contemplating a 13th Amendment designed to make slavery off-limits to federal constitutional amendment to ratifying one that outlawed slavery in the United States.

Overtaken by History

By the early 20th century, photographs of child labor had helped make the issue of child labor a national concern. Lewis Hine was particularly famous for capturing images of children working in factories and other industrial settings, giving Americans an image of childhood that clashed with the comfortable picture of family life they wanted to believe in.

Congress tried to act in 1916 with the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act. Rather than regulating factories directly, Congress used the Interstate Commerce Clause to prohibit the shipment of goods produced under certain child-labor conditions. The Supreme Court struck it down two years later in Hammer v. Dagenhart, ruling that Congress could regulate interstate commerce but not control local manufacturing conditions that belonged to the states.

Congress tried another route by imposing a tax on businesses using child labor. The Supreme Court rejected that approach too in 1922.

With ordinary legislation blocked twice, Congress turned its attention to the Constitution. The Child Labor Amendment of 1924 would explicitly grant the federal government the power to “limit, regulate, and prohibit” the labor of anyone under 18. Ratification stalled as opponents argued it attacked states’ rights, and the amendment received only 28 ratifications, short of the required number.

Then the constitutional obstacle that had produced the amendment disappeared. Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, again regulating labor conditions connected to interstate commerce. When the law reached the Supreme Court in United States v. Darby in 1941, the Court upheld it and expressly overruled Hammer v. Dagenhart. Congress had the commerce power after all.

The Child Labor Amendment never became part of the Constitution because the country reached much the same destination without it. Because Congress gave the proposal no deadline, it is technically still pending.

The ERA After the Deadline

The Equal Rights Amendment had been around for nearly a half-century when Congress finally approved it. One of the leaders of the women's suffrage movement, Alice Paul, proposed an equal rights amendment in 1923, just three years after women won the constitutional right to vote.

Versions of the amendment made it to Congress over the decades but never passed. In 1970, after it became bogged down in committee again, Michigan Rep. Martha Griffiths used a discharge petition to get it on the House floor. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it to the states, giving them seven years to ratify it.

States ratified it quickly: Hawaii did so within hours of the amendment's approval, and 21 other states ratified that year. Then momentum slowed, and by the 1979 deadline the amendment had only 35 states, three short of the 38 needed to ratify it. Congress extended the deadline to 1982, but no other states ratified.

Fast-forward to decades later: Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020. If those votes count, the ERA has the 38 states needed for ratification, although several earlier states have claimed the right to withdraw their ratifications.

Small side note: South Carolina has legislation pending to ratify, including S. 48, sponsored by Senator Tom Davis, who served as Chief of Staff before me in Governor Sanford’s office.

The National Archives has said it cannot certify the ERA under existing law because congressional deadlines have expired. The amendment is not part of the Constitution, but the fight over whether the ERA's story is finished has proven much tougher to resolve.

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Tick Tock, D.C.

Washington, D.C., has been an unusual constitutional case almost from the beginning. Before the federal government took control of the District in 1801, residents there had voted as residents of Maryland or Virginia. Once Congress assumed exclusive authority over the new federal district, residents lost voting representation in Congress.

That arrangement lasted for generations. The 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961, finally allowed District residents to vote for president. A nonvoting delegate returned to the House in the 1970s, and home rule gave residents an elected mayor and city council. But D.C. still had no voting members of Congress, even though its residents paid federal taxes like everyone else.

In 1978, Congress proposed closing that gap. The amendment would not have made the District a state, but it would have given it congressional representation, presidential elections, and participation in the constitutional amendment process, so D.C. would largely have been treated like one. Because that arrangement would have covered presidential elections, the separate 23rd Amendment would eventually have been repealed.

The proposal barely cleared Congress. The House passed it 289 to 127, while the Senate approved it 67 to 32, only one vote more than the two-thirds required. Supporters could point to an awkward fact behind the old complaint about taxation without representation: District residents were paying federal income taxes while having no voting voice in the Congress that imposed them. In fact, the District of Columbia's license plate today includes some variation of “Taxation without Representation.”

Congress gave the states seven years to decide. When the deadline arrived in 1985, only 16 states had ratified the amendment, far short of the 38 it needed. No Gregory Watson comeback was available this time because Congress had put a clock on the process, and the clock had run out.

A Constitution Designed to Change

The six amendments that failed tell us something the 27 that succeeded cannot. They show constitutional change while it is still uncertain, when Americans are arguing not only about what the Constitution means but what they want it to become.

George Washington understood before ratification was complete that the document would need room to change. He admitted its imperfections and rejected the idea that his generation possessed some wisdom unavailable to those who would follow. Future Americans would have experience on their side, he wrote, and the Constitution left a “Constitutional door” open for whatever changes they might find necessary.

“I do not conceive that we are more inspired,” Washington wrote, “than those who will come after us.”

Americans have walked through that door 27 times, while six other proposals made it as far as Congress and stopped somewhere along the way. Constitution Day seems like a good excuse to spend a little time with both groups. The Constitution is shorter than most people remember and, once you start tugging at threads like these, considerably more interesting.

If we are going to keep arguing about what it says, we might as well read it. And no quiz after all. I was bluffing. But there is enough for a Jeopardy category or a fun story at your next party.

Happy Constitution Day!

Read More: U.S. Constitution (National Archives)

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Presidents can do a lot on “day one,” ranging from issuing executive orders to making appointments, changing priorities, and reversing decisions made by their predecessors. The fiction is that the keys are already in the Oval Office ignition and we can go from zero to change in 100 days. Some truly believe the border will be fixed, regulations gone, and wars ended on “day one.” No Congress required.

“Day one” isn’t just about speed of action. It suggests that the last election settles everything. Candidates create those expectations because, with each passing cycle, the voters increasingly expect immediate action. We elect a president and then demand almost immediate transformation. Elections change who occupies the office, but that office does not turn the country on a dime.

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The People, Not the Party

In Federalist No. 39, James Madison answered what form of government the Constitutional Convention created. A republic, he wrote, derives its authority “directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.” His argument was radical in its simplicity: legitimate power came from the people. Still not far removed from the monarchy, the Framers refused to concentrate power in one institution or one person.

Instead, they built a government where interests converged through different institutions, none of which could speak for the country alone. They intentionally divided power, but did not disconnect it. Those separate entities had to work with one another for government to function, requiring slow consensus rather than immediate national referendums.

At the same time, winning an election does not make any institution the property of the party that won it. A president is chosen for the whole nation, including the millions who voted for the opposition. This idea of representative government carries on: the people elect leaders to govern collectively, not selectively. That is why the oath of office requires loyalty to the Constitution, not to the party that helped put you there.

“The People Have Spoken”

The tired electoral cliché, “the people have spoken,” has the benefit of sounding true enough. This is how political leaders want us to think: we’ve received a mandate and debate is over. Meanwhile, our history has never provided a single decisive election to end the debate. That idea is the very basis of The Unfinished Republic: that self-government is in perpetual motion. Every election begins with a government already in motion, shaped by the choices of the generations before it. Even the Constitution, amended 27 times, carries with it the friction of that ongoing debate. An election can shift the direction of our country, sometimes even dramatically, but it does not completely erase the past or settle the future.

Despite the wishes of some, Americans clearly do not speak with one voice when it comes to voting. A presidential election may have one outcome, but the voters divide power in other ways, whether in Congress or state governments. Tens of millions can vote for the losing candidate, but remain every bit as American when they wake up the next morning. Election night chooses a candidate and a direction, but requires everyone to remain represented and engaged.

Though misunderstood, selecting our president shows how deeply that idea was built into the system. The Framers did not intend for us to simply hand the office to the candidate who received the most votes. Instead, they created the Electoral College, a group of electors representing each state based on the combined state representation in Congress. A candidate has to receive a majority of those votes or the election moves to the U.S. House of Representatives, with each state delegation voting as a single vote. The system blended popular choice with the role of the states rather than treating the country as a single national electorate. Madison, in short, described presidential power as coming from “a very compound source.”

Modern political sentiment increasingly characterizes elections as carrying more weight than they can actually bear. The political opposition is more commonly defined as dangerous rather than just wrong. We’re approaching a dangerous point where the opposition party has transformed from rival to existential threat to our safety and security. Political rhetoric is an addiction that requires a higher and higher dose to achieve the same effect.

Americans today want elections to end debates that have carried on for generations, and when they don’t, they treat their very existence as proof the system is broken. This sentiment proves a nation increasingly dependent on and expectant of shortcuts, as though a five-minute YouTube video will teach all of us how to solve complex problems. Instead, each election shapes the direction of a political continuum that the next electorate will judge accordingly.

It is both a necessity and a frustration of self-government that no instant solutions exist. Almost as soon as the votes are counted in one election, the debate begins again. Our republic depends on citizens willing and able to challenge our government and demand that leaders always answer to them. Political power grows not by eliminating opposition but by persuading it.

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The Value of Friction

Madison understood that human nature fostered debate. In Federalist No. 10, he wrote faction was “sown in the nature of man.” Liberty allows debate and dissent so that anyone can be heard. Madison understood that the only way to destroy factions was to destroy liberty.

To prevent debate from being uncontrolled noise, we need representatives in various forms to “refine and enlarge” public opinion. To show how Congress achieved this, the old saying is, “the House poured the tea, the Senate let it cool.” In short, the People’s House was there to react quickly to public reaction, and the Senate deliberated it. Although the filibuster is not a constitutional tool, it reinforces the notion by forcing a majority to work with a substantial minority before acting. Eliminating it would effectively make the Senate another center of political id.

Persuasion takes time, and sometimes that is the point. Presidents should have to persuade the people and ultimately, Congress to enact change. Too often, a president pursues a policy aimed squarely at his political base while members of his own party in Congress refuse to stand in the way. Voters encourage this fear by treating any opposition as virtually criminal obstruction rather than deliberating the nuances of an issue. Even still, presidents have increasingly used extra-constitutional Executive Orders because even waiting for Congress to act is viewed as weakness.

Elections were never intended to marginalize voters who did not support the winners. Americans increasingly look to government entities to shield themselves and others from debate, building a government-sanctioned echo chamber. The warning is simple: a majority willing to silence the opposition today should remember how quickly power can reverse. After the next election, you may be the one begging to be heard.

But the balance is freedom to speak, not freedom to stop. The Framers rejected the Articles of Confederation, which paralyzed our new nation by demanding too much agreement. In Federalist 22, Hamilton warned that when a minority can overrule the majority, government can be kept “in a state of inaction,” weakened when action is most needed. He warned that decisions should come only after the “regular deliberations” of the whole body.

Hamilton warned against allowing a minority to stop the government from acting. The Constitution had to allow for opposition to prevent the oppression of the majority, but not replace it with the oppression of the minority. The majority must be able to govern, but it should have to hear the people it defeated along the way.

Incomplete Victory

Our impatient republic was not created by politicians alone. Over time, voters have incentivized it. Candidates quickly learn that promises to fight are easier than acknowledging that complex issues require patience and persuasion. So a vicious cycle of instant gratification feeds itself. The result is a self-government failure: speed has become a substitute for constitutional restraint.

This flawed expectation cuts across party lines. In July 2026, Pew found that a majority of voters in both parties prefer congressional candidates who will “fight hard” for partisan policies “even if it makes it harder to get things done.” So we increasingly reward political leaders for not compromising, then wonder why our institutions cannot govern effectively.

Politicians are like feral animals, responding to what keeps them alive politically. So they layer intellectual dishonesty to paper over their own failures. When campaign promises don’t come at lightning speed, they blame an imagined corrupted system rather than admitting our system requires them to earn outcomes. Voters get more impatient, and politicians get more creative, all at the expense of our constitutional republic. So where does that leave us? Applying the rules selectively. The Constitution is easy to defend when it slows down “the other side” but harder to defend in the face of “our guy.”

What worries me is that this habit is becoming more and more dangerous because power flows like water, always looking for space to fill. A shortcut lives long after the politician who cut it, and is deposited into the hands of someone else who will stretch it again. The constitutional limits that frustrate quick political victories also remind us that those victories are temporary.

Self-government requires more than “winning” because the constitution creates a deadline to those wins. We have to balance progress, liberty, and respect to maintain a republic. So the burden is not simply on prevailing, but rather on the work you do after the victory. Otherwise, the only progress is the erosion of liberty and respect. And we’ve seen enough progress on that already.

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It’s 7:45 p.m., and roughly 150 members of Congress have convened on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. First, they observe a moment of silence in a bipartisan gesture. Then, spontaneously, they sing “God Bless America,” an act of defiance in the face of sheer terror. What would bring together a bipartisan group of Congress in this patriotic moment? It was the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.

It started like any other day. Working on Capitol Hill meant long, unpredictable days. The to-do list would probably become irrelevant by 10 a.m., replaced by another. That was before social media and tireless cable news coverage brought you the latest in real time.

That morning, we held a subcommittee hearing on Internet Tax Fairness, a critical consumer issue with a looming deadline, as a congressional moratorium was set to expire in six weeks, and Congress had yet to resolve it. I worked for the Subcommittee Chairman, Representative Bob Barr, representing northwest Georgia in the then-7th Congressional District.

