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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The Diagnosis Is Easy

Americans have never lacked confidence in their diagnoses of national decline. Every age finds proof that the republic is weakening, and ours is no exception. We can spend a great deal of time naming what feels broken, but diagnosis has a way of becoming its own substitute for action. The harder question is what might make us healthier.

That is why Federalist No. 29 deserves a better reading than it usually receives. At first glance, it can feel like one of the more technical essays in the series, focused primarily on the militia and national defense. But Hamilton is working toward a larger question that still matters: what keeps a free people free?

Hamilton’s argument rested on a simple idea. Liberty survives only when citizens remain connected to the responsibilities of self-government. Read that way, Federalist No. 29 becomes more than a technical debate about military readiness. Beneath the constitutional mechanics, Hamilton asks whether a republic can preserve freedom once its citizens grow detached from the work of preserving it.

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The Fear Behind the Argument

The Anti-Federalists were not foolish to worry about military power. They had history on their side. Americans had just fought a revolution against imperial authority, and many remembered British troops not as abstract defenders of order, but as instruments of control. To people who had lived through that experience, giving the new federal government authority over the militia sounded less like efficiency and more like restoring the crown under a new name.

Hamilton understood the fear. One reason The Federalist Papers endure is that their authors rarely treated objections to the Constitution as unserious. They often thought those objections were wrong or overstated, but they understood their force. In Federalist No. 29, Hamilton was writing to citizens who feared that the very government created to protect liberty might someday command the means to destroy it.

His response was practical rather than sentimental. Hamilton argued that the federal government needed meaningful authority over the militia because common defense could not depend on scattered systems moving in different directions. A nation that could not organize its own defense would eventually discover that disorganization is not a theory of liberty. It is an invitation to danger. When he wrote that militia authority was one of the “natural incidents” of providing for the common defense, Hamilton meant that the duty to defend the nation carried with it the authority necessary to do so. If the Union had the duty to protect national survival, it needed the tools to meet that duty.

Hamilton distrusted political arrangements that depended on everyone behaving nobly at the same time. The Articles of Confederation had already shown the danger of a national government that could request and hope, but not reliably act. He wanted a republic capable of defending itself, not because he worshiped power, but because he understood that weakness could endanger liberty as surely as ambition.

The Limits of Theory

Federalist No. 29 is not a blank check for central power. Hamilton spends much of the essay explaining why the militia system would not become the nightmare his opponents imagined. He rejected the idea that the federal government could realistically turn the whole population into a constantly drilled military force. Trying to discipline the entire body of the people, he argued, would be both “mischievous” and “impracticable.” It would burden ordinary citizens, disrupt productive life, and turn civic obligation into a weight few people could reasonably sustain.

Hamilton’s answer is more restrained than the caricature usually allows. He was not imagining a country organized around permanent military readiness. He was trying to solve a practical problem: how to give the republic enough capacity to defend itself without letting defense consume the ordinary life of its citizens. His proposed “select corps” of the militia was an attempt to hold that line. It kept the people connected to the work of defense without asking every citizen to live as a part-time soldier.

That balance is the heart of the essay. Hamilton wanted the republic to be capable of defending itself without allowing defense to consume civic life. He wanted federal authority, but not a system in which the people disappeared from the equation. Properly understood, the militia was not only a military instrument. It was a reminder that the defense of a free society should remain connected to the citizens who live under it.

The Citizen Soldier and the Republic

Federalist No. 29 becomes larger and more hopeful when read as an argument about citizenship. A free people cannot treat the republic as someone else’s responsibility, push every duty upward, and then wonder why their institutions feel distant and unresponsive. Liberty depends on a living connection between citizens and the system they expect to preserve their freedom.

The Citizen Soldier embodies that connection. The idea is not simply that civilians may be called into military service. It is that service leaves behind the habits a republic needs long after the uniform comes off. The Citizen Soldier serves when called, then returns home to the longer work of citizenship.

That is what makes the idea hopeful without making it sentimental. Hamilton was not asking Americans to admire a cleaner past. He knew the republic had been born in argument and would live in argument. His confidence rested on something harder: the belief that free people could disagree fiercely and still accept enough obligation to keep the country from coming apart.

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The Modern Habit of Outsourcing

Our problem is not that Americans lack opinions. It is that opinion has become too easy to mistake for citizenship. We can react to politics all day without accepting responsibility for it. Hamilton would have recognized the danger. A republic does not survive because people admire liberty from a distance. It survives when citizens accept personal responsibility for whether freedom endures.

The Constitution can set the framework, but it cannot supply civic will. That work belongs to the people. Federalist No. 29 reminds us that liberty cannot be handed off to others or preserved by spectatorship. The republic needs citizens who still believe freedom asks a sacrifice of them.

That is the promise inside the Citizen Soldier ideal. Service is not only what happens in uniform. It is the habit of answering when the republic calls and carrying that obligation back into ordinary life. A country that remembers that habit has not lost its way. It still knows how to find its way back.

The Hope Inside the Essay

Federalist No. 29 carries warnings, but its deeper current is constructive. Hamilton believed the American experiment could work if free people remained close enough to the responsibilities of self-government. He did not ask Americans to choose between security and liberty. He asked them to build a republic capable of preserving both.

That belief is easy to miss because modern readers often come to Hamilton through the lens of his conflicts. We remember the ambition, the financial system, the fights with Jefferson, and the fatal duel that still casts too long a shadow over his public memory. But Hamilton’s constitutional writing is animated by a stubborn faith that the republic could be made to work if its design matched human nature.

There is hope in that realism. Hamilton did not ask Americans to become angels. He asked them to build institutions suited for flawed people who still wanted to live free. That may be one of the most useful lessons for our own time. We do not need a political system that waits for Americans to become less angry or less tribal. We need civic habits strong enough to help us act responsibly anyway.

