The Test They Left Us
The Founders told the world what tyranny looks like. Before we honor them tomorrow, we must hold their list up to America today.
Video discussion for paid subscribers follows article. (This one is longer than usual… and I share some of my struggles and why I’ve been waking up at 2am with a feeling of doom)
In the summer of 1776, in a hot room in Philadelphia, a few dozen men signed a document they knew could be their death warrant. These were not men radicalized by personal desperation. Most had wealth, property, and families to lose. And still, they pledged to one another “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and they meant it as plainly as it reads.
They took this risk because they had watched power gather dangerously into one man’s hands. They laid out their case against him, item by item, and reached a verdict: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
Tyranny has long had a shape you can recognize and name, as our Founders documented in their famous Declaration. So while we celebrate their triumph this weekend, the most patriotic thing we can do is read it. Not as a story about a king long dead, but as a test a free people must keep giving itself. Would those men recognize this moment? Can we?
Lawmakers Made to Obey
The test starts where our Founders started, who first protested a ruler that suppressed the voice of their colonial assemblies. He would withhold laws whole communities depended on, they charged, “unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.” And he leaned on lawmakers who resisted by holding them in “places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”
Let’s compare those words to what we have witnessed today. Just last week, we watched a Congress that can barely agree on the date overwhelmingly approve a measure to address our nation’s dire housing crisis. But our President decided to withhold his signature until Congress added new voting hurdles, because he’s scared of what could happen in the midterms without them. So a law Americans desperately need is being withheld, not on its merits, but in an attempt to erode our right of self-governance. The same one they said only tyrants fear.
But that wasn’t all. That day the President also held a private meeting with Senators of his own party, berating those who dared to question his war in Iran. When faced with the President’s anger, Senator Bill Cassidy told reporters he did not stay quiet.
But by the end of the night, after another private White House briefing, Cassidy folded to the pressure and killed a key war powers resolution vote to please the President. Just hours after saying he wouldn’t be “bullied into silence”, Cassidy was forced into a compliance that once took the patient coercion of a King. (So did Rand Paul, who voted against the resolution for the first time, ever…. When his vote could have actually made THE difference. He is NO HERO. I have a Rand Paul story I’ll tell in the video that follows.)
Forces Turned Inward
Our Founders also condemned a ruler that aimed armed power at his own people, who “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” and who shielded his men “by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”
That complaint should also ring a bell for Americans. Over the past year our President has ordered troops into American cities, led mostly by governors and mayors who did not request them, to crack down on crime and immigration. Close to five thousand troops remain in our nation’s capital, their mission extended over the objection of city officials. And when his questionable authority on these deployments was challenged, he gave a revealing answer.
Not the Constitution. Not the law. Just that he is the President, and can do what he wants. Even when federal agents shoot and kill American citizens in Minneapolis. Renée Good, a mother of three, killed in her car. Alex Pretti, a nurse, shot while filming agents with his phone. Months later, no one has been charged. The government even declared the killings justified, sealed the evidence away from state investigators, and turned its scrutiny onto Good’s grieving widow.
When the Founders talked of armed men who could kill Americans and never see the inside of a courtroom, they meant a king’s soldiers. But their words can just as well describe our streets today. The troops we never asked for. The agents who answer to no one. And the American graves they leave behind.
A People Left to Pay
Our Founders further rejected a ruler who did not hesitate to wreck his own people’s livelihood, by levying unjust taxes against the colonies and by “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”
Just two and a half centuries later, Americans are again being asked to swallow the price of ordinary life. Our President’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs were effectively the largest tax increase on Americans, as a share of the economy, since 1993. He picked fights with our closest allies, rattled the global economy, and sent the cost of everything from cars to groceries climbing. And it was not foreign governments who paid for it but American families, the very people he claims to fight for.
And he was not done reaching into our wallets. The war he started in Iran has cost the typical household around a thousand dollars and counting, most of it from record high prices at the gas pump. But when a reporter brought up that staggering level of inflation, we all saw how the President answered.
This is a President who looks at the strain on Americans and feels nothing he needs to answer for. He’s fine, he’s rich, that’s all that matters… people should be proud of him in his mind. A ruler perfectly willing to destroy his people’s wellbeing, exactly what we once refused to accept.
A Judiciary Under Fire
And finally, our Founders denounced a ruler who could not accept a court’s judgement, accusing the Crown of having “obstructed the Administration of Justice,” and working to make judges “dependent on his Will alone.”
By now the similarities are unmistakable. Every time a federal court blocks our President’s agenda, whether he is deporting people without a hearing or renaming a national monument, he does not just appeal. He attacks the judge by name and demands their removal. The most recent example came in May, when a judge ruled that the President cannot rename the Kennedy Center. It was a straightforward reading of statutes that hand that power to Congress alone, but the President demanded the judge be “brought up on charges” and impeached anyway, and disparaged his wife on Truth Social by name.
These attacks on judges and their families have become an ugly routine, and even those appointed by conservative heroes have been targets. Just listen to Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who blocked the President’s birthright citizenship ban days after it was made.
This is exactly how tyrants bend the court without ever touching the law. Judges who once only had to ponder arguments now have to weigh whether a ruling is worth a bomb threat, a mob at the door, or the safety of their own children. A judiciary that has to make that calculation is not a free one, and neither are the people that rely on it.
What They Left Us
That is the cost of tyranny, which we have now seen enough of to name. But our Founders did not only diagnose tyranny, they beat it. They took that list of abuses and revolted, with no certainty of victory at all. And they freed themselves from the tyrant they had described.
We are their heirs, and fortunately we hold what they did not. We have courts that, for all the pressure on them, are still ruling. We have our voices that cannot be silenced, as much as they may try. And most importantly, we have our votes, the one thing no tyrant can survive.
The real test they left us is not whether one man fits the description. He does. It is whether we still recognize tyranny when we see it, and whether we still have the nerve to rise against it.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a few dozen brave men looked at that same test and answered it with everything they had. On their behalf, and for the sake of everyone who will inherit this country after us, so must we.
Video discussion for paid subscribers, I want to warn you…. It’s longer than usual and direct from the heart…. I share some struggles