We were together doing last-minute preparation when the news broke just before 9 a.m. that a plane (American Flight 11) struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. We watched, believing some terrible accident had occurred, unaware of the tragedy unfolding that day. We started the hearing about 15 minutes late after the second plane (United Flight 175) hit the South Tower, and Congressman Barr asked for a moment of silence for those affected by the tragedy.

By 9:37 a.m., a third plane (American Flight 77) crashed into the Pentagon, killing all the passengers on board and 125 military and civilian personnel, including a former Hill colleague I’d seen just the week before. At 9:45 a.m., Capitol Police ordered the evacuation of the Capitol and office complexes. We ended the hearing abruptly and helped everyone exit the hearing room. Congressman Barr insisted on returning to his office but told us to evacuate safely.

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One of the passengers on Flight 77 was Barbara Olson, whom I had met years earlier when she was chief investigative counsel for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. I was barely out of college and still a young idealist on Capitol Hill. The first time we met, she called me a dumbass. By the end of the meeting, she had apparently decided I was a dumbass worth fixing. Barbara scared me a little, challenged me a lot, and taught me how to really dig into an investigation. The week before 9/11, I had dinner with Barbara and her husband, Ted. I remember leaving that dinner thinking things were going very well for them. A week later, she was gone.

Thousands of people poured into the streets from the House office buildings, unsure where to go or what to do. Amid the crowd, I found several staff members and directed them to meet at the corner of First and C Streets. One staffer had just relocated from Georgia and started the day before, totally lost. When I guided her to our meeting place, the South Tower had already collapsed. Flight 93 had crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes away from its likely intended target, the U.S. Capitol. I often marvel at the bravery of the men and women on that flight who took matters into their own hands and sacrificed their lives for the safety of thousands, including me, in the U.S. Capitol complex.

When the North Tower fell at roughly 10:28 a.m. that morning, every restaurant and bar nearby was full of displaced congressional employees watching television coverage. In Washington, D.C., cell phone signals were jammed, making it impossible to make a call, so the line for the available payphones was impossibly long.

I sent our staff to the nearby apartment of our staff scheduler to set up temporary operations, which would be further away from the danger. While I watched the smoke on the horizon from the Pentagon, rumors were rampant on the streets: reports of a car bombing at the State Department, other planes still in the air, and heading for the Capitol. Word was spreading about the desperate acts of those still trapped in the towers before the collapse. In short, it was chaos.

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Suddenly, my phone vibrated, and I saw 35 phone messages from my wife and other family members. I tried to call my wife, but the cell signal was still jammed. One tiny bit of fortune: Congressman Barr insisted that the senior staff members get a BlackBerry phone. I could email my family to let them know I was safe and would call when I could. Listening later, I could hear my wife’s voice get more frantic with each unanswered call.

Over the next few hours, we tried to gather news, stay connected to staff and the Congressman, and plan next steps. We were allowed back into our offices late afternoon and handled press and constituent calls. As the sun was setting in Washington, members of Congress gathered on the U.S. Capitol steps to honor those who had lost their lives and show unity. To this day, 9/11 is through the lens of the events I witnessed in Washington that day and not through the television coverage that so many people remember.

My story pales in comparison to those who died on the planes, in the towers of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, or who bravely went toward the crisis while the rest of us were evacuating. The families of nearly 3,000 dead and 25,000 injured have spent years processing their loss, even to this very day.

For the rest of us, we were unwilling witnesses to one of the most horrific tragedies in recent U.S. history. Everyone knows their 9/11 story, often with the same sense of danger as those in New York or Washington. In short, it was a universally shared experience. Part of that experience is reliving the fear and uncertainty of that day as the facade of security fell around us.

In the meantime, take today to remember those who perished and the families they left behind. We should also remember the brave men and women who risked their lives to help others reach safety. If we want to honor them, we should reject fear and choose resolve instead.

Twenty-five years later, that may be one of the clearest lessons September 11 still offers us. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is what we choose to do despite it. Call me a foolish optimist, but I still believe we are capable of that.

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9/11 Resources

For readers who want to learn more, these resources preserve the history, voices, and records of September 11.

• National September 11 Memorial & Museum: Exhibits, oral histories, collections, timelines, and educational resources.

• The 9/11 Commission Report: The official report examining the attacks, the events that led to them, and the government response.

• September 11 Digital Archive: A large collection of firsthand accounts, emails, photographs, audio, video, and other records from 9/11 and its aftermath.

• Flight 93 National Memorial: The story of the passengers and crew of United Flight 93 and the crash site near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

• National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial: The story of American Airlines Flight 77, the attack on the Pentagon, and the 184 people who were killed there and aboard the aircraft.

• National Archives: 9/11 FAA Records: FAA records, audio, and other material related to the four hijacked flights, including American Airlines Flight 77.

There is an old joke about a New Yorker walking through a small town in Georgia when he sees a dog attacking a young boy. He jumps into action, killing the dog while saving the child. A reporter, who saw the whole thing, congratulates him and proposes the headline: “Local Man Saves Child by Killing Vicious Animal.” When the man explains that he is not a local, the reporter changes the headline to “Georgia Man Saves Child by Killing Dog.” Then he learns the man is from New York, and the headline changes again: “Yankee Kills Family Pet.”

The joke works because the event never changes. The child remains unharmed. The dog remains dead. The man still a hero. Only his origin story changes, and the judgment changes with it.

Congress shares that headline problem. Democrats retained control of the House in January 2021 when Joe Biden took office, but now their oversight was on a Democratic Administration. In the previous Congress, during Donald Trump’s final two years in office, House committees devoted much of their time to investigating the executive branch. Under Biden, the same committees slowed their oversight. Among 20 comparable committees, the median share of tracked hearings and letters devoted to executive oversight dropped from 36.9 percent during the first 18 months of the 116th Congress to 24.9 percent during the first 18 months of the 117th. Fifteen of the 20 committees did less oversight.

There are limits to the comparison because COVID disrupted congressional business and unified Democratic control gave the party a substantial legislative agenda to pursue. The pattern doesn’t begin or end with Trump or Biden. Research on House investigations from 1898 through 2014 found committees pursued executive branch oversight more aggressively when the other party controlled the White House. This does not prove that Congress simply abandons the Capitol when their own party occupies the presidency, but it does show that party shifts the incentives to use congressional power.

That matters because Madison expected personal and institutional interests reinforcing one another. He believed members of Congress would defend congressional power because doing so would also defend their place in the constitutional order. Modern parties have torn those interests apart.

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The Interest of the Man

Madison argued the people occupying each branch needed the “constitutional means, and personal motives to resist encroachments by the others.” His explanation was blunt: “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

The formula was simple: a president would protect presidential power, while members of Congress would protect congressional power. Madison expected each branch to resist the other because the people occupying each had something to lose when another branch gained leverage. The design relied on self-interest being attached to the institution. Though presidents and members of Congress alike have been motivated by self-interest, that alone has not kept up in modern times.

Madison also understood parties would influence the system. Four years after Federalist 51, he wrote that “in every political society, parties are unavoidable,” and he soon became ironically involved in organizing opposition to the Federalists. The vulnerability in his argument is not that he did not envision parties. Instead, it’s that modern parties give legislators political interests that extend beyond the very branch lines Madison expected to generate rivalry.

A senator may care about the Senate’s authority, but if protecting it means blocking a president of his party, his institutional interest is no longer operating alone. The party can make presidential success more valuable than resisting presidential power or its failure.

When Party Changes the Incentive

Appropriations law offers an example because the underlying question is fairly constant: did the executive spend in the way Congress intended? The Government Accountability Office interprets those questions for Congress, and congressional requests have become increasingly partisan.

Previous administrations experienced more cross-party and bipartisan activity. During the Obama administration, Republicans made most of the requests, though Democrats still asked GAO to examine their own administration. Some requests were even bipartisan. Republican and bipartisan requests also continued into Trump’s first term in office.

More recently, the partisan pattern has solidified. Of the 26 congressional requests for GAO decisions on executive branch compliance with appropriations law during the Obama and Biden administrations, 18 were submitted solely by Republicans. Of the 33 requests during Trump's first administration, 27 came solely from Democrats. Under Biden, requests regarding his administration have come solely from Republicans. As of 16 July 2026, requests regarding Trump's second administration have come solely from Democrats.

This does not prove that party determines every congressional action, but it shows how strongly partisan alignment determines who questions executive compliance.

The same pattern emerges in litigation. The Republican-controlled House sued the Obama administration over Affordable Care Act payments it claimed Congress had not authorized. A few years later, the Democratic-controlled House sued the Trump administration after it redirected federal funds to the border wall. The legal questions were not identical, but both Houses asserted the same fundamental prerogative: presidents cannot spend money Congress has not authorized for that purpose.

Those cases do not show what either party would do against a president from their own party. They do show that both parties clearly use the institutional principle when it means opposing the other party.

Legal scholars Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes identified this as the “separation of parties, not powers.” National parties create political alliances that cross the formal boundary between Congress and the presidency. Under divided government, partisan and institutional interests often reinforce one another. During unified government, they do not, because defending Congress may mean hamstringing a president whose success members of the majority party want.

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Checks That Depend on Party

Members of Congress do not always yield to the partisan incentive. In 2019, 12 Republican senators joined Democrats in voting to end Trump’s national emergency declaration at the southern border, opposing a president from their own party on a question of congressional authority.

Those votes show that institutional interest has not completely disappeared. The question is how costly it becomes when it conflicts with party loyalty. Challenging an opposition president can protect Congress and help your party at the same time. Challenging your own president might sacrifice policies you support, provoke your base, or weaken a president whose success is tied to yours.

The broader oversight record reflects that difference. Congress tends to pursue executive oversight more aggressively during divided government and relax when one party controls both Congress and the White House. Its constitutional authority does not change after an election, but the political price of using it does.

That is the pressure party places on Madison’s design. The institutional incentive remains, but is less reliable when legislators have stronger political reasons to protect the president than to resist him.

What Madison Could Not Solve

We might see another test after the November elections. Democrats have a realistic chance of taking the House and, in doing so, returning Congress and the White House to divided control. If that happens, oversight of the Trump administration will almost certainly become more aggressive, and it may be justified. The interesting question will be whether the same congressional powers suddenly seem more necessary because an election changed the party holding the gavel.

Voters reinforce the same dynamic when we demand aggressive oversight of a president we oppose and dismiss similar efforts as obstruction when our party occupies the White House. The hardest test of constitutional principle is not whether we want it applied to “the other side.” It is whether we still want it applied when it blocks something we support.

If Congress and the public defend constitutional limits arbitrarily, presidents quickly learn the lesson. Some resistance will be strong when the opposition party controls Congress and much less when their own party does.

That is the same distortion at work in the old joke. A presidential power does not become more constitutional because our candidate is using it, and congressional oversight does not become obstruction because it is aimed at a president we support. The office is the same. The authority is the same. Only the party changes.

If that is enough to change our judgment, then Madison’s problem is not confined to Congress anymore. We have made constitutional limits conditional on the party in power. The facts should not change because the party does. Neither should the Constitution.

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In 2023, Texas legislators voted unanimously to raise car insurance rates by $1 per year to combat catalytic converter theft. The bill made no mention of ALPRs; lawmakers later told The Texas Tribune that they had not come up in discussions of how the money would be spent. The Tribune has since learned that the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority has allowed at least $30 million of that rate increase to be used on nearly 3,200 Flock cameras. The chairman of the authority had hoped in 2023 to “cover the entire state” with Flock cameras.1

Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently ordered state agencies to stop funding the deployment of Flock cameras in light of increasing reports of abuse and public concern. More than 1,200 cameras had been deployed for the Department of Public Safety under a three-year, $15.9 million agreement, with thousands more backed by grants to local departments.2 Texas had built a surveillance state without the legislature quite realizing it.

Noel Pichardo had the same experience in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Pichardo was a police officer in 2023 and thought that an earlier effort to bring Flock cameras to Pawtucket had stalled. Pichardo later learned that the city had signed a two-year, $128,000 deal for 20 cameras and treated it as an administrative decision. Pichardo began to notice them around town and asked, “Wait a minute. When did we make this decision to put these up?”3

Cities all the time buy this kind of gear, and you’re not going to expect a city council vote over a software license or a printer. Flock is something else. It allows the government to hold on to massive amounts of information about people suspected of nothing and connected to no particular investigation. That is a surveillance policy, and one that needs to be in the open and discussed.

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Why Flock?

Flock is handy for police. In June 2026, the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office used Flock data combined with other evidence to identify those involved after a shooting at the Bluebird Motel in Somers. Four people were taken into custody.4 When you’re dealing with serious crimes and time is of the essence, efficiency like that is important.

You can look up a license plate in public view without a warrant. Flock changes that by allowing police to store and later retrieve vehicle sightings before they have any indication that the driver might be relevant to an investigation. Information about vehicles police are looking for is stored in a much larger database of people suspected of nothing.