Hope, then, is not denial. It is not pretending the republic is healthier than it is or using slogans to avoid hard truths. Hope is the belief that free people still have the power to repair what has weakened and that national dysfunction does not excuse personal withdrawal. That kind of hope is harder than cynicism because it asks something of us. It asks us to do the work of freedom.

The Right Prescription

The cure for what ails us will not come from a politics built around resentment, nor will it come from protecting the powerful because they happen to wear the right party label. Citizenship requires something more honest than that. It asks us to hold elected officials accountable regardless of party and to reject the old habit of political insiders shielding their own while asking everyone else to carry the cost. A country cannot outrage its way back to health. It has to recover the habits that make self-government possible.

That is the older and better meaning of citizenship Hamilton points us toward in Federalist No. 29. The militia question belonged to his time, but the principle behind it still belongs to ours. Liberty endures only when free people remain connected to the republic and to the responsibilities of citizenship.

That is the cure: renewed citizenship, rooted in the belief that freedom still asks something of us and that Americans are still capable of answering. For a country tired of diagnosing its own decline, that may be the hope Hamilton leaves behind: the cure is still in our hands.

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Americans put a lot of faith in the Constitution, and for good reason. But Hamilton understood something we sometimes forget: the Constitution does not climb off the page and stop power by itself. It only works when institutions defend their own role, and citizens believe they can still make government answer when it pushes beyond its proper limits.

Federalist No. 28 starts with that harder truth. A republic needs a government strong enough to enforce the law and defend itself when things get ugly. But that same strength creates the problem Hamilton could not ignore. The power that protects the republic can also threaten it when citizens lose the ability to limit it.

That is where No. 28 picks up from Federalist No. 27. In No. 27, Hamilton argued that government works best when people believe it is legitimate and answerable to them. No. 28 moves into rougher territory by asking what happens when legitimacy no longer carries the argument and force enters the picture.

Hamilton made a practical argument, not an authoritarian one. A government that cannot enforce the law cannot preserve order, and a republic that cannot preserve order cannot protect liberty. Americans rightly distrust concentrated power, but liberty needs more than limits on government. It also needs lawful authority strong enough to defend the conditions that make freedom possible.

That balance drives the whole essay. Hamilton wanted government strong enough to act, but still answerable enough to be restrained. Consent starts to weaken when the people’s judgment no longer changes the course of power. That is the question that Federalist No. 28 leaves us with: what happens when citizens remain free in theory but lose the practical power to make government answer?

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Hamilton’s Uncomfortable Answer

Hamilton defended national authority in Federalist No. 28 because he had seen what weakness produced under the Articles of Confederation. He did not want a national government that could only ask in the face of disorder. A government that cannot respond to rebellion or open defiance will not remain a government for long.

That part of Hamilton’s argument still matters. People can criticize government force in the abstract, especially when they live in a society where someone else usually preserves order. But liberty does not survive when lawful authority collapses. People cannot enjoy constitutional rights in a place where factions arbitrarily decide which laws count.

Hamilton did not ask anyone to trust power blindly, and this is where the Anti-Federalists had a point. Writers like Brutus feared that national power, once armed with enforcement authority, would not stay modest for long. They had fought a revolution against a distant power backed by troops, taxes, and executive command, so they understood how force used in the name of order could become force used against liberty.

Hamilton answered that fear with divided authority. If federal power became oppressive, the states and the people could resist. If state power became oppressive, federal authority could intervene. Hamilton believed federal abuse would meet more than scattered anger because the people would have states as organized centers of opposition. Resistance would have a political form rather than private rage.

That assumption makes No. 28 useful now. Hamilton’s argument depends on checks that are actually used. Once the institutions meant to restrain power lose the will to do it, the Constitution can remain intact on paper while its habits collapse in practice.

The Congressional Vacuum

Executive power often grows into the space Congress leaves behind. The legislature should be the first line of resistance when presidents exceed their authority, but too often it avoids the hard calls and waits to complain until power has already shifted. That pattern shows up most clearly in war powers, where Congress is supposed to decide when the country goes to war but often leaves presidents enough room to act first and explain later.

That arrangement lets members criticize military decisions after the fact without taking responsibility. The same habit appears in domestic policy, where Congress writes laws that leave agencies and presidents to make the choices voters actually feel. Executive power does not grow only because presidents take it. Congress hands power over first, then objects when the executive uses it, without doing the work required to restrain it.

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Federalism by Permission

Federalism usually weakens quietly. It does not always look like Washington marching in and taking power by force. More often, it looks like funding, rules, and dependency. The federal government offers money, imposes conditions, and, over time, turns state discretion into state compliance.

The Tenth Amendment is supposed to remind us that Washington has limits and that powers not given to the federal government remain with the states or the people. That principle should not become a partisan slogan, useful only when the other party controls the White House. Its job is simple: keep power from collecting in one place.

Not every federal action is wrong. The federal government has real authority, and a modern country needs that. The trouble begins when nearly every issue becomes federal by default. States may complain about Washington’s reach, but too often they accept the money that makes resistance harder.

Federalism matters because it gives citizens another place to turn when Washington overreaches. But that only works if states are willing to act like states. When they become managers of federal priorities, citizens lose a real channel of self-government.

The Permanent Emergency

Emergency power brings Federalist No. 28 closest to our own politics because Hamilton understood that government may need force when ordinary law cannot preserve order. That was more realistic than reckless. But emergency power is supposed to answer a real crisis, not become a shortcut around normal government.

The danger begins when presidents learn that crisis gives them room to move around Congress. Once that lesson takes hold, the temptation does not fade when the crisis does. What begins as a temporary response can become a habit of governing whenever ordinary politics becomes too difficult.

Executive power changes when presidents stop treating legal limits as real limits. Hamilton wanted energy in the executive, but energy was never supposed to mean self-permission. The president enforces the law. When he begins bending the law around his own sense of necessity, the office changes from executor to author.

Emergency power does not stay loyal to the president who first uses it. It becomes part of the office. The next president inherits it, expands it, and points to the last president as permission. If citizens only object when the other side holds power, they are not defending constitutional limits. They are aiding and abetting their erasure.