Police can query that data and start building a picture of where a given car has been. That may be enormously helpful in a serious investigation. But does that mean we want the government holding on to that much information about the rest of us?

The Washington Post has reported on at least 50 law enforcement officers charged with or accused of misusing license plate reader systems, 90 percent of which involved Flock.5 In Wisconsin, Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala was charged with repeatedly using Flock for personal reasons.6 These officers didn’t hack the system. They had access, and they used it.

An audit might reveal that an officer abused the database, but the officer already has the information. The person being watched might not know the search took place, much less have an opportunity to challenge it.

The government’s experience with Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act is instructive. After 9/11, the government bulk collected metadata on phone calls because they believed that more access might prevent another terrorist attack. The bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board subsequently found that the program had only narrow value, and Congress scaled it back.7 Surveillance powers are easy to expand when the benefits are clear, and the costs aren’t. They’re much harder to scale back once the government starts relying on them.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were written with an inherent distrust of government power. The Founding Fathers had seen the government search, seize, and deprive people of liberty with broad brushstrokes. Their solution was to require the government to follow rules before it could intrude on our rights. Flock is handy, but that doesn’t mean we get to circumvent the process.

In 1755, Ben Franklin noted that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”8 James Madison later wrote about representative government in Federalist No. 51: “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”9

If communities decide that Flock is useful enough to keep, the constraints on that power should be in place before police use it to gather information on people suspected of nothing.

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Checking the Government

The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on how the Fourth Amendment applies to a technology like Flock. Its location-tracking cases suggest that some tracking on public roads may be okay, while, more broadly, sweeping digital records of a person’s movements are constitutionally distinct.10 Flock falls somewhere between those cases.

This summer, the Court issued a ruling in Chatrie v. United States that taking a person’s Google Location History constituted a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. The case has been sent back to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the warrant satisfied constitutional requirements.11 Chatrie doesn’t answer the Flock question. But the government shouldn’t get to exercise the surveillance power enabled by technology while we all wait years for another case to reach the Court.

Virginia has already set guardrails around the use of automated license plate readers. Its law generally requires information to be deleted after 21 days, restricts how and with whom it can be used or shared, and requires public reporting.12 Wisconsin lawmakers considered different approaches during the 2025–26 legislative session, but neither became law.13

Flock has also adjusted some of its policies in response to criticism, recommending a seven-day retention period and requiring more documentation around searches.14 Those protections rely heavily on the person at the keyboard and on whether someone actually reviews their work.

An internal investigation in Alpharetta, Georgia found that officer Dustin Bozzo allegedly looked up a former lover’s license plate 56 times and another officer’s plate 29 times. When asked for a reason, he frequently chose “Wanted Person” or “Traffic Infraction,” options he later said were simply “just a quick keystroke.”15 Requiring a reason offers little protection if nobody actually reviews the search.

The ACLU of Massachusetts recently published a toolkit for defense attorneys to use to force disclosure of surveillance technology used by police departments. WIRED reported that defendants and sometimes even prosecutors may not be aware that a particular surveillance technology was used.[16] A defendant who doesn’t know how police found them can’t challenge it, and a judge won’t know whether the government crossed a constitutional line.

If the government wants a searchable database of the movements of people overwhelmingly suspected of nothing, it should explain why it needs that power before it deploys it widely. Citizens need enough information about how the system is being used to know whether those limits are being observed.

Some places might want Flock, but with guardrails. Others might not want that much power. Either is more defensible than letting the technology proliferate unseen until police rely on it and every proposed constraint sounds like taking away an essential tool of law enforcement.

Pichardo asked the right question: “When did we make this decision to put these up?” The answer isn’t after the cameras have been watching.

If police want databases that let them track civilians’ everyday movements, that power should be authorized by elected officials with clear boundaries the public can see and understand. The government doesn’t get to build the surveillance system, give police carte blanche access to it, and then ask us to trust them to behave going forward.

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By the end of the Civil War, the United States had preserved the Union but left one of the Constitution’s most difficult questions unresolved. Four million people were suddenly liberated from slavery, but the Constitution offered no clear answer to what that freedom meant.1 Nearly a century after independence, the country finally confronted the question of American citizenship at a national level. More importantly, if those rights were denied, who had the duty to protect them?

Leading up to the war, citizens' legal rights largely depended on their state of residence. Though the federal government exercised its authority at the national level, it did little to directly protect citizens against the states. Emancipation introduced a new conflict: freedom meant little if states could still deny ordinary citizens their rights.

Madison described America’s republic as a “double security” to the rights of the people.2 The state and national governments would serve as a check on one another, giving citizens, in theory, more than one protection of their rights. Reconstruction, instead, exposed a limit when the government closest to the people was the source of oppression.

The constitutional response came in the form of three constitutional amendments adopted over five years.3 The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but freedom alone did not immediately settle which rights accompanied it. The Fourteenth Amendment clearly established citizenship and prohibited states from denying due process or equal protection under the law. Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial discrimination in voting.

Together, the Reconstruction Amendments did more than repair the Union. They changed the dynamic of our constitutional rights. While the Bill of Rights was designed to restrain the federal government, Reconstruction established a federal role to protect our rights against state denial. The Civil War had settled slavery and secession through force, but it had not settled what citizenship would mean afterward.

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A Second Founding

During Reconstruction, a new constitutional order spread across the South. Congress required most former Confederate states to adopt new constitutions and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment as conditions of full reentry into the Union. Black men who had until recently not been considered citizens were now voting on those constitutions, serving on juries, and entering public office.4 In 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina and Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi became the first Black men to serve in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate respectively.

Reconstruction also changed what southern state governments felt obliged to provide. Public education, which had largely been limited across the South, became one example. South Carolina’s 1868 constitution required public schools to be open to children “without regard to race or color,” an effort to address the social and civic conditions slavery had created.5 Less than thirty years later, Ben Tillman would lead the political effort to replace that Reconstruction constitution and restrict the political rights established under it.

New federal power gave the new constitutional order more practical force. On the military side, the Army protected both voters and Reconstruction governments, while the Freedmen’s Bureau helped former slaves transition to freedom. White supremacist violence posed a threat to that progress, and Congress enacted the Enforcement Acts to give federal authorities greater power to protect voting rights and prosecute political violence. Those efforts weakened groups like the Ku Klux Klan and gave the new amendments some practical force. This would prove to be a temporary solution to a much deeper challenge.6

When Enforcement Failed

The rise of Reconstruction also brought the rise of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which used violence and intimidation to suppress Black political participation in an attempt to restore the pre-Civil War political order. Though federal intervention succeeded in countering some of that resistance, the commitment to do so was difficult to sustain over time. Republican unity fractured, economic concerns grew, and Reconstruction increasingly gave way to sectional reconciliation.

The Supreme Court started to narrow Congress’ Reconstruction reforms as well. In The Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, the Court read the Fourteenth Amendment more narrowly than many Republicans had hoped, limiting the federal government’s ability to act. The Court agreed on national citizenship, but not on how far federal power could go to defend it.7

By 1877, political support for Reconstruction had largely disappeared, and the post-war federal presence in the South had withdrawn. Those critical amendments remained, but as troops withdrew, many Southern states began dismantling much of the progress gained during Reconstruction.

The Long Delay

The retreat from Reconstruction revealed the difference between changing the Constitution and enforcing it. South Carolina offers a clear example of how Reconstruction was undone. Its 1868 constitution opened public schools to children “without regard to race or color.” Less than thirty years later, Ben Tillman helped lead a convention to replace that constitution. He said the goal was “to so restrict the suffrage and circumscribe it, that this infamy can never come about again.” Through constitutional change, Reconstruction expanded citizenship, but its opponents later used constitutional change to restrict it.

The contradiction could hardly have been clearer. The Constitution recognized national citizenship and promised equal protection, yet millions of citizens remained subject to governments organized to deny both. The amendments had not disappeared, but they offered little protection when those responsible for enforcing them chose not to act.

This history makes it difficult to say that the constitutional system simply corrected itself. The Constitution supplied tools, but it could not compel anyone to use them. The Constitution provided another avenue for protection, but citizens still had to push the federal government to act.

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The Republic Responds

The civil rights movement succeeded in part by forcing racial discrimination into the national consciousness. Activists challenged discriminatory laws in the federal courts, while exposing violence far beyond the South. Birmingham and Selma became national symbols of the denial of constitutional rights.

That changed the political equation at the federal level. Brown v. Board of Education opened one route for federal intervention, while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government power to act when states would not.8

Civil rights activists used public opinion across the country and federal power to challenge state and local governments that refused to protect their rights. Madison had argued that divided authority could help protect liberty. Reconstruction and the civil rights movement showed that the same structure could also give citizens somewhere else to turn when their own governments denied them equal protection.

What Reconstruction Changed

Reconstruction changed more than the rights written into the Constitution. It changed the relationship between citizenship and federalism. Before the Civil War, the constitutional order largely assumed that states would protect the ordinary rights of their own citizens. Reconstruction changed that assumption by recognizing that the state itself could be the problem.

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave the federal government a new role when states denied those rights. That was the deeper shift. Federalism was no longer only about dividing power. It also created a way to challenge abuses of power closer to home.

Washington had argued that constitutional defects should be corrected through amendment, and Reconstruction followed that path.9 But the amendments also exposed their own limit. They could change the Constitution, but they could not make anyone enforce it.

Reconstruction showed that the danger to liberty did not always come from a distant federal government. It could come from much closer to home, and when it did, federal power might be the only effective check. That was a possibility neither Madison nor Brutus had fully imagined, and one the country would spend the next century struggling to resolve.

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It’s not an image you see every day: a governor carrying two pigs – one under each arm – to the doors of a legislative chamber. Just a day before, the South Carolina House of Representatives took up Governor Sanford’s 106 budget vetoes and overrode all but one in less than a hundred minutes. Though it seemed like the pigs were solely a response to the veto votes, they were the final volley in a battle that began nearly a year earlier. The objective of the fight: establish the governor’s credibility in shaping the state’s budget and inject Sanford’s views on fiscal restraint.

In the end, it got messy – quite literally – as the remnants of that press conference needed to be scrubbed out of the carpet. The memory of Sanford and those pigs lasted longer than the stains. In the end, it also helped him influence the debate for years to come.

An Unconstitutional Deficit

At the beginning of Governor Sanford’s first term, he learned the state had closed Fiscal Year 2002 with a $155 million deficit, violating the state constitution’s balanced budget requirement. In the summer of 2003, he raised this issue publicly with the chairmen of the legislature’s budget-writing committees, Representative Bobby Harrell and Senator Hugh Leatherman.

The deficit had caught the attention of the credit rating agencies, which were considering downgrading the state’s AAA bond rating. That pressure brought the governor and the legislative leaders together to reach a rare accord to enact the “Fiscal Discipline Act” to pay off the deficit in three years.

Sanford also pledged to hold a series of public budget hearings to dig deep into state government spending before his first Executive Budget in January 2004. The importance of this first budget was one of the reasons Sanford asked me to relocate from Washington to be Senior Policy Advisor in the Governor’s Office in Columbia in August 2003.

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The First Executive Budget

South Carolina is a “legislative state.” The governor’s role is limited a bit except for the megaphone. When Governor Carroll Campbell took office in 1987, he sent a budget to the General Assembly even though there was no official role for the governor in the budgeting process. He repeated this annually, and finally, in his last year in office, the law was changed to require the governor to submit an annual budget. His successors submitted what amounted to a wish list without details over the next eight years, and we wanted to change that.

We proposed paying off the debt in one year but also proposed budget cuts to help make that happen. We held budget hearings through the late summer and fall of 2003, made charts and graphs, and produced a 315-page budget to the General Assembly in January 2004. Though the cuts were not popular, the level of detail was. Even our critics conceded that we had taken the mission of budget-writing seriously and earned a seat at the table.

We weighed in regularly throughout the process, creating as much pressure as possible to eliminate the deficit. The budget included funds for “increased enforcement,” which gave the South Carolina Department of Revenue added resources to pursue uncollected taxes. It also had land sales of unused state property. Even though those projected funds were not guaranteed, they amounted to all but $16 million of the deficit paid off in one year. Being that close, we wanted to finish the job.

Just Give Us Options

We met with legislative leaders to see where we could find the rest of the money. Then-Speaker David Wilkins told the Governor, “Just give us some options, and we can make it happen.” Wilkins had no idea he’d opened the door to an avalanche of vetoes.

Over the next five days, we scoured the budget and put together a list of 106 separate vetoes. Not all of the vetoes aimed to reduce spending; some eliminated “provisos,” which were legislatively directed policies inserted into the budget. We submitted the vetoes just before midnight on the last possible day, confident we would achieve victory.

Goring Every Ox

When we met with legislative leaders on the budget vetoes, we laid out the arguments and conveyed we understood that not every veto would stand, but we “gave them options.” The reality was that we had gored every ox possible, building a coalition of vote-trading that ensured defeat. When the House convened to take up the vetoes, they wanted to get the votes over.