Constitutional limits rarely fall all at once. They weaken when citizens excuse their own leaders for what they condemn in the other side’s. That is how emergency power becomes normal: not because restraint loses the argument, but because partisans stop making it.

Citizenship without Control

The harder problem is not simply that leaders accumulate power. It is that citizens can slowly lose the tools to restrain political actors and the government itself. They may still do everything a healthy republic asks of them and yet find that power has learned how to absorb public frustration without changing course. A republic weakens when citizenship becomes mostly reactive, when people spend more time responding to power than directing it.

That is the slow death of consent. It begins when citizens come to believe their consent no longer changes anything. Hamilton assumed the people would remain active enough to resist abuse, but that assumption breaks down when public action becomes more like release than correction.

Hamilton accepted that the government sometimes needs force to preserve order. But he never treated citizens as passengers. His argument depends on a people strong enough to resist abuse when power crosses the line. Once citizens lose the tools to restrain power, consent becomes a claim made by the powerful instead of an authority held by the people.

The Final Check

The answer cannot be lawlessness. Federalist No. 28 uses the language of resistance, but in a republic, resistance begins with accountability rather than collapse. The purpose is not to tear down constitutional order. It is to make power answer to that order again.

That kind of accountability cannot depend on partisanship. If constitutional limits matter only when they restrain the other side, then they do not really matter at all. They become tools of convenience rather than rules of self-government.

That is the civic test Hamilton leaves behind. Power does not stay loyal to the people who defend it today. The authority excused in one administration will be available in the next, and each exception makes the next one easier to defend. Citizens cannot help weaken limits when those limits are inconvenient and then expect those same limits to protect them later.

Hamilton did not ask Americans to choose between order and liberty. He knew the republic needed both. Government had to be strong enough to preserve the Union, but restrained enough to remain answerable to the people. That balance only works if citizens refuse to become passive when power crosses the line.

The question is whether we still deserve Hamilton’s confidence. The people were supposed to be the final check, not the final audience. A republic cannot run indefinitely on procedure, force, and exhaustion.

Consent has to mean more than being counted. It has to mean being heard, being heeded, and having the power to pull government back inside its limits before government forgets those limits exist.

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There is a line in Federalist 27 that ought to make every elected official in America sit up a little straighter. Hamilton writes, “I believe it may be laid down as a general rule that their confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.” Strip away the 18th-century phrasing, and the point is direct: people obey government not simply because it has power, but because they believe it is legitimate enough to use that power. Citizens can fight their government and still believe the system belongs to them. Once that belief breaks, opposition becomes alienation.

That is the burden of Federalist 27. Hamilton is answering the fear that the proposed Constitution would require military force to enforce federal laws. His critics worried that a stronger national government would become distant and dangerous, especially when it acted directly on the people. Hamilton did not answer by pretending power was harmless. He argued that power is less dangerous when it flows through regular order, wise administration, and public confidence. When government earns legitimacy, it has “less occasion to recur to force.”

The warning for our time is that public trust does not collapse all at once. It erodes when citizens come to believe the rules are written to protect those in power rather than hold them accountable. Once that belief takes hold, every decision begins to lose moral force. They may be legal, but they no longer represent the people.

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From the Sword to the Law

Hamilton has spent the previous essays walking through the hard problem of power. In Federalist 23, he argued that a government responsible for national defense must have the authority to defend the nation. In Federalist 24 and Federalist 25, he pushed back against the idea that liberty could be preserved by pretending danger would politely wait outside the gates until Americans reached consensus. Then, in Federalist 26, he turned to civilian control and the question that sits near the heart of every republic: if the sword must exist, who controls it?

Federalist 27 moves from the sword to the law. Hamilton is no longer only asking if the Union will have enough power to act. He is asking whether national authority will be accepted as lawful rather than foreign. His answer is that federal power should operate through ordinary legal channels, so that obedience becomes part of civic life rather than a recurring confrontation. The laws of the Union, he writes, would become “the SUPREME LAW of the land,” and state officers would be bound by oath to support them. If these powers were administered with “a common share of prudence,” he believed there was “good ground to calculate upon a regular and peaceable execution of the laws of the Union.”

That phrase, “a common share of prudence,” is the hinge. Hamilton was not promising wise government. He was warning that lawful power still depends on restraint. Citizens can accept defeat when they believe the rules are fair and the next contest is real. But when the political class rewrites those rules to protect itself, it creates two systems: one in which politicians change the rules to get the results they want and another in which citizens must live with those results.

When the Rules Serve Power

Redistricting belongs here because it tests whether representation still runs from the people to the government, or from those in power down to the people. Hamilton was not writing about congressional maps, voter files, or consultants using software to carve communities into partisan shapes. But he was writing about public confidence, and that confidence breaks when politicians draw the rules of representation to protect themselves.

A district should begin with the people who live there: their towns, neighborhoods, shared problems, and common interests. Too often, mapmaking now begins with the desired outcome and the voters needed to secure it, then rearranges communities until they serve the result. Elections still happen, but representation shifts away from the people and toward the mapmakers. A small group of people gets to dig a moat around the castle of power, hollowing out representative government in the process.

The danger grows when politicians meet gerrymandering with more gerrymandering. One side redraws for advantage, the other retaliates where it can, and both insist they are only correcting the other’s abuse. That may work as a talking point, but it is a lousy form of self-government. In that cycle, voters stop being citizens and become pieces to move.

Mid-decade redistricting makes the motive impossible to hide. Redistricting is supposed to follow the census, when population changes require states to adjust district lines. When politicians redraw maps between censuses, they are trying to win through process what they fear they cannot win in November.

When politicians can redraw maps whenever they want a better deal, constituents become movable assets, kept as long as they're useful and discarded when inconvenient. That breaks the basic bargain of representative government: elections should be won by persuading voters, not rearranging them. If politicians can keep changing the electorate, they never really have to answer to it.