The vote was called and taken, one after another. During the process, one member was blowing a train whistle to get members to vote faster. Just one member, former Representative Herb Kirsh, voted to sustain every veto. In fact, at one point, he was the sole no vote, and the members chanted “Herb! Herb! Herb!” to get him to change his vote. In the end, he refused, and the Speaker announced the vote as “104 to Herb, the veto is overridden.”

In the moment, we were surprised. After it was over, we realized that we had not considered the breadth of the vetoes and that members would trade votes to save a particular line they supported. Our press secretary had gone on record expressing anger, and Sanford’s response was, “We don’t show emotion. We don’t take it personally.” He publicly walked back those comments, but we couldn’t settle for a 99-minute defeat in the House.

Eating the Governor’s Lunch

Coincidentally timed with the vetoes, we had scheduled an end-of-the-year reception for legislators at the Governor’s Mansion. It turned out to be a three-hour roast. One member of the House said during the event, “It doesn’t seem right that the governor’s feeding us dinner after we ate his lunch.” It was all smiles during the dinner, but Sanford pulled me aside to talk about the day and the response when everyone left. He wanted to know what I thought we should do, and all I could come up with was, “Punch’em back.” After all that effort to be credible, we couldn’t let it all fall apart now. Sanford said, “Alright, let’s think about it and talk in the morning. Deal?” I agreed, and we parted ways.

We Need Pigs

After our morning staff meeting, the governor and I met to talk response. I didn’t have anything that didn’t seem either too weak or too strong.

He, on the other hand, said, “Remember those press conferences that Citizens Against Government Waste did on the Hill?”

“Pig Book. We used to have pigs eat money out of troughs. It was great,” I replied.

“That’s what I want to do. We need to get some pigs and have a press conference outside the House chamber.”

I wish I could say I hesitated or even tried to talk him out of it, but it seemed perfect. We needed to keep it quiet – and we needed pigs. We asked Daniel Layfield, a staffer in our press office, to find us some. He called every farm within driving distance and asked to borrow a couple of pigs. He didn’t get a lot of interest until he found a farmer in Lexington County who wanted to know why we needed them. Daniel answered honestly, “The Governor wants to stand outside the House and talk about pork-barrel spending.” The farmer loved the idea so much that he told him we could have them for as long as needed. Off to get two pigs!

Run Like Hell

As everything was coming together, we needed to bring the rest of the staff in on what was happening. Our Senate liaison, Carl Blackstone, and Deputy Chief of Staff, Chad Walldorf, were completely unfazed when we locked them in a room to share the details. It says a little something about our brand that they didn’t even push back.

We needed to bring in Tom Davis, our Legislative Director and liaison, to the House. Tom would be Chief of Staff before me and then leave to serve in the South Carolina Senate. Tom had already had a rough session, and it was not looking up. He already knew we were about to drop something big on him since the Governor and a group of staff were waiting for him in a closed-door meeting.

“Just tell me,” he said.

“Tom, the Governor is going to do a press conference in front of the House with two pigs,” I responded.

He paused and looked around the room, waiting for us to let him in on the joke.

“He’s not kidding, Tom. The pigs are on the way,” Daniel helpfully added.

Tom sat down and put a hand to his head.

“You have to go back up there and pretend like nothing’s happening,” I said.

“So, how am I going to know when it happens?”

“Oh, you’ll know.” I said, “And when it does, run like hell.”

That was the last I saw of Tom for hours.

The Governor’s Got Pigs!

The pigs arrived, transported in two crates commonly used for dogs. One was an all-white Yorkshire and the other a red Duroc, each weighing about 30 pounds. We named them “Pork” and “Barrel” to highlight spending and overriding vetoes instead of ending the deficit. Sanford pulled the pigs out of the carriers and headed for the stairs leading to the House. We went up the opposite steps to push the crowd toward the press conference.

“The Governor’s got pigs!” we told anyone who would listen, pointing to the House chamber door.

As Sanford got to the top of the steps, one pig pooped on his coat, shoes, and carpet. We’d watch the video of that moment in slow motion many times over the coming months. Sanford is notoriously cheap, and here we have a great example. This all happened on a Thursday. His jacket and pants didn’t go to the cleaners until the following week.

The governor held a 10-minute press conference, announcing he was just having a little fun at the expense of the House since they’d done the same at his expense the day before. He talked about the constitution and the need to live within our means. He encouraged the Senate to take a more deliberate approach to the vetoes and said he hoped we could pay off the whole deficit. He picked the pigs back up, off he went back to the office, and we sent Pork and Barrel back to the farm.

House Majority Whip, Representative Annette Young, stood at the door and yelled, “Somebody better clean up this mess, and it better be one of y’all!” pointing at the governor’s staff. When you imagine this voice in your head, imagine decades of cigarettes and Scotch added in.

By the time the lobby had cleared, you could tell the pigs had been there. The task of cleaning up fell to Press Secretary Will Folks and Speechwriter Joel Sawyer, who had to round up cleaning supplies and scrub the carpet. The smell lingered for the rest of the day, but they seemed to have gotten the stains out.

The move wasn’t very popular with the General Assembly, and the senators had their fun while taking up the vetoes. They sustained 12 more, but we fell short of getting the $16 million. The voting public’s response, however, was overwhelmingly positive. The House Majority Leader told me that his poll numbers flipped over the weekend, and two weeks later, he would lose his primary to an unknown challenger.

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Postscript

A few months later, at the close of the budget process in June, the Comptroller General announced we’d had an unexpected surplus and enough money to eliminate the deficit. So, in the end, it all worked out.

In the rearview, we’d fought to a draw, but given that the odds were stacked against the South Carolina governor, I considered it a win. We had established credibility on the budget, and we’d earned respect in the budgeting process. This tension would regularly repeat itself during Sanford’s time in office, and spending was the single most contentious issue between him and the legislature.

No pigs were harmed in the telling of this story.

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James Madison and the Anti-Federalist writer known as Brutus offered sharply different answers. The Constitution adopted one of them. American history would spend the next two centuries testing both.

Two Cases for Liberty

The question itself was hardly new. From the ancient world through the Enlightenment, political thinkers generally assumed that republics worked only on a small scale. Citizens who knew one another were more likely to recognize a common good, hold public officials accountable, and resist the concentration of power. The larger and more diverse a republic became, they believed, the weaker those civic bonds would grow, until self-government itself began to fail.

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Brutus accepted that traditional view. “In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar,” he wrote. A nation stretching from New Hampshire to Georgia contained too many competing interests, in his view, to remain genuinely representative.

Distance posed another danger. “The representatives of the people cannot, as they now do, mix with the people,” Brutus warned. In a larger republic, public officials would know less about the lives and opinions of their constituents. The states would gradually lose influence as national authority grew, leaving political power farther from those it was meant to serve.1

Madison did not dismiss the concern. He had watched the Revolution divide Americans into Patriots and Loyalists. He had witnessed the failures of the Articles of Confederation and seen Shays’ Rebellion expose the fragility of the young republic. He agreed that faction threatened self-government. Where he differed with Brutus was over the cure.

In a small republic, Madison argued, citizens moved by the same passion or interest could quickly gain enough power to impose their will on others. He defined a faction not simply as a political group, but as one driven by an interest or passion “adverse to the rights of other citizens.” Free people would disagree and organize. The danger arose when one group gained enough power to place its interests above the rights of others.

Nor did Madison believe faction could be eliminated without destroying the freedom that produced it. “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” he wrote. People would develop different interests and naturally organize around them. A free society could not prevent that without ceasing to be free, so its challenge was to control faction’s effects.

His answer reversed one of the oldest assumptions in political thought. “Extend the sphere,” Madison urged. A larger nation would contain more competing interests and ambitions, making an oppressive majority harder to assemble. The diversity Brutus regarded as a threat could become a safeguard.2

The wider sphere was only part of the design. In Federalist No. 51, Madison described authority divided between the states and the national government, then divided again among separate branches. He called this arrangement a “double security” for the rights of the people. Representation would provide another filter. Elected officials were expected to exercise judgment, not simply carry the passions of the moment into government.3

Brutus and Madison therefore offered different protections for liberty. Brutus trusted government kept close to the people, while Madison trusted a larger constitutional system to prevent any one interest from dominating. Ratification chose Madison’s design, but it could not tell Americans whether that design would work.

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The Republic Responds

When the Constitution went into effect in 1789, Madison’s theory moved from paper into practice. The First Congress created the first executive departments and established the federal judiciary. It also sent twelve proposed amendments to the states. Ten were ratified by 1791 as the Bill of Rights. Another, limiting when congressional pay increases could take effect, waited 203 years before becoming the Twenty-Seventh Amendment in 1992.4

Organized political opposition soon complicated the picture. Within a few years, Hamilton and Jefferson had built rival coalitions around profoundly different visions of the republic. Newspapers became openly partisan, with Federalists warning that Jefferson would invite anarchy and Republicans portraying Hamilton’s allies as enemies of republican government.5

Madison was not simply observing this development; he helped create it. The author who had argued that a large republic would disperse political interests became one of the architects of a national opposition movement. That did not invalidate his theory, but it showed how quickly political leaders could gather the varied interests of an extended republic into durable coalitions.

The election of 1800 placed the new system under its first great strain. Jefferson defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams, but the Electoral College produced a tie between Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives needed thirty-six ballots to resolve the contest.

The crisis exposed a serious weakness in the Constitution’s original design. Still, the dispute was settled through the constitutional process. Jefferson’s inauguration and the Democratic-Republican takeover of Congress marked the first peaceful transfer of national power between political parties in American history.6

Madison’s confidence survived its first major test, though not quite in the way he might have expected. The transfer occurred through organized political parties, a form of national coordination that Federalist No. 10 did not fully explore. The Constitution proved able to accommodate political practices that reached beyond the argument he had made in 1787.

When the Coalitions Broke

The decades after 1800 appeared to strengthen Madison’s case. The United States expanded westward, admitted new states, and became more economically complex than either Madison or Brutus had known. Its major political parties joined voters across regions and interests, giving the constitutional system a measure of stability.

Democrats and Whigs remained national parties because each depended on support from both North and South. That structure did not resolve the conflict over slavery, but it kept sectional loyalty from becoming the only organizing force in American politics.

That structure began to fail as slavery moved from one issue among many to the question that reorganized American politics. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 did not create sectional conflict, and the Whig Party was already fragile. But by repealing the Missouri Compromise restriction and allowing settlers to determine the status of slavery in the new territories, it accelerated the collapse of the coalition structure that had helped contain the dispute.

Violence followed in Kansas. The remaining Whig coalition disintegrated, and the Republican Party emerged in opposition to the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party also fractured along sectional lines as the Civil War approached.7

The breakdown reached beyond party politics. Madison had expected different interests to cross one another, making a durable majority faction harder to form. By the late 1850s, slavery was drawing those interests into rival sectional blocs. Northern and southern voters increasingly saw the opposing section not as a political competitor, but as a threat to their future.

Congress itself became another arena for the conflict. On 22 May 1856, Representative Preston Brooks entered the Senate chamber and beat Senator Charles Sumner unconscious. Three days earlier, Sumner had delivered “The Crime Against Kansas,” an antislavery speech condemning the violence in the territory and attacking several of slavery’s defenders in the Senate.8

Secession and civil war gave tremendous force to Brutus’s warning that a vast republic could become too divided to govern itself. The competing interests Madison expected to restrain one another had instead been reorganized around incompatible political and moral orders.

The war did not produce a simple verdict against Madison. In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln argued that the Union was older than the Constitution and intended to be perpetual. Because the Constitution sought to form “a more perfect Union,” unilateral secession could not lawfully make that Union less perfect. The Union therefore remained unbroken despite the ordinances of secession.9

The Union fought to preserve that order, but preservation transformed it. The war brought emancipation and greatly increased national capacity. It also raised serious constitutional questions about executive war powers and the suspension of habeas corpus.10

What the First Century Revealed

Madison described the “great object” of republican government as securing “the public good and private rights” while preserving popular rule. By 1865, the extended republic had endured, but at extraordinary cost. It had preserved the Union without resolving whether constitutional liberty would be secured equally for all Americans.11

The first century vindicated parts of both arguments. Madison’s institutions proved stronger than Brutus expected, and the large republic withstood political parties, transfers of power, territorial expansion, and civil war. Yet his confidence in crosscutting interests met a devastating limit. Once slavery absorbed those interests into rival sectional blocs, constitutional bargaining could no longer contain the conflict.

Brutus was also right that scale could strengthen national power. Preserving the Union required a broader federal authority than Americans had known before the war. His case remained incomplete, however. He could not show that a smaller republic would have protected liberty more reliably, especially for those trapped beneath a local majority.

By 1865, the Constitution had survived the crisis of the Union, but it had not answered the crisis of citizenship. The war had ended slavery and preserved the nation. The harder question was whether the extended republic could protect the rights of Americans when the governments closest to them would not.

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Jury duty is one of the few civic obligations I genuinely enjoy, which puts me in a distinct minority. Most people receive a summons and start thinking about missed work or disrupted plans, and many start looking for an excuse before they even finish reading the notice. A summons means something more to me. Jury duty is one of the few occasions when citizenship becomes more than an opinion because we are asked to listen carefully and judge fairly, knowing that our decision may change another person’s life.