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Why Competitive Districts Matter

A close district keeps a politician from getting too comfortable. They cannot spend all their time preaching to people who already agree and calling that representation. They have to explain themselves to voters who still need to be persuaded. Competitive districts do not make politics noble, but they make it harder for representatives to confuse their supporters with the public.

Safe districts pull politics in the opposite direction. When the general election is effectively decided before it starts, the primary becomes the real threat, and the representative’s world gets smaller. Winning trust across the district matters less than avoiding punishment from the most intense voters in one party. Over time, that changes who runs for office, how they talk, and what they do once they get there.

The people back home are still there, but they no longer carry the same weight. The job starts to bend toward a national political world that rewards performance over accountability. Talking to constituents becomes part of the show, while the real relationships form far outside the district.

In a republic this large, the collapse of competitive districts should worry us. When most races are decided before November, the voters’ voice is silenced before the ballot is even cast. That is not self-government. It is a system learning how to protect itself from the people it is supposed to represent.

The Guardrails Are Weakening

The Supreme Court has made the redistricting fight more volatile. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court rejected Louisiana’s congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district, and found that the state had relied too heavily on race. The case puts two principles in tension: the Voting Rights Act protects voters from minority-vote dilution, while the Constitution limits how far states may go in using race to draw districts.

Some argue that race-based districts should disappear altogether. That debate deserves serious treatment. But if states replace race-conscious districting with openly partisan districting, they have not made the process more representative. They have only changed who benefits from the manipulation. A map built to protect political control does not serve the people simply because officials stop naming race as the rationale.

The Court did not repeal the Voting Rights Act, and we should not describe the ruling that way. But the decision narrows one of the remaining guardrails in redistricting fights. It gives states less room to answer vote-dilution claims with race-conscious districts, and it gives partisan mapmakers more room to test the boundaries. That is where a legal ruling becomes a political accelerant. It changes what states may do, and it invites political actors to push harder.

Weakened guardrails change behavior. Once parties sense more room to draw aggressive maps, restraint starts to look like surrender. Each side treats the other’s escalation as justification for its own excess. The result dilutes representative government under the false promise that everyone will return to the norms later. Each new map becomes the baseline for the next fight, and legal permission hardens into political insulation.

The Two Systems

The system creates the temptation. The same politicians who benefit from the rules often have the power to shape the conditions under which they keep office. Without restraint, the rules stop checking ambition and start serving it. Rules meant to protect the people start protecting the people already in charge.

Every faction can convince itself that its cause is too important to lose. Once that belief takes hold, politicians stop treating defeat as part of republican life. They turn it into a danger to be engineered away. They defend the tactic as necessary and dismiss restraint as surrender because they cannot trust the other side. That is how the political class builds two systems of rules: one in which citizens must accept the result, and another in which politicians keep adjusting the contest.

A republic cannot hold that bargain forever. Its legitimacy depends on the belief that the office is temporary and that a losing side can return by persuading enough people next time. The system does not require parties to like each other, but it does require both sides to accept competition as real. Redistricting attacks that belief by telling voters the map may matter more than persuasion.

A safe district turns the general election into a ceremony. It teaches candidates to please the right people rather than earn public trust, while voters learn that a legal map can still fail the basic test of representation. Too many politicians understand that problem clearly until the new lines protect them.

Who Are They Serving?

That is the question at the center of this essay. When politicians draw a district to secure a preferred outcome, they do not build it around the voter. They build it around the result they already want. When politicians redraw maps mid-decade and rearrange communities to chase another seat, the answer becomes hard to avoid: too often, the system serves those trying to keep control of it.

Hamilton’s point in Federalist 27 was that authority depends on confidence. People are more likely to accept government when they believe it is acting lawfully, prudently, and fairly. Redistricting abuse runs counter to that because it weakens accountability, strengthens party control, and helps politicians avoid defeat.

A map that delivers more seats may help win a speakership or protect a majority, but it also teaches citizens a dangerous lesson: politicians can treat representation as another tool of control. The same tactic celebrated in office becomes the abuse denounced in opposition. The public sees the pattern, and every new map becomes permission for the next one.

Federalist 27 still matters because law can give government authority, but only public trust can make it last in a free society. That trust weakens when citizens believe their representatives are sorting and managing them instead of answering to them.

A district drawn to protect a party does not give citizens a voice; it gives the party control. And a republic cannot remain free for long when those in office become more committed to protecting their position than answering to the people.

The Man at the Front of the Room

It was September 1986 when I walked into James Lohr’s chemistry class for the first time. He was younger then than I am now, though that is the kind of thing you only think about years later. Back then, he seemed ancient, which is probably how most teachers looked to a sixteen-year-old. What stayed with me was not really his age so much as the way he carried himself. He was serious, steady, and plainly there to teach, and even as a kid, I could tell he was not going through the motions.

What I remember most is that chemistry never stayed neatly inside chemistry. The class had structure, and the material mattered, but he was never afraid to stop and take a student’s question seriously, even when it seemed to lead away from the day’s lesson. At the time, that could feel like a digression. Looking back, it feels more like part of the class itself. He taught chemistry, but he also taught in a way that made the subject feel connected to the rest of life.

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The Line That Stayed

He is still vivid to me all these years later. I can picture his face, his Pennsylvania Dutch beard, and the dry way he answered questions. One memory has stayed with me for nearly forty years because it captured so much of him in a single moment. Whenever we were assigned a paper, somebody would eventually ask how long it had to be. Mr. Lohr would pause, stroke his beard, look slightly upward, and say, “Long enough to cover the subject.”

That was the whole answer, and it was very much his style: dry, precise, and delivered in a way that made further discussion feel unnecessary. He was not trying to be clever for the sake of it. That was simply his way of cutting straight to the point and leaving it there.