I once served on a jury in a criminal DUI case. The defendant had refused a breath test. The judge instructed us not to consider his refusal in deciding whether he was guilty. Regardless of his reasons, we had to put them aside and base our verdict on the evidence in the case.

The prosecution relied on the arresting officer’s testimony and a field sobriety test the defendant had failed. Some jurors questioned the officer’s account and were not convinced that the field test or the officer were convincing enough. To them, it seemed more like the officer’s word versus the accused. Those doubts made deliberations harder, but they also forced the rest of us to look more closely at the case. The officer’s badge did not decide the outcome, but neither did the arrest.

We eventually returned a guilty verdict. I was satisfied with the result because we had tested the prosecution’s case. The doubtful jurors had to listen to what persuaded us, while the rest of us listened to their doubts. The defendant was entitled to a jury of his peers, skeptical or otherwise. In the end, we believed the evidence overcame that skepticism and proved the case.

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A Check Operated by Citizens

The jury protects the accused, and limits the power of the government. Police investigate, prosecutors bring charges, but they do not decide guilt. In a jury trial, the government must make its case to the people. That idea was taking shape in America long before it was written into the Constitution.

In 1735, New York printer John Peter Zenger was prosecuted for seditious libel after publishing criticism of the royal governor. There was little dispute that Zenger had printed the articles, and the judge wanted the jury to focus on that narrow question. Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, asked the jurors to consider whether truthful criticism of government should be treated as a crime merely because those in power found it offensive.

Hamilton was asking the jurors to exercise their own judgment rather than surrender it to the judge. The jury acquitted Zenger, producing a verdict that did not create modern freedom of the press or bind other courts but mattered because of what the jurors had done. They refused to be an extension of the prosecution. The judge could share his view of the law, but he could not deliver the verdict. Instead, that decision still belonged to the citizens in the jury.1

The place of juries in American government was later written into the nation’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence condemned the King for “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” Article III protected jury trials in federal criminal cases, and the Sixth Amendment added further protections. The Seventh Amendment preserved juries in many federal civil disputes.2 The Founders were not arguing every public official was corrupt, but they understood officials should not control every part of the process. Ultimately, the citizens should decide whether the government had proved a charge.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw the jury as more than a legal procedure. He called it “above all a political institution” because it placed part of the administration of justice in the hands of the people. He also understood what service demanded from the juror. The jury, he wrote, “invests each citizen with a kind of magistracy.”3 For a limited time, ordinary people hold public authority and weigh evidence within the rules established by the court.

Though the work happens unseen by many, the decision is not symbolic. It can affect someone’s life in many ways. That is what makes the jury unusual. It checks government power, but it can only do so when citizens are willing to exercise judgment themselves.

The Work of Citizenship

For much of American history, many were denied this responsibility. Blacks and women were excluded from juries by law and practice. The Supreme Court eventually rejected those practices, recognizing exclusion harmed defendants and denied citizens the administration of justice.4 Being called to serve was therefore evidence that the law recognized a person as capable of exercising public authority.

That history makes our current attitude toward jury duty harder to defend. Too many people treat a summons as a problem to solve. They look for excuses that worked or wonder what they might say during jury selection to ensure they are dismissed. Getting out of jury duty becomes a small achievement, as though they have beaten the government.

There are good reasons why some people cannot serve. For some, missing work means losing a paycheck. A parent may not have reliable childcare, or a caregiver may not be able to leave someone who depends on them. Courts should take those burdens seriously, and employers should not make civil service a punishment. But inconvenience is not the same as hardship, and a disruption is not, by itself, a reason to avoid a public responsibility.

There’s no doubt jury service usually passes unrecognized. Many jurors return to their lives without anyone knowing the deliberative work that went into their jury duty. The absence of an audience is part of what makes the responsibility demanding. The work still has to be done carefully.

The DUI case made that clear to me. Some jurors didn’t trust the officer, and the rest of us could not simply dismiss their concerns. The lack of a breath test left room for doubt, while the field sobriety test was open to challenge. We were not able to speculate about why the defendant refused the test or hold his decision to contest the charge against him. We had to decide the case using the evidence presented to us during the trial.

That required more than defending our first impressions. We had to stay with the disagreement until we could decide whether the evidence was enough. In the end, we found that it was. The prosecution met its burden, but only after the jury had tested the case. The citizen test of the evidence was critical to the worth of the decision.

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The Summons

Unlike what we see on television, jury service is not dramatic or glamorous. The real work is sifting through the case and deciding guilt or innocence. Despite the potential banality of jury duty, we lose far more if the people work harder to evade the summons than hear a case. None of our constitutional rights are protected by words; they are protected by us.

Real hardship may make service impossible, but mere inconvenience should not. When citizens look for escape hatches from jury duty, the cost does not fall on the court. Their absence leaves the work to a smaller, less representative group, while the burden of checking government power falls on those who cannot find a way out.

Our jury system cannot remain credible if citizens want its protection but refuse to offer that protection to others. The government still has to prove its case, but the safeguard grows weaker when too many refuse to participate. Over time, the public loses confidence that justice is being done by citizens rather than merely to them.

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A Revolution Without Independence

Americans began their Revolution before they decided they wanted independence. By the summer of 1775, they had fought British troops from Lexington and Concord to Bunker Hill. George Washington commanded a new Continental Army outside Boston, and men had already died fighting the king’s forces. Yet Congress was still asking the king for help.

The Olive Branch Petition called George III the colonists’ “Most Gracious Sovereign” and asked him to restore peace and protect their rights.1 Americans were fighting his army while appealing to him as their protector.

Many colonists believed Parliament had violated their rights but still hoped the relationship with Britain could be repaired. Separation would be treason, bringing economic upheaval and war against one of the world’s strongest empires. When Common Sense appeared, reconciliation and independence were still competing possibilities. Americans had learned to resist British authority, but they had not yet decided to leave it.

For years, newspapers and sermons had carried arguments about taxation and representation, along with broader questions about natural rights and the limits of parliamentary power. Legislatures petitioned London while local committees organized resistance at home. Much of the debate, however, concerned the rights of colonists within the British Empire. It explained why Parliament was wrong without making the case that America should leave.

Building a movement required more than exposing British misconduct. The case for separation had to reach beyond legislative chambers and lawyers’ offices, and people had to understand it well enough to make it their own. By January 1776, the colonies needed an argument that could move Americans from resistance to independence.

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An Argument That Could Travel

Paine had arrived in Philadelphia little more than a year earlier and held no political office. Common Sense was not addressed to Congress, colonial legislators, or learned gentlemen. It was “addressed to the inhabitants of America.” The first edition appeared anonymously, credited only to “an Englishman.”2

By calling the pamphlet Common Sense, Paine suggested that readers were equipped to judge the question before them. “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong,” he wrote, “gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Custom could not justify an institution simply because people had grown accustomed to it.

Paine reduced the imperial relationship to an image that required no lesson in constitutional theory: “There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”3 He also removed the king from the role many colonists still hoped he might play. George III was not standing apart from Parliament, waiting to restore colonial rights. He was part of the system they were resisting.

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Paine also made a practical case, arguing that independence would allow the colonies to seek foreign alliances and take responsibility for their own defense. Instead of asking how the imperial relationship might be repaired, he asked what America might gain by ending it.

He made the argument clear enough to survive outside the pamphlet and enter ordinary conversation. I used to say in politics that your ideas are only as good as your ability to get people to act on them. Paine understood the same thing. The case for independence could not remain an argument among political leaders. It had to become something Americans could carry into their own conversations as they decided what came next.

The Argument Goes Public

Common Sense appeared on 10 January 1776 and was advertised five days later. Its reach soon extended beyond the original pamphlet as newspapers reproduced parts of Paine’s argument and critics responded in print.4 James Chalmers published Plain Truth, a direct rebuttal to Paine’s call for separation. Its title page also addressed “the inhabitants of America.”5

George Washington saw evidence of a shift in private letters from Virginia, which he told Joseph Reed showed Common Sense was working “a powerful change” in the minds of many men.6 John Adams admired Paine’s ability while distrusting parts of his argument. He wrote that he could not match the pamphlet’s “Strength and Brevity,” its “elegant Simplicity,” or its “piercing Pathos.” But he dismissed its biblical case against monarchy and called its proposed continental government “feeble.” The ideas were not new, Adams believed, but Paine had expressed them with unusual force.7

The question was no longer confined to Congress. It had moved through newspapers and private letters into military camps and disputes between Patriots and Loyalists. Paine did not create the independence movement by himself. British policy and the war had steadily weakened hope for reconciliation, while months of political organizing pushed the colonies closer to separation. But Common Sense gave the movement words it could use. Americans could make the case without first explaining the entire history of the imperial crisis.

Independence had become a public argument. Paine’s achievement was not simply that he explained the case for independence, but that he made it usable. He gave Americans language they could carry into their own arguments and make their own.

The title page addressed Common Sense to “the inhabitants of America.” At first, those words described its audience. By the time readers finished the pamphlet, they described the people who would decide what came next.

The Revolution Remembered Backward

The American Revolution is usually remembered backward. We begin with 4 July 1776 and arrange everything before it as if the outcome had already been decided. What had been uncertain becomes, in hindsight, a road that could only lead to independence. The story is cleaner that way, but the people living through it did not have the comfort of hindsight.

Long before there was a Declaration, there was resistance. Americans were already asking how far imperial power could reach and whether Britain had crossed that line. The men who gathered in Congress did not announce a new nation. They argued from within the British Empire, insisting that they were defending inherited rights rather than inventing new ones.

They claimed the rights of Englishmen and the authority of colonial self-government against a Parliament that increasingly treated distance as permission. What sounded like loyalty in 1774 could look like submission by 1776, as a defense of inherited rights became an argument over who had the authority to govern.

Americans did not declare independence and then discover self-government. They had already begun practicing it. From Congress down to local committees, they were learning to act together while still appealing to the king and claiming the authority to judge imperial power.

In the strange middle ground before independence, Americans spoke the language of loyalty while building the habits of union. The Declaration would not create that reality so much as give it a name.

Resistance Before Independence

The First Continental Congress did not declare independence. It turned a Massachusetts crisis into a continental one. When delegates from twelve colonies gathered in Philadelphia in September 1774, Parliament had already passed the Coercive Acts in response to the Boston Tea Party, punishing Massachusetts and bringing local government more tightly under imperial control. The warning was clear: if one colony resisted, it could be made an example.

The other colonies had to decide whether Massachusetts was a warning or a common cause. Congress answered through common action. The delegates described their rights together and agreed on a shared response to British policy, even though they did not yet claim to speak for an independent people.

Their language remained cautious. Congress still appealed to British constitutional tradition, objecting to parliamentary overreach rather than monarchy itself. The delegates were not claiming that America had become a nation. They were arguing that Britain had broken the rules under which free people could be governed.

The colonies were not yet declaring independence. They were insisting that power had limits, and that consent was one of them. Yet the form of Congress pointed beyond its language. A group of colonies had assembled and spoken together. Long before they agreed on what that political body was, they had begun to act like one.

The Articles of Association carried Congress’s decision into daily life. A boycott of British goods depended on local committees to enforce it, which meant ordinary habits of trade and consumption now served a political cause larger than any one town or colony.

That discipline across colonial lines did not come from certainty that separation was coming. It came from the belief that British power had to be answered by American cooperation. Before Americans declared that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” they were already testing consent in practice.

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Petitioning the King While Taking Up Arms

By 1775, the contradiction had become impossible to miss. The colonies petitioned the king even as they prepared for war. They still used the language of loyalty, but their actions were making it harder to restore imperial control.

After Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress faced a crisis the First Congress had tried to prevent. Blood had been shed, Boston sat under military pressure from both sides, and Americans were no longer arguing only over whether they should resist. They had to decide who could organize that resistance.

Congress stepped into that role by creating the Continental Army and placing George Washington in command. What had been a scattered colonial military response became something closer to a common American force. The colonies were not yet independent states, but they were no longer acting only as separate colonies.

Even then, reconciliation had not disappeared from view. In July 1775, Congress sent the Olive Branch Petition to George III as “your Majesty’s faithful subjects,” still asking the king to restore peace and preserve the imperial connection. At almost the same time, it issued the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, explaining why Americans believed armed resistance had become necessary.

The contradiction was now on paper. Congress was appealing to the king while preparing to fight the king’s army. Separation was not yet the answer, but resistance already was. The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms made that tension plain:

Congress denied separation at the very moment it was organizing armed resistance. The claim was not dishonest so much as strained by events. Americans still hoped the empire could be repaired, but Britain would not accept the premise repair required: that the colonies had political rights Parliament could not override, and that Americans had the authority to defend those rights even before they declared independence.

The Habit of Self-Government

The formal break came on 4 July 1776, but the habit of self-government had taken shape earlier, when Americans claimed the right to judge power for themselves. The colonists did not merely complain that Parliament had passed bad laws. They argued that government could act through legal forms and still violate the rights of free people. Once they made that claim, obedience could no longer be treated as automatic.

Resistance now needed structure. Congress gave it a continental voice, while local committees carried it into daily life. Through boycotts and military preparation, self-government became less an idea than a discipline, something Americans had to practice through institutions of their own making.

None of this was clean or complete, and none of it yet made America a nation. But a people long practiced in local self-rule began to discover that they could also act together across colonies. The Declaration of Independence would later give this argument its most famous language: governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Before Americans declared that principle, they were already acting as if legitimate authority required their participation.

Independence was not inevitable. The old relationship simply became harder to sustain. Britain still imagined obedience as the answer to disorder, while Americans increasingly saw obedience without consent as the disorder itself.

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Before Independence Had a Name

The Declaration of Independence did not begin the American experiment. It gave public language to a political reality already taking shape through resistance. Nations often tell their origin stories as if the decisive moment explains everything, but this one resists that kind of neatness.

Before independence, the colonists had learned that liberty could not survive as an inherited claim. It had to be practiced through common action, and Congress had begun to provide the form that action required. What started as a meeting of colonial delegates was becoming an authority the British Empire could not easily explain.

The men who gathered in Congress were not yet ready to declare a new nation. Their petitions still reached for reconciliation, and their explanations still fit resistance inside the old constitutional order. But by 1776, they had begun acting like a self-governing people.

Independence became the name for a choice they had been moving toward through action. They did not simply announce a nation into being. They recognized, with all the danger and uncertainty that came with it, that the work had already begun.

The Revolution was not a straight road to 4 July. It was a long argument over who had the authority to govern in common. Before there was independence, there was the harder work of becoming capable of it.

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When Hamilton opened Federalist No. 1, he did not begin with the details of the Constitution. He began with the stakes of the choice.

Americans had declared that rights came before political authority. They had fought a war on that principle and won. But winning independence did not prove that self-government could endure. The harder test came next: whether a free people could create a republic strong enough to protect liberty without surrendering the principle that made liberty possible.

That question does not feel as radical to us as it did in 1787. Most people lived under authority they had not chosen. The American claim rejected one of the oldest assumptions of rule: power began above the people. The Revolution rested on a different premise. Power began with the people.

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The Problem the Revolution Created

The Declaration gave that claim its clearest form: governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But a principle declared in revolution still had to become a working republic.

Federalist No. 1 forced Americans to face the problem the Revolution had left behind. If rights came first, the new republic had to be judged by whether it secured them. But if the Union remained too weak to act, liberty would rest on promises the country could not reliably keep.

That was the harder work after independence. Americans had rejected a king. Now they had to decide whether they could build a Union capable of governing while still remaining answerable to the people. The Revolution had proved that Americans could resist illegitimate power. It had not yet proved that they could create legitimate power strong enough to last.

The Failure of a Weak Union

Hamilton wrote after what he called “an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government.” The wording is formal, but the problem was practical. The Articles of Confederation had left the Union too weak to act reliably as a nation.

The Articles described the Union as a “firm league of friendship” among the states. The phrase carried hope, but it also revealed the weakness of the arrangement. The states had joined together, yet the national government still depended on them to make common decisions real. Congress could request money, but it could not reliably collect it. National promises depended on state cooperation.

The Revolution had left the country in debt and dependent on public credit. If the Union could not meet its obligations, it could not easily command trust at home or respect abroad. This was more than an accounting problem. A republic that could not pay what it owed would struggle to prove that independence had produced a durable nation.

The same weakness appeared in trade. Because Congress lacked power to regulate commerce among the states, local interests could pull against national ones. Treaties created a similar problem. Congress could make agreements with foreign powers, but it often could not make the states honor them.

The Articles also left national policy without reliable enforcement. There was no separate executive to carry out the laws, and no national judiciary to settle disputes under national law. Congress could act in the name of the United States, but too often it lacked the tools to make that action meaningful.

This is why Hamilton did not open with a list of constitutional provisions. The United States had won independence, but the Union still lacked dependable authority to make national decisions real. Hamilton was not defending power for its own sake. He was arguing that liberty could not survive if the republic meant to protect it was too weak to act.

Reflection and Choice

Hamilton framed ratification as a test of public judgment. Americans had the chance, he wrote, to decide whether societies could establish good government through “reflection and choice,” or whether they would remain dependent on “accident and force.”

That line names the stakes cleanly, but Hamilton did not assume the debate would rise naturally to the level of the moment. The proposed Constitution touched state power, local influence, and sincere fears about national authority. A debate that consequential was bound to draw out ambition as well as principle.

Hamilton did not ask Americans to approve the Constitution out of loyalty or habit. He hoped their choice would be guided by “a judicious estimate of our true interests.” Then he admitted that this was “more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.” That is not cynicism. It is realism about republican politics.

Federalist No. 1 is often remembered for its confidence in reasoned choice, but it is just as clear-eyed about what can distort that choice. Hamilton warned that ambition, personal resentment, and party spirit could shape arguments on both sides. He also warned that men who begin as demagogues can end as tyrants.

That warning belongs at the center of the essay. If the people were the source of legitimate authority, then the people also had to judge arguments made in their name. Self-government required more than a love of liberty. It required citizens to ask whether an argument served the public good or merely claimed to.

Hamilton trusted the people enough to make an argument to them, but he did not flatter them. He treated citizens as capable of judgment, not immune from passion. That is the tension running through Federalist No. 1. Americans could govern themselves, but only if they could think seriously about what self-government required.

Power Worth Trusting

The Constitution did not answer weakness by making power unlimited. It gave the Union more authority, then tried to keep that authority bound to the people.

Under the Articles, Congress could ask the states for support. Under the Constitution, Congress could tax and regulate commerce. Laws would no longer depend on state cooperation alone, because a president would be responsible for carrying them out. National disputes could also be heard in national courts. These were not small changes. They gave the Union tools the Articles had withheld.

But the point was not simply to move power from the states to the center. The point was to make national authority capable of acting while still keeping it republican. The Constitution placed power in institutions that depended on the people and then divided that power so no single part could claim the whole. The Union would be stronger, but it would still answer to the people who had created it.

Hamilton did not ask Americans to stop fearing power. Fear of power was part of the Revolution’s inheritance. But he asked them to see that weakness had dangers too. A government too strong could threaten liberty. One too weak could fail to protect it.

That was the balance Federalist No. 1 asked Americans to consider. The choice was not between liberty and authority. The choice was whether liberty could survive without authority strong enough to defend it.

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The Test

Self-government was more than a principle to admire. It was a responsibility. Americans had claimed the right to choose their government, but now they had to decide whether the country they created could survive under a system that lacked the authority to govern. Hamilton believed they were capable of making that judgment, but he did not treat their success as automatic.

That is what makes Federalist No. 1 more than an introduction to the Constitution. Hamilton was asking Americans to face the next demand of the Revolution. It was not enough to reject power that ruled without consent. They had to decide whether they could create power that still answered to consent.

That question gave the ratification debate its deeper meaning. Americans had already shown that they loved liberty enough to fight for it. Hamilton wanted to know whether they understood liberty well enough to build a government capable of protecting it.

He did not offer that belief as praise. He treated it as something Americans still had to prove.

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Two Questions, Not One

In April, I argued that the birthright citizenship fight contained two separate questions: what the Fourteenth Amendment means, and whether a president can force a new answer by executive order. The Supreme Court has now decided Trump v. Barbara, and the decision shows why that distinction matters. Collapsing those questions was always the mistake.

The first question is hard: does the Constitution leave any room for Congress to revisit how birthright citizenship applies in a modern immigration system? The Fourteenth Amendment says that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens. For more than a century, United States v. Wong Kim Ark has been the central case interpreting that promise. That precedent matters.

But serious precedent is not beyond examination. Wong Kim Ark arose in a different legal and political world. That does not make it obsolete, but it does raise a fair question about how far its reasoning extends when applied to facts the Court did not squarely confront. The modern debate asks whether temporary or unlawful presence changes the constitutional analysis, and whether Congress can clarify the statute without crossing the line drawn by the Fourteenth Amendment. The law now has categories, and the country now faces a scale of migration that the Court was not confronting in 1898.

That does not mean Congress would win. It means that if the question is going to be tested at all, lawmakers should be the ones to start. The second question is much easier: can a president settle this by executive order? The answer is no.

A president cannot amend the Fourteenth Amendment by proclamation. He cannot create exceptions the statute does not contain because he thinks the law should have been written differently. And he cannot take one of the most basic questions in a republic, who belongs to it at birth, and answer it by executive command.

That is the difference this case should force us to see. Birthright citizenship may be open to constitutional argument. Citizenship by executive order should not be.

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The Proper Branch to Test the Question

The Supreme Court’s majority reached a broad constitutional answer. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, concluded that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment. The majority read the Citizenship Clause through English common law, Reconstruction, the repudiation of Dred Scott, and Wong Kim Ark. Its conclusion was clear: if a child is born on American soil and subject to American law, that child is a citizen.

That may be right. And when a constitutional question is properly presented, courts have the authority to answer it. Courts interpret the Constitution and decide whether statutes or executive actions exceed it. That role is not optional, especially when citizenship is at stake.

But there is a difference between saying the courts have the final word in a constitutional case and saying no one else has a role in asking the question. Congress writes citizenship statutes. It also has enforcement power under the Fourteenth Amendment, though that power has limits. Lawmakers can hold hearings, build a record, and pass legislation that asks the courts to decide where the constitutional line sits. That is how the constitutional process is supposed to work.

Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment allows Congress to enforce the Amendment. It does not allow Congress to narrow a right the Amendment itself guarantees. If the Citizenship Clause means what the majority says it means, no statute can legislate around it. But the legislative branch can test whether the Constitution leaves room for statutory clarification. And if it is wrong, the courts can say so.

Justice Kavanaugh’s separate opinion is worth reading because it refuses to collapse the issue into one question. He rejected the Executive Order because the President cannot add exceptions to citizenship law that the statute does not contain. But he also left open the possibility that Congress may have some room to test the boundaries of birthright citizenship. The majority disagreed, treating the constitutional rule as already settled. That disagreement is exactly why the Executive Order was the wrong instrument.

The Wrong Instrument

The Executive Order was not just a disputed answer. It was the wrong instrument. Our politics has grown too comfortable with shortcuts. When Congress does not act, presidents often try to fill the gap. When presidents act, the courts are asked to bless or block what lawmakers never debated. Then everyone claims the system is broken because one branch refused to do the work and another tried to do too much.

This is not a problem unique to one president or one party. Executive orders have become the duct tape of modern government. They are used to patch over legislative failure, signal political commitment, and create the appearance of action when the constitutional process is slow, public, and hard. But the slowness is deliberate.

Citizenship is not paperwork. It is the legal recognition of membership in the political community, which is why a republic should debate its boundaries with care. That means legislation when legislation is proper, judicial review when constitutional limits are tested, and amendment when the Constitution itself must change. None of that fits inside an executive order.

Justice Scalia once drew the line between changes “adopted as progressive by the American people” and changes “decreed as progressive by the Justices of this Court.” His point was aimed at courts, but the principle runs deeper. In a constitutional republic, lasting change should not be handed down by judges when the Constitution leaves the matter to the people. And it should not be announced by presidents when the Constitution gives the work to Congress, the courts, or the amendment process.

The Constitution does not require us to pretend hard questions are easy. It requires us to answer them through the institutions built for that purpose.

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The Constitutional Line

The debate over birthright citizenship is not frivolous simply because the current rule is old. Old precedents can be strong. They can also be tested by new facts. A serious republic should be able to say both things at once. Wong Kim Ark deserves respect. The Fourteenth Amendment deserves more.

If Congress believes the citizenship statute no longer fits the modern immigration system, it can make that case in the open and accept the judgment of the courts. What lawmakers cannot do is hide behind presidential action. And what the President cannot do is act as if executive power becomes constitutional authority whenever Congress lacks the courage to move.

The danger is not limited to this order. The larger danger is not only that one president may reach the wrong answer. It is that the country becomes comfortable with the wrong method. Today the shortcut may point in one direction. Tomorrow it may point in another. The constitutional damage is the same either way.

The Constitution gives us a way to argue about citizenship: Congress legislates, courts judge, and the people may amend the Constitution when the text itself must change. What it does not give us is a single person with the power to settle belonging with a signature.

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Every Fourth of July, we return to the Declaration of Independence, or at least to the lines most Americans know best.

That sentence deserves its place in our civic memory. It gave Americans a standard the country would spend generations trying to meet. Later generations would use it to challenge the nation, often more forcefully than the founders themselves had imagined.

But the Declaration was not written only to announce a principle. It was written to defend a decision.

The men who approved it were not writing from the safety of victory. They were speaking for a cause that could still fail. The colonies had been fighting Britain for more than a year, but independence remained a step many Americans had not yet accepted. Before Congress could ask the world to recognize a new nation, it had to explain why separation was justified. That argument had been building for years, but most of it had not begun as an argument for independence.