And then there were the chemistry jokes. One of his lines was, “Little Willy was a chemist, Little Willy is no more. What he thought was H2O was H2SO4.” It was exactly the sort of joke a chemistry teacher would treasure, and a teenager would pretend not to enjoy, which may be why it stayed with me. So did “long enough to cover the subject,” and forty years later, I can still hear both lines in his voice. People who have worked for me have heard that story and that line for several reasons, hopefully with some sense of the impact it had on me.

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The Life Behind the Teacher

When I read his obituary, parts of the man I had seen as a student came into clearer focus. He was born in Indian Head, Pennsylvania, to a coal miner father and a mother who taught piano. After his father was paralyzed by a mining injury, he left home young and came to Maryland’s Eastern Shore with a suitcase and five dollars in his pocket. That is not the beginning of an easy life, and it helps explain how he carried himself. He learned early that life was serious business.

He found work, found opportunity, earned a degree in chemistry, later completed a master’s degree in science education, and spent thirty-seven years teaching chemistry at Easton High School. His family wrote that he never forgot how much his own life had depended on the intervention of others at key moments, and that this memory shaped the way he taught. His classroom stayed open after hours for students who needed help, and he tutored nursing students because he knew a life can change when somebody decides you are worth the effort.

That helps explain why he never seemed like a man who was merely covering material. He believed what happened in a classroom mattered. His family wrote that he believed in the lasting value of public education and understood that with knowledge comes power, and with power comes responsibility. That’s not included in an obituary because it sounds nice, but because it’s the settled view of a man who had thought hard about what teaching was for.

What Students Carry

One detail in the obituary stopped me. His family wrote that former students had been a frequent topic of conversation around their kitchen table for years, that he talked about where they had gone, how they were doing, and what had become of them. That tells you a great deal, because plenty of teachers care in the moment, while fewer keep caring for decades. That detail reached back across the years and confirmed something many of his students probably felt without ever being able to prove: the concern was real.

By the time I knew him, he had already lived enough life to know that teaching was not a performance and that a classroom was not a holding pen for bored teenagers. He was not trying to be your friend. He was trying to teach you something, and within that effort lay a larger challenge: pay attention, think clearly, and take the world seriously. Those lessons wear better than most.

What He Was Really Teaching

I often write on this site about the Constitution, the Founders, ambition, power, and the institutions meant to keep a free society from flying apart. But a republic is not held together by documents alone. It also depends on habits of mind and character formed long before anyone reads The Federalist Papers or runs for office.

That work happens first in families, then in churches, communities, and all the ordinary places where people are shaped. It happens in classrooms too, when a teacher refuses to treat learning as busywork or students as a problem to be managed. Men like James Lohr were part of that quieter work, helping form citizens without ever needing to say so.

That may be why teachers like him stay with people so long. They were not simply delivering information. They were showing, by example, what seriousness, judgment, and self-command looked like, and when enough adults like that disappear from a culture, the loss eventually shows up everywhere else.

What Stayed With Me

I did not walk into his classroom in 1986 expecting any of that. I thought I was taking chemistry, but what I got was a picture of what a serious adult looked like, even though I was too young at the time to fully understand it. Mr. Lohr was the kind of teacher whose life gave weight to his words and who expected students to rise to the level of the material rather than dragging the material down to meet them. What stayed with me was not only what he taught, but the sense that teaching itself was serious work and that students were worth the effort. There is a line in his obituary from a visitor near the end of his life who told him, “You have made a difference.” In his case, that feels both true and earned.

I am sure I was not one of his more memorable students, but that made him no less present in my life. He stayed with me in the way good teachers do, not always at the front of your mind, but never very far from it. Long after I forgot most of the chemistry, I remembered the man.

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A Man Returns Home

In August 1895, Wong Kim Ark returned to San Francisco after a temporary trip to China and found that the federal government would not let him reenter the country where he had been born. Officials argued that birth on American soil did not make him a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that claim eventually reached the Supreme Court. In 1898, the Court rejected the government’s position and held that a man born in the United States to non-citizen parents who were permanently domiciled here was a citizen at birth.

That story still carries weight because it reminds us that the argument over birthright citizenship did not suddenly appear in the age of cable panels and executive orders. It is an old constitutional dispute, and from the beginning it has involved more than theory. It has forced the government to answer a basic question about law and belonging: when a person stands before the state, born here, does he belong here or not? More than a century later, the Supreme Court must again confront the scope of birthright citizenship. But the part of the case that keeps drawing me back is not only the debate over text. It is the question of whether an administration that rejects the current legal understanding may try to force a new one into place through executive action when Congress has already spoken through statute, and the courts have already spoken through precedent. Once that becomes the issue, the case no longer concerns immigration policy alone, or constitutional interpretation in the abstract. It becomes a case about how the law changes and whether the country still expects major legal change to move through the institutions that test it and legitimize it.

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The Question Beneath the Case

There is nothing improper about arguing that the law has taken a wrong turn. Congress can write a bad statute. Courts can misread a constitutional provision. Even a longstanding legal settlement can deserve another look if the case for rethinking it is serious enough. That is part of republican life. It is how a constitutional system stays alive rather than turning itself into a shrine to old conclusions. So the point here is not that birthright citizenship must remain forever beyond debate. The point is that the Constitution does not treat every possible route to change as equally legitimate. Some routes force scrutiny, consent, and institutional testing. Others try to achieve by executive speed what the constitutional order ordinarily requires people to earn through argument and persuasion.

That distinction matters because of the posture of the present dispute. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” directing the federal government not to recognize citizenship for certain children born in the United States to mothers who were unlawfully present or temporarily present, unless the father met certain citizenship or permanent-resident conditions. Lower courts blocked the order, and the Supreme Court heard arguments on April 1, 2026. What makes that sequence important is that the administration is not merely floating a constitutional theory in an academic journal or, in the ordinary course, asking the judiciary to reconsider precedent. It is asserting executive authority in an area where the governing legal order already includes constitutional text, a federal statute, and long-settled Supreme Court case law. Title 8 of the United States Code states that a person born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is a citizen at birth. The administration, then, is not simply offering an interpretation. It is trying to push around an existing legal structure rather than work through it.