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Before Independence

The Declaration did not appear out of nowhere. By the summer of 1776, the colonies had been arguing with Great Britain for more than a decade, and most of that argument had not been about independence.

For years, colonial leaders insisted they remained loyal subjects of the Crown. Their quarrel was not with British government itself, but with a government they believed had violated the rights British subjects were supposed to possess. They were not yet asking to leave the empire. They were asking the empire to honor its own principles.

Even after fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, many Americans still hoped the breach could be repaired. By July 1776, Congress no longer believed that was possible. The Declaration gave that conclusion its public form. After years of arguing that British authority had violated British rights, Congress now had to explain why those violations justified leaving the empire altogether.

The Burden of Persuasion

By July 1776, Congress had already decided that the colonies would separate from Great Britain. The remarkable thing about the Declaration is not the decision itself, but what the delegates chose to do next.

Before speaking of equality or natural rights, and before listing a single grievance against the king, they paused to explain why they believed they owed the world an explanation.

Those are not the words of people who believed conviction alone settled the matter. The famous principles that follow are the beginning of a case Congress believed had to be made before independence could be defended.

Raising the Standard

The opening of the Declaration invites its readers to hear the case. The next paragraph tells them how to judge it. Jefferson begins with a thought that feels almost out of place: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes…”

Those words slow the document down just when we expect it to gather speed. Jefferson does not ask his readers to begin with the colonies’ grievances. He asks them to begin with the weight of the decision itself. Governments are not to be discarded because they disappoint us, nor is every injustice enough to justify revolution.

Only after establishing that principle does he turn to the conduct of George III. The grievances that follow are not simply a catalog of complaints. They are Congress’s answer to the standard Jefferson has already set. If long-established governments should not be changed for “light and transient causes,” then Congress had to show that Britain’s abuses were neither light nor transient. The Declaration is asking whether separation had finally become not a choice but a necessity.

The Citizen Appears

By the time Jefferson writes that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” Congress has already presented its case and left the judgment to its readers.

That is easy to overlook because we know how the story ends. The delegates did not. They could not assume agreement, much less demand it. The Declaration had to persuade its readers. It treated them not as subjects receiving an order, but as people capable of judging whether the case had been made.

Consent of the governed is usually read as a statement about the source of political authority. It is that, but it also says something about the people themselves. A government can rest on consent only if citizens are capable of judgment. The Declaration does not merely claim that power comes from the people. It assumes the people can decide whether power has been used justly.

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An Unfinished Experiment

The Declaration declared that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” but it left a question that would follow the republic from the beginning: who counted among the governed?

The question appeared almost as soon as independence did. Abigail Adams saw the problem before the Declaration was approved.

“We will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

She was not rejecting the Revolution. She was asking whether its principles would be applied as broadly as its language suggested.

Nearly a century later, Frederick Douglass returned to the same question from the perspective of a man born into slavery.

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

Douglass did not argue that the Declaration was wrong. He argued that the nation had failed to live under the principle it had already proclaimed.

Abraham Lincoln answered that challenge by returning to the Declaration itself. At Gettysburg, he reached past the Constitution to the nation’s first principle.

“Conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

For Lincoln, the Civil War was a test of whether the proposition announced in 1776 could endure.

A century after emancipation, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and described the Declaration as a promise still waiting to be honored.

“A promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

King was making the same argument Abigail Adams had made before the republic was born. The question was not whether the principle had power. The question was whether Americans would extend it to the people still waiting to be included.

That is where the Declaration becomes harder to live with than to quote. It gave Americans a way to defend independence, then left behind a principle that did not stay where the founding generation tried to leave it. It moved outward, slowly and unevenly, carried by people who could read the words and see themselves missing from them.

That does not make the Declaration weaker. It makes our obligation clearer. If we claim its principles as an inheritance, we also inherit the work of upholding them.

What Comes Next

The sentence we remember still deserves its place, but the Declaration is deeper than its most famous line. Its strength lies not only in the fact that it declared independence. It gave Americans a standard for what they should become.

We have never fully lived up to that standard, but we have never stopped returning to it. Americans have fought wars over it, amended the Constitution for it, and unsettled old arrangements because of it. That history should not make us cynical about the promise. It should remind us how much Americans have been willing to do when the country has fallen short of its own principles.

That is the inheritance the Declaration leaves us: not perfection, and not surrender, but the work of drawing the republic closer to the promise it made at the beginning. We are not the first Americans asked to do that work, and we will not be the last. But for now, it is ours.

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The words above were published a week after Lexington and Concord, which should give us pause. We tend to remember Lexington as the beginning of an independence movement already gathering momentum. Yet the men who had just watched the Massachusetts militia confront British regulars still described themselves as loyal subjects of the Crown. They condemned what they called the “persecution and tyranny” of the ministry, but they had not yet abandoned the political world they inherited.

The distance between Lexington and Independence is one of the easiest realities of the Revolution to overlook. Looking backward, the path seems direct. Looking through the documents of 1775, it appears far less certain.

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Still Loyal, Already Preparing

The spring of 1775 was not calm. British troops occupied Boston, and few colonists still trusted royal officials. In Massachusetts, provincial leaders had already begun operating outside the normal channels of royal government, while preparing for the possibility that force might settle the conflict between colony and crown.

Yet preparation and loyalty existed side by side. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress repeatedly framed its cause in constitutional terms. Its members argued that British officials had violated long-established rights and exceeded their lawful authority. They spoke less as founders of something new than as defenders of liberties they believed already belonged to them.

To modern readers, that position can seem contradictory. To many colonists, it was not. They believed the problem was not the British constitutional tradition itself. The problem was that those entrusted to uphold it had begun to abandon it.

A Constitution Worth Saving

A resolve adopted on 24 March 1775 makes that understanding clear. The Provincial Congress urged towns and individual inhabitants to continue the measures already recommended for “putting this colony into a complete state of defence.” It also warned that any relaxation would bring “the utmost danger to the liberties of this colony and of all America.”

Those ideas belong together. Massachusetts prepared for a serious confrontation, but the Congress had not yet prepared for independence. It sought to defend what it regarded as constitutional liberty. The colonists wanted to preserve rights they believed they had inherited through law and feared Britain now threatened.

This is where modern readers can easily lose sight of the world the colonists inhabited. Leaders in Massachusetts did not usually describe those rights as American rights. More often, they described them as the rights of Englishmen. They cited charters, common law traditions, and constitutional principles that they believed bound both Parliament and the Crown. They did not argue that Britain lacked all authority over the colonies. They argued that authority had limits.

The political categories later generations would use had not yet hardened. The spring of 1775 did not pit committed Loyalists against committed advocates of independence. Many colonists opposed the course Britain had taken and prepared for armed resistance, while still hoping the constitutional relationship could be repaired. They feared what might happen next, but they had not yet agreed on what should happen afterward.

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The Night Before

By mid-April, that fragile balance had begun to narrow. Reports circulated that General Thomas Gage might move against military stores outside Boston, and the warning network built over months of crisis began to matter in practical ways.

Paul Revere later testified that on the evening of 18 April, Dr. Joseph Warren sent for him and told him that British troops were expected to march “by water to Cambridge, and from thence to Lexington.” His account keeps the night grounded in what people knew at the time: troops were moving, leading men might be in danger, and the countryside had to be warned.1

That is the April 18 worth remembering. The concern was immediate and practical. Would troops seize supplies? Would they arrest leaders? Would force now settle disputes that petitions and political arguments had failed to resolve? Those questions mattered without a settled vision of independence.

In retrospect, independence can seem like the obvious destination. It was anything but obvious in the spring of 1775. Colonial leaders still framed the dispute as a fight over constitutional obligations and inherited rights, even as some prepared for the possibility of armed resistance.

The Declaration speaks with the confidence of a people who have reached a conclusion. The documents from the months before Lexington read like the work of people still wrestling with a question.

Farther From Independence Than We Remember

The Declaration of Independence now dominates our memory of the Revolution, but it remained distant in the spring of 1775. Not merely distant on the calendar, but distant in political imagination. Even after Lexington and Concord, many Americans continued to hope that Britain and the colonies could repair their constitutional relationship.

The Continental Congress offers another reminder of how much political ground remained. Congress had not yet treated independence as the inevitable result of the fighting in Massachusetts. To reach the Declaration, colonists first had to conclude not merely that British officials had acted improperly, but that the imperial relationship itself could no longer secure the liberties they sought to protect.

That conclusion came gradually as the war widened and reconciliation failed. In the spring of 1775, many Americans still stood between resistance and independence. The opening image makes that clear: even after Lexington and Concord, and even after blood had been shed, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress still described the colonists as loyal subjects of the Crown.

What Changed After Lexington

Lexington did not instantly create a movement for independence. It changed confidence that the existing relationship could be restored. Before the fighting, many colonists believed they could preserve constitutional liberties within the British system. After the fighting, that belief became harder to sustain.

The men who described themselves as “loyal and dutiful subjects” were not confused about who they were. They believed they defended a constitutional inheritance that stretched across the Atlantic and back through generations of English history. When they prepared for resistance, they hoped to preserve those liberties, not discard them.

The fighting at Lexington did not answer that question. It made the question harder to avoid. The Revolution did not begin with a settled vision of a new nation. It began with colonists trying to save a political world they believed was worth preserving, until events forced them to confront that it might no longer be repaired.

Sources

• Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 24 March 1775 Resolve.

• Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 26 April 1775 Address.

• Paul Revere Deposition, 1775.

• Journals of the Continental Congress, 1775–1776.

• Peter Force, American Archives, Fourth Series.

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By the time Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist No. 31, the argument over taxation had been going on for years. The United States had emerged from the Revolution with debts it could not reliably pay and a national government that depended on the states for the money needed to meet its obligations.

The Articles of Confederation created a common treasury, but Congress could not fill it on its own. The states were expected to raise their assigned shares through their own legislatures. In theory, the arrangement preserved their independence while allowing the Union to function. In practice, it left Congress asking for money it could not compel anyone to provide.

Hamilton had already described the problem in Federalist No. 15. Congress could pass resolutions, but without authority over individual citizens, those resolutions became “mere recommendations which the States observe or disregard at their option.” Congress tried to work around that weakness by proposing import duties in 1781 and again in 1783. Both efforts failed, leaving Hamilton convinced that a single state could frustrate the entire system.

By the time he reached Federalist No. 31, Hamilton believed the lesson was clear. A national government responsible for national obligations needed the authority to raise revenue directly. Since no one could predict the cost of the next war or emergency, that authority could not be confined within narrow limits established in advance. “As revenue is the essential engine” for meeting national needs, Hamilton wrote, the federal government “must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes.”

Hamilton had a strong case. A government that cannot pay its debts or provide for its defense will eventually discover that its other powers do not mean very much. But the Anti-Federalists saw a different danger inside the solution. They worried that a power granted to cure weakness would gradually change the character of the Union.

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What Brutus Saw in the Taxing Power

The Anti-Federalist writer known as Brutus, widely believed to have been Robert Yates of New York, raised that question before Hamilton wrote Federalist No. 31. Yates had served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention but left Philadelphia before the Convention completed its work. By the time the first Brutus essay appeared in the New York Journal in October 1787, he had become one of the strongest critics of the proposed Constitution.

Brutus did not treat taxation as one provision among many. He saw it as the power that would allow the rest of the federal government to grow. “The authority to lay and collect taxes is the most important of any power that can be granted,” he wrote, because it “will in process of time draw all other after it.”

That was more than an objection to taxes. Brutus was trying to understand what the new power would do to the relationship between Washington and the states. Congress would gain access to duties, imposts, excises, and direct taxation. The states would retain their authority, but they would be competing for revenue with a national government whose laws were supreme.

Brutus believed Congress should control duties on imports while the states retained greater authority over internal taxation. Hamilton rejected that distinction because he believed it would recreate the weakness the country had spent years trying to escape. Import duties might be enough in ordinary times, but a war could require much more.

The disagreement was not between people who understood the problem and people who did not. Hamilton saw the danger of giving the federal government responsibilities without the resources needed to meet them. Brutus saw the danger of giving it access to nearly every resource and trusting future generations to preserve the balance.

When the Argument Reached John Neville’s Door

The disagreement did not remain theoretical for long. In July 1794, it arrived at the home of John Neville outside Pittsburgh. Neville was the federal tax supervisor for western Pennsylvania, charged with collecting the excise tax on distilled spirits that Congress had enacted at Hamilton’s urging. For farmers west of the mountains, whiskey was not simply a drink. It was a practical way to turn grain into something easier to transport and sell.

Resistance had been building for years. When federal officers began serving writs on distillers who refused to comply, the conflict escalated. Armed men surrounded Neville’s estate at Bower Hill and demanded the surrender of a federal marshal. Fighting broke out, and by the end, the house and outbuildings were burning.

President Washington responded by calling out a militia force of nearly 13,000 men. By the time the troops arrived, the rebellion had largely dissolved. But the episode made the stakes plain. The new federal government could do what the Confederation could not. It could levy a tax and enforce it.