Why Method Is Part of the Substance

That is why method matters here, and why it should matter even to people who are open to revisiting the current understanding of birthright citizenship. The Constitution does not leave the country helpless when citizens or officeholders believe that a major legal question has been wrongly settled. Congress may revise statutes. Litigants may ask the judiciary to narrow, distinguish, or overturn precedent. And if the country genuinely comes to believe that constitutional text itself should change, Article V remains available. None of those paths is quick, and none is easy, but that does not show constitutional failure. It shows that the American system requires more than executive impatience before the legal ground shifts beneath the public.

In other words, the process here does not distract from the real question. In constitutional government, process helps answer it, because it shapes how officials exercise power, how institutions build legitimacy, and what future officeholders think they can claim for themselves. When a president uses an executive order to unsettle a structure that Congress and the courts have already reinforced through statute and precedent, the lesson reaches well beyond the policy dispute at hand. He teaches the country that certainty and impatience can make the ordinary channels of legal change look optional. That habit has consequences. It encourages the public to treat the constitutional order not as a framework within which power must operate, but as a set of obstacles that the boldest branch can manage if it moves first and forces everyone else to react later.

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What the Federalists Still Have to Say

This is where the Federalist frame helps, not because the eighteenth century offers easy answers to every modern question, but because it still offers clarity about structure. Hamilton argued for energy in the executive because he understood that government without vigor can become incoherent, evasive, and weak. But he did not defend executive energy in order to blur the line between enforcing the law and remaking it. He defended decisiveness in administration, accountability in office, and the capacity to act where the Constitution and the law had already entrusted action to the executive. He did not argue that a president should push aside the ordinary work of lawmaking and adjudication whenever Congress moves too slowly and the courts seem likely to resist.

Madison’s framework points in the same direction. The Constitution assumes ambition, rivalry, and institutional friction, which is precisely why it divides power rather than concentrating it. The Framers did not expect one branch to take the lead on every urgent question while the others scrambled to catch up. They wanted difficult matters to pass through more than one center of authority so that law, especially on questions of enduring importance, would carry more legitimacy than the will of a single officeholder. Viewed through that lens, the birthright citizenship case is not simply another policy clash. It reflects a broader trend in modern governance, in which presidents of both parties increasingly cite congressional paralysis, legal complexity, and political urgency as reasons to expand executive initiative. The script now sounds so familiar that people mistake it for common sense: Congress will not act, the issue is too important to wait, and the courts can sort it out later. But that is not really a theory of constitutional government. It is a habit of executive impatience that has grown easier to defend only because the rest of the system has grown too accustomed to it.

This Is Not an Argument for Freezing the Law

None of this requires anyone to pretend that the present legal understanding of birthright citizenship lies beyond challenge. It does not. People who believe that Wong Kim Ark should be read narrowly, or that modern assumptions about citizenship have drifted away from the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, have every right to make those arguments. They can bring them to court. They can make them in scholarship, in Congress, and in public debate. There is nothing un-American about pressing for legal change. On the contrary, a healthy republic depends on the ability to argue for legal change within the constitutional order itself.

What does not follow, though, is that executive action may stand in for that larger constitutional labor. An administration may challenge precedent, but it should not act as though an executive order can perform the work that belongs to Congress, the judiciary, or the amendment process. To my mind, that is the stronger argument in this case because it avoids the lazy mistake of treating precedent as sacred and change as illegitimate. The issue is not whether change may happen. The issue is whether a president may announce a narrower constitutional view, instruct the bureaucracy to enforce it, and leave the rest of the system to absorb the shock. On a question as consequential as citizenship, that is very hard to defend. The Court may yet choose to narrow or revisit existing doctrine, but that is a different thing altogether from allowing the executive branch to behave as though that work has already been done.

The Better Standard

A better standard would begin with a simple but demanding premise. If Americans want to revisit birthright citizenship, they should do so openly and lawfully, through the institutions that give lasting change its legitimacy. They should make their argument in court and ask the judges to reconsider the doctrine. They should make the argument in Congress wherever Congress has room to act. And if they truly believe the constitutional text has been wrongly understood at the deepest level, they should make the harder case for amendment. That path is slower, less dramatic, and much less satisfying for leaders who want immediate victories. But constitutional government was never designed to guarantee quick wins for the side most persuaded of its own righteousness. It was designed to ensure that lasting change would be tested by institutions broad enough to legitimize it and sturdy enough to slow it down.

That is also why executive shortcuts do so much damage over time. Their effect does not stop with a single policy or administration. They teach the public to think that constitutional order is optional whenever the issue is urgent enough and the president is determined enough. Once that mindset takes hold, it does not stay boxed inside immigration law. It reappears wherever a future administration decides that legislation is too slow, the courts too uncertain, or public persuasion too burdensome. And every time it reappears, the same claim returns with it: the matter is too important to wait, so the executive must act. A republic can survive episodes of that reasoning. What it cannot do, at least not without cost, is turn that reasoning into a governing style.

Closing Thought

The story of Wong Kim Ark still matters because it reminds us how much is at stake when the government treats citizenship as something it can narrow first and justify later. But the larger issue in the present case is whether the country still believes that constitutional ends must be pursued through constitutional means. That concern is not abstract, and it is not merely procedural. It goes to the heart of how modern presidents understand power and how Congress has too often allowed itself to become a spectator, condemning executive overreach in theory while tolerating it whenever the overreach comes from the right political team. The result is a political culture that rewards motion, mocks restraint, and slowly teaches the public to treat the ordinary constitutional route as unusual simply because it is slower and more demanding.

That is a bad bargain for everyone. A republic cannot preserve its balance if each branch defends the Constitution only when it is losing. On a question as weighty as citizenship, that should be clear enough. If birthright citizenship is important enough to revisit, then it is important enough to revisit honestly through the courts, through Congress, and, if the country is prepared for it, through the amendment process. What should concern us is not only the answer the Court eventually gives, but whether we have become so accustomed to executive shortcuts that the ordinary constitutional route now feels exceptional. If that happens, the deeper loss will not be confined to this case. It will be felt across the whole structure of self-government.

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Spending Like Drunken Sailors

Last week, the federal debt crossed $39 trillion, and Congress is not even close to slowing down. U.S. Department of the Treasury data put total public debt just above that mark on March 19, 2026. The jump from $38 trillion to $39 trillion took about five months, after the move from $37 trillion to $38 trillion took about two months. This should force a serious national debate. Instead, it barely got noticed in the noise of Washington.

Congress will happily burn days on nominations, investigations, and whatever new outrage can fill an afternoon of cable news. But when the conversation turns to the cost of its own decisions, you can hear crickets in the swamps of the Capitol. Most members of Congress couldn’t tell you what the government should stop doing, which promises they cannot keep, or what taxpayers and future generations can actually bear. Reinforcing the old saying that Washington is 68 square miles surrounded by reality.

Each new trillion shows up faster than the last, while members of Congress play their role in the professional wrestling drama. In Washington, a freeze is a cut, and a real cut is an act of war. Then members go home and brag about spending that shows up in the district or state. The theater is so old that hardly anyone in town seems to notice it anymore.

Reagan saw this years ago. In “A Time for Choosing,” he said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size,” then added the line that still lands because it is still true: “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” That quote from 1964 rings even truer more than six decades later. Temporary solutions become permanent expenses without debate.

That is also why gimmicks thrive. Caps, triggers, delayed savings, rosy ten-year projections, and promises that the pain starts later. None of that is cosplay discipline. By the time the trick is exposed, the debt is even higher.

How does fiscal discipline work in Washington? Something like this:

A man comes home from work, out of breath, and drops into a chair at the kitchen table.

His wife asks, “What happened to you?”

He grins and says, “I skipped the bus and ran behind it all the way home. Saved myself $2.50.”

She looks at him and says, “That’s nothing. Tomorrow run behind a taxi and save $15.”

You, too, are now a Washington budget expert.

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Fiscal Pride Before the Fall

The United States does not need a dramatic collapse to get itself into trouble. It just needs to get comfortable with habits that slowly box it in. A government promises more than it is willing to pay for. Borrowing is the easiest route, because it feels like a victimless crime. No one pays more today, no one loses a pet program, and they’ll be out of office before the bill comes due.

Interest is where this stops sounding abstract. Debt service is money already committed before Congress makes a single new decision, and that is the deeper problem. Debt does not just crowd out other priorities. It narrows self-government itself because a republic is supposed to debate real choices in real time. But a government buried in debt enters every debate with fewer real options and too much of the future already spoken for.

Sooner or later, debt becomes more than a number. It begins to limit what the government can do, especially when a crisis hits, and real choices have to be made. Great powers can carry debt for a long time. But it’s time for Congress to admit it has an addiction and begin the road to recovery.

Hamilton Understood Credit and the Danger

Hamilton was not hostile to public credit. He understood that a serious country needs the ability to raise money and respond to danger. In Federalist 15, he asked, “Is public credit an indispensable resource in time of public danger?” In Federalist 30, he wrote that “Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic.” And in Federalist 34, he argued that government must have the “CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen.” He understood a simple point Congress often prefers to forget: a republic cannot defend itself on good intentions alone.

But that was never his whole argument. Hamilton did not praise credit, so politicians could treat borrowing like a permanent escape hatch. He also insisted that the government needed “a regular and adequate supply” of revenue, and warned that without it, the government would “sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish.” He warned too of “the destruction of public credit at the very moment that it was becoming essential to the public safety.” In plain English, credit only works when it rests on something real: revenue, trust, and a government willing to level with the public about what it can actually afford. Congress prefers the half of Hamilton that justifies borrowing and skips the half that demands discipline.

And Hamilton was writing with a warning already in view. The Federalist Papers appeared in 1787 and 1788 as France was sinking deeper into the fiscal crisis that helped trigger the Revolution. That matters because debt becomes more than just a financial problem when a government can no longer make its promises, taxes, and political order align. At that point, the budget is no longer just a ledger. It becomes a test of whether the government can still level with the public.

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What $39 Trillion Tells Us

That is the real problem in Washington. The issue is not simply that Congress spends too much, though it does. It is that the system itself is built to protect spending, postpone consequences, and make serious restraint look politically absurd. Growth is treated as the baseline, while any real effort to slow it is framed as cruelty or retreat. Gimmicks are packaged as reform, temporary measures become permanent fixtures, and both parties keep finding ways to postpone the reckoning. Republicans campaign as budget hawks and then govern as if the bill will come due on somebody else’s watch. Democrats defend spending growth as though arithmetic were a partisan attack. The language changes, but the dodge stays the same. In both parties, the next election still seems to matter more than the next generation.

That is why $39 trillion matters. Not because round numbers have some mystical significance, but because this one puts the habit in plain view. Congress still wants applause for the promises, credit for the spending, and distance from the cost. It will fight over almost anything except the spending patterns that created the mess in the first place. And it keeps relying on the same evasions, calling a freeze a cut, dressing up gimmicks as reform, and treating delay as though it were a governing strategy.

Debt is not the whole problem, but it is the clearest sign of it. It shows what happens when a political system chooses avoidance over restraint and delay over honesty. That is the warning inside the number.

Where No. 26 Sits in the Argument

By the time Alexander Hamilton reaches Federalist No. 26, he is no longer trying to prove that the country needs the power to defend itself. He has already made that case. The Articles of Confederation had left the nation weak, divided, and unable to respond with much consistency or force. Here, Hamilton turns to the harder question: if the federal government must have the power to raise and support armies, what keeps that power from becoming a danger to liberty itself?