Hamilton saw a government capable of governing, and he was right that a republic could not allow armed resistance to determine which laws would be obeyed. But Brutus might have seen something else. The stronger government had arrived, and the power to tax carried with it the authority and resources needed to make that power real.

From Taxation to Influence

The federal government remained relatively small for much of the nineteenth century, but the direction of travel was clear. The Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, allowed Congress to collect income tax without apportioning the burden among the states according to population. That did not create an entirely new taxing power, but it made federal revenue easier to collect at scale.

Federal authority also grew through spending. Washington developed a powerful way to shape decisions traditionally left to the states by attaching conditions to federal money. The clearest example came in the 1980s, when South Dakota still allowed 19-year-olds to purchase low-alcohol beer and Congress threatened to withhold a portion of the state’s federal highway funds unless it raised the drinking age to 21. Washington did not order the state legislature to change its law. It used money to make the alternative more expensive.

South Dakota challenged the law, and the Supreme Court upheld it in South Dakota v. Dole. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dissented. Her concern was not that Congress could never attach conditions to federal funds. It was that highway money had become a tool for regulating a separate area of state policy. If that logic extended too far, she warned, Congress could reach “almost any area of a State’s social, political, or economic life.”

There was a serious public-safety argument for a uniform drinking age. But the case revealed how federal power had evolved. Washington did not need to eliminate the states when it could influence their decisions through money. That was the modern version of the concern Brutus raised two centuries earlier. The power to tax had become the power to spend, and the power to spend had become a way to shape decisions Washington could not always impose directly.

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The Ratchet

The Anti-Federalist argument becomes more persuasive when we stop imagining the growth of government as a dramatic act of seizure. That is rarely how power accumulates. More often, it grows through decisions that appear reasonable on their own and become difficult to reverse after people begin to rely on them.

The danger is that emergency power rarely feels temporary once people have learned to live with it. What begins as a response to a particular failure becomes part of the country’s expectations, and after a while the burden shifts from justifying its creation to defending its removal.

Some of those programs have been necessary. Others corrected failures that the states were unable or unwilling to confront. There is no serious way to look at American history and conclude that every expansion of national authority was a mistake. But the cumulative effect matters. Authority moves toward Washington more easily than it moves back, and programs created for defensible reasons do not disappear simply because the circumstances that first justified them have changed.

Ronald Reagan captured the problem in his 1964 speech, A Time for Choosing: “Governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” The line has lasted because it describes an institutional reality. Congress can create a program one vote at a time because each new program begins with a purpose and a constituency. Ending one is harder because every proposed reform becomes a separate fight, and each fight produces an argument for why this particular program should be spared.

Recovering Power

If power is easier to grant than to recover, restraint is not enough. The courts can police the outer boundaries, but they cannot rebuild the balance on their own. A citizen movement can create pressure, but without a process for returning authority, that pressure eventually turns into another slogan.

The best model may come from an unlikely place: the Base Realignment and Closure process, better known as BRAC. Beginning in the late twentieth century, Congress faced a problem it could not solve through ordinary politics. The country had more military installations than its post-Cold War needs, but closing a base meant that jobs, contracts, and local influence would disappear from someone’s district.

So Congress changed the process. An independent commission reviewed military installations and recommended a package of closures and realignments. The President and Congress could accept or reject the package as a whole, but they could not carve it apart one base at a time. That mattered because it prevented every local interest from defeating the larger national decision.

Returning authority to the states will require the same kind of discipline. Congress should create a HARBOR Commission, modeled on BRAC: Handing Authority and Responsibility Back to Our Republic. The name carries a little history. Americans once protested distant taxation by throwing tea into the Boston Harbor. HARBOR would be less theatrical, though there may still be some satisfaction in throwing a few taxes into the harbor along the way.

Its task would be easy to state and hard to execute: identify which federal responsibilities still require federal control, which should be returned to the states, and which no longer justify their existence. The recommendations would come as a single package of transfers, consolidations, and closures so Congress could not spare every favored program one fight at a time.

That structure matters because ordinary politics is built to protect the familiar. The point is not to cut for the sake of cutting. It is to force the question Congress usually avoids: where does this responsibility belong?

The debt makes that question harder to postpone. The next fiscal crisis will not arrive as a seminar on federalism. It will arrive as pressure and an emergency. In moments like that, constitutional limits are often treated less like rules of self-government than obstacles to be overcome. In the current political climate, even asking whether Washington has the authority to act can be treated as a refusal to care about the problem.

That is how constitutional government weakens. Not usually through open contempt, but through impatience. A crisis arrives, and the demand for action becomes absolute. Limits that once defined the system begin to look like excuses. Before long, anyone who insists on those limits becomes the problem.

That is why HARBOR matters. If there is no mechanism for returning power before the next crisis, the crisis itself will become the mechanism for expanding it. Hamilton was right that a government too weak to act could not survive. Brutus was right that a government accustomed to acting would not easily yield power back. The work now is to build a way back while constitutional limits still have a fighting chance.

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Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the American republic remains unfinished. That is not a failure of the founding. Self-government has always depended on the people entrusted with it.

The founders created a system strong enough to endure disagreement and survive change, but they never assumed the Constitution could settle every question that followed. The arguments at its core would be carried from one generation to the next, especially the question of how much power a free people should give their government.

That is why the 250th anniversary matters. It should be more than an occasion for nostalgia or a parade of familiar images and polished quotations. The American story is more useful than that. It reminds us that liberty does not sustain itself and that citizenship asks something of us in return.

I have spent much of my life returning to these questions, first as a student of history and later through work in government and public service. The more time I have spent with them, the less interested I have become in easy answers. The value of the American story is not that it settles every argument for us, but that it helps us see the choices in front of us more clearly.

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The Arguments Never Ended

The Unfinished Republic will return to the debates that shaped the country and follow them beyond the founding era. The Federalists deserve careful attention, but they were not the only voices worth hearing. The Anti-Federalists understood that a government strong enough to solve immediate problems could also become distant from the people it was meant to serve.

Their concerns did not vanish with ratification. The Federalists feared that a weak government would fail when the country needed it most. The Anti-Federalists worried that concentrated power would become difficult to restrain. Both sides understood that the structure of government matters because human nature does not change simply because a Constitution has been written.

We are still living with that tension. The scale of modern government would have startled both sides, but the underlying question remains familiar: how much authority can a free people safely place beyond their immediate reach? The question becomes more pressing when public institutions seem distant from the citizens they serve or less accountable for the decisions they make.

The Argument Across Generations

The debate did not end with the founding because every generation encountered its own version of the same problem. Lincoln wrestled with whether the Union could survive and become more faithful to its stated principles. Frederick Douglass forced the country to confront the distance between its promises and its practices.

The 20th century brought new versions of the same challenge. Eisenhower warned that power could gather quietly, even within institutions created for legitimate purposes. The civil rights movement reminded the country that constitutional promises mean little when they are not lived in practice. And the debates of the 21st century have shown that the tension between liberty, authority, and accountability has not gone away.

The circumstances changed, but the larger question remained. Could the country respond to new pressures and new forms of power without losing sight of its principles? That question has shaped the republic for generations, and it continues to shape our politics today.

Anniversaries can make history feel inevitable. Looking backward from the safety of the present, we can imagine that the outcome was always waiting for us. It was not. The country survived because people made difficult choices without knowing whether they would succeed. Some decisions brought the republic closer to its ideals. Others exposed the distance that remained.

A serious reading of the past must make room for both achievement and failure. The country has never been as pure as its admirers sometimes claim, nor as empty as its harshest critics suggest. Its history is more demanding than either version allows. The republic has endured because people continued to challenge it to live more fully by its own principles.

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The Responsibility Is Still Ours

That work does not belong only to presidents, judges, or elected officials. Self-government depends on citizens willing to pay attention and accept responsibility for the health of the republic. It requires us to argue in good faith and resist the temptation to treat every disagreement as proof of betrayal. A free society cannot function for long when people demand restraint from their opponents while excusing excess from their own side.

The 250th anniversary gives us a chance to reconsider those habits. The past does not offer simple answers, but it reminds us that our frustrations are not entirely new. Earlier generations left us arguments worth revisiting and lessons earned at considerable cost. What we do with them is now our responsibility.

No generation can complete the work of self-government and hand it down intact. Each inherits a republic shaped by the choices that came before and faces the question anew: what are we willing to preserve, what are we prepared to repair, and what have we allowed to weaken? The republic remains unfinished because each generation has to answer that question for itself.

Americans love to argue about taxes, but we rarely argue honestly about what they reveal. Most tax debates focus on who pays. Far fewer ask whether the public can still see clearly enough to understand what they are paying for. We have built a tax code that touches nearly every part of public life, yet hides behind rules few can follow without help.

Hamilton would have recognized the danger. Federalist No. 30 is usually treated as a defense of federal taxing power, but the deeper issue is accountability. A government that promises what it cannot finance is dishonest. Financing what people cannot understand creates a different problem. We all know the taxman collects, but we can no longer see him clearly.

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The Cost of the Articles

When Hamilton wrote Federalist No. 30, the young nation was struggling under the Articles of Confederation. Congress could request money from the states, but it could not compel payment. Hamilton wanted a government powerful enough to function, but accountable enough to trust. The national government carried responsibilities it could not reliably support.

Hamilton saw the contradiction immediately. “Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic,” he wrote, “as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions.” Many modern readers stop at the word “money” and assume Hamilton was talking about wealth. He was talking about capacity. Responsibilities without resources are just promises.

The problem under the Articles was not only financial weakness but confusion. Congress could blame the states, and the states could blame Congress. The public had no clear way to know who was responsible when obligations went unmet. Hamilton believed responsibility and authority were bound together. If the federal government carried national obligations, it needed the power to meet them. Only then could the public know who deserved credit when government succeeded and who deserved blame when it failed.

A Different Problem

Today, the problem has taken a different shape. Hamilton worried that the federal government lacked enough authority to raise revenue. Few would make that argument now. Washington has the power to tax, but power is no longer the issue. Clarity is.

The tax code began as a way to raise money. Over time, Congress made it carry more of the work of governing. A choice that might look costly in the budget can look less visible in the tax code, even when it still shapes behavior and shifts resources. That does not make every tax preference wrong. It does mean the public has to work harder to see what has been done.

That is where complexity becomes more than a tax problem. The more Washington hides choices inside the code, the harder it becomes to hold anyone responsible for them. Hamilton feared a government too weak to meet its financial obligations. We should fear one that forgets its obligation to the people paying the bill.

That is the danger of a tax code that becomes too hard to follow. It does not merely confuse people. It changes the relationship between the government and the governed. The people who know how the system works gain leverage. Everyone else is left to comply first and understand later.

The Transparency Deficit

Americans do not get to opt out of the tax system. We live under the code whether we understand it or not, which is why its rules should not become clear only after the bill comes due. Most people accept that taxes are necessary. What they should not have to accept is a government that sends the public a surprise bill for decisions it never got to see clearly.

That matters because taxes are not just numbers on a return. They represent a portion of someone’s life already spent earning the money. When the cost only becomes clear later, people are right to wonder whether the rules were written with them in mind.

If citizens are expected to obey the law and pay their bills, they should be able to understand the rules. If only the taxman knows the rules, taxation without representation takes on a new form.

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The Game Is Not Neutral

Complexity is often defended as the unavoidable cost of governing a modern economy. There is some truth in that. A country this large will never have a tax code that fits on a postcard, and pretending otherwise does not help the argument. But complexity does not fall evenly. It favors the people who can afford to understand the rules before everyone else even knows where to look.

That is where the imbalance begins. Expertise has value, and there is nothing wrong with hiring good advice. The problem comes when the system depends so heavily on specialists that ordinary taxpayers can no longer follow the rules without them.

Most Americans are not studying the tax code in their spare time. They are trying to live their lives and make good decisions with the information they have. When the rules become too complicated for most people to follow, the public loses more than convenience. It loses confidence that the same system is working the same way for everyone.

Hamilton’s Challenge

Federalist No. 30 contains another line that deserves more attention. Hamilton argued that “a complete power… to procure a regular and adequate supply” of revenue “may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution.” It is often read as a defense of federal taxing authority, and it is. But Hamilton was also setting a standard: if government claims responsibility, it must show the means.

That standard still matters because revenue is not only a tool of government. It is also a test of accountability. The question is not only whether Washington can collect. It is whether the people funding the system can still judge it.

This is where Hamilton’s argument turns back on modern government. He wanted a Union with enough power to meet its responsibilities, but that power was never meant to become distant from the people who fund it. Revenue should make the government function. It should not give the government shelter from accountability.

Trust Requires Light

Hamilton won the argument over federal revenue authority long ago, but the question beneath Federalist No. 30 did not disappear. The old question was whether the government had the means to act. The modern question is whether the public can still see how that power is being used.

That is where modern America has work to do. Washington can move money at a scale Hamilton could not have imagined. The problem is not that the government acts. The problem is that too much of its work now happens where the people paying for it cannot clearly see it.

Self-government asks more of us than voting. It asks us to see power clearly enough to challenge it. That becomes harder when the rules are written for people already inside the system.

Free people should never have to guess how they are governed.

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