That is what gives it its place in the larger argument of the Federalist Papers. It is not a stand-alone essay about military policy. It sits in the middle of Hamilton’s case for national defense, where he insists that the Union must have real power to provide for the common defense, but that such power must still operate within a constitutional system of restraint. Federalist 23 lays out the case for national defense powers. Federalist 24 and Federalist 25 confront the fear of standing armies and the comforting fiction that the states could manage major threats on their own. Then Hamilton reaches the next obvious concern: if the federal government may maintain an army in peacetime, what prevents that power from becoming an instrument of tyranny?

That makes this essay the hinge in the argument. Hamilton shifts from necessity to restraint. He is no longer asking readers to accept that the country needs military capacity. He is showing them how the Constitution is supposed to keep that capacity under civilian control. That is the real subject here: whether a republic can possess military power without surrendering liberty to it.

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The Fear of Standing Armies

The fear Hamilton is addressing was not invented for effect. Americans had inherited a deep suspicion of standing armies from English history, where military force tied too closely to executive power had long been seen as a threat to freedom. That suspicion only deepened in the colonies, where British troops were not a theory but a lived reality. To many Americans in 1787, the phrase standing army did not sound like safety. It sounded like what Hamilton called an “hereditary impression of danger to liberty.”

He does not dismiss that fear. He takes it seriously and then tries to contain it. The Anti-Federalists were raising a real concern. If the Constitution had simply handed military authority to a permanent executive with no meaningful restraint, the criticism would have landed. But Hamilton argues that the Constitution answers that danger by placing military support in the legislature and forcing that support to be renewed at regular intervals. The power to raise and support armies belongs to Congress, and appropriations for that purpose may not last longer than two years. That is not some dusty procedural footnote. It is the check.

Hamilton also believed that some of the opposition had drifted into what he called an “injudicious excess.” The old fear of standing armies was understandable. But in his view, some critics had carried that fear so far that they no longer distinguished between a monarchy and a republic, between an unchecked ruler and a legislature accountable to the people. His answer was not that power was harmless. It was that a republic with elected lawmakers and recurring votes had to be judged differently from a monarchy. The real question was whether military power remained chained to institutions the public could still see, contest, and control.

Hamilton’s Constitutional Answer

And it is a smart one. The army cannot simply roll on by habit. It must be funded again, debated again, and justified again. For Hamilton, legislative control was the “ultimate point of precaution” consistent with the safety of a free people. His point is not that elected officials are magically virtuous. His point is structural. Military power is safer when it remains dependent on representative institutions, regular elections, and public scrutiny. In his view, liberty is preserved by forcing power to come back, again and again, to the people’s representatives for approval.

That argument only makes sense if you remember the failure that came before it. The Constitution did not emerge from a season of national confidence. It emerged from drift, weakness, and frustration under the Articles of Confederation. The central government struggled to raise money and coordinate defense, and repeatedly depended on the states to act together when they were busy guarding their own prerogatives and pulling in different directions. The framers were not solving an imaginary problem. They were trying to build a government that could survive contact with reality.

Hamilton is responding to two dangers at once. Americans had seen the threat of concentrated military power, but they had also seen the weakness of a government unable to defend the nation. A government too feeble to defend itself is not a guardian of liberty. It is an invitation to disorder, foreign pressure, and national humiliation. That is why this essay is more than a defense of peacetime armies. It is a lesson in constitutional design. Hamilton is asking whether a free people can create enough national capacity to govern and defend themselves without building the machinery of oppression. His answer is yes, but only if power remains tied to institutions that force accountability.

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When the Guardrails Go Soft

This is where the essay starts sounding familiar. Hamilton’s argument depends on one core assumption: military power in a republic must remain tied to recurring public consent. The Constitution allows for an army, but it does not treat that army as a permanent force floating above politics. It requires Congress to revisit the question, fund the force, and take responsibility for doing so in public.

Congress still funds the military. It still passes appropriations. But on the deeper question of ownership, the branch Hamilton expected to carry the burden has often seemed more interested in commentary than responsibility. Presidents act. Congress complains, applauds, hedges, and issues statements that vanish by the next news cycle. The money keeps flowing, the machinery keeps moving, and responsibility gets smeared so widely that no one really owns the decision.

His point was not simply that legislators should sign checks every two years. It was that recurring control over military support would force recurring political accountability. Congress was supposed to face that question “once at least in every two years,” not let military power settle into a permanent habit. Members would have to defend the policy, justify the expense, and answer to the public. The appropriations limit was supposed to prevent military power from becoming routine, unquestioned, and separated from real civilian control. But routine is exactly what modern government does best. Give Washington enough years, enough acronyms, and enough press releases, and almost anything can become background noise.

That is the sharper warning inside the essay. The danger is not only executive overreach. It is legislative drift. It is Congress growing comfortable with reacting instead of deciding. A modern superpower cannot function as though it were still a fragile Atlantic republic in 1787. Hamilton would have understood that. He was not arguing for helplessness then, and he would not argue for it now. But he would have recognized the danger of normalized military power that continues with less real debate, less real ownership, and less real accountability.

Federalist 26 is Hamilton’s warning that military power in a republic must never become routine. The country may need an army, readiness, and force. But in a free government, those things must remain tied to public consent and legislative control. Hamilton’s answer was structure. Put military power under the “ultimate point of precaution,” review it often, fund it openly, and make elected officials own it. Do not let the sword drift free of the Constitution.

That is where the essay still stings. The danger is not only an overreaching president. It is a Congress that gets lazy, loud, or comfortable enough to let military power become background noise. Once that happens, oversight becomes theater, funding becomes a habit, and accountability starts to look like somebody else’s job.

That is the enduring challenge of Federalist 26. Not whether America should be defended. It should. The question is whether the people’s branch still has the discipline to control the means of that defense, or whether it has settled for clapping, complaining, and cashing the bill.

A republic does not lose its liberty because an army exists. It loses it when elected leaders stop doing the work of controlling it. That was Hamilton’s warning, and it still lands.

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