Republican Liberty

WE ARE ALL GORSUCHIAN:

Make Congress Great Again: We need to unite around our Constitution, not be divided by party politics. (Mickey Edwards, Apr 17, 2025, American Purpose)

The real danger of this moment is not about any individual policy but the accretion of unchecked power in the hands of a single man. The essence of American constitutional government is twofold: the balance of powers between the federal government and the states; and the division of federal powers between equal and competitive branches, of which the greatest power—because it is most representative of the will of the people—rests in the people’s Congress. This power structure rests on both norms of behavior and a framework of institutions designed to ensure a continuing commitment to the nation’s foundational principles, including liberty, justice, security, and equality—all of which are currently under attack.

Breaching of due process (searches without warrants, arrests without charges, criminalization of speech, the elimination of Congress as a meaningful participant in government decisions) eliminates many of the core freedoms that lured our parents and grandparents to come to America, often at high risk—to be part of this land of promise, this land that men and women have died to protect on battlefields from Bunker Hill to Berlin.

Here is how we think outside the box.

First, recognize that the courts alone cannot stop the flood of constitutional breaches flowing from the White House: the judicial process is slow and limited in its powers. The one force equal to that of the presidency is the Congress of the United States. But both parties are executive-centric and focus their political strategies primarily on the election of a president who mirrors their own beliefs and goals. Members of both parties have long records of acquiescing to presidents of their own party and stretching the limits of constitutional permissibility to achieve a desired political goal. In the end, it is one party—its agenda, and its desire for political dominance—that supersedes the constitutional separation of powers that was designed to protect against exactly the kind of dictatorial threat we now face.

The primary focus now needs to be on reasserting Congress’s Article One role as maker of laws, decider of policies, distributor of funds, designer of taxation—and ensuring the election to Congress of men and women who recognize their constitutional obligations to check the ambitions of would-be kings.

Actually, that is the box.

THERE IS NO PRO-LIFE PARTY:

Jens Ludwig on American Gun Violence (Social Science Bites, April 1, 2025)

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, let me start off by acknowledging the first part of the question, which the data suggests, is very true, that the 400 million guns that the United States has for a country of 330 million people is without question part of the story. You know, we have state level data on a proxy for household gun ownership. And we can see that over a decades-long period, the household gun ownership rate between the northern part of the United States the southern part of the United States have been converging over time, and we can see over that same time period that murder rates have been converging across these regions as well. So it’s a nice sort of natural experiment that points to something that’s suggestive of a causal relationship between overall gun availability and murders. And so, if you had a wand that one could wave, that would get rid of the 400 million guns in the United States, I think it is very much true that the United States would become much, much safer. But as you say, that’s not the whole story.

David Edmonds: America is not the only country awash with guns. My elder brother lives in Switzerland, where almost everybody has a gun, but they don’t have the murder rate that you have. So it seems like guns alone can’t be the answer.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, gun violence is really the product of two things, not just one thing. My little cartoon equation for this in the book is gun violence equals guns plus violence. What you can see in the data is that, for instance, that Switzerland and Canada have almost identical levels of gun ownership, and yet, the murder rate in Canada is multiple times what you see in Switzerland. And I think the explanation there is that the rate of violent crime is substantially different between Switzerland and Canada. And so I think what the data seemed to suggest is that guns don’t cause violent behavior, cause violent crime. Guns make the violence that happens much more deadly. So you can have lots of guns and not many murders, lots of violent crime without guns and not many murders, but if you have lots of guns and lots of violence together, that’s the thing that leads to lots of murders.

WE ARE ALL GORSUCHIAN NOW:

The only national emergency is the law that empowers a mad king (Will Bunch, Apr. 6th, 2025, Philadelphia Inquirer)

The sad reality is that we gave him this power.

In the fall of 1976 — ironically, America’s Bicentennial year — Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants the White House authority to take strong economic measures against foreign nations without either an investigation or seeking prior approval from Congress. Like a lot of laws passed in the years immediately after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Congress thought that IEEPA was a way to reign in an imperial president, when in reality it did the exact opposite.

The idea behind the law was to end a raft of ongoing emergencies declared by Nixon and other past presidents and create a better-spelled-out, more democratic process for any future ones. Instead, the declaration of national emergencies has expanded under every president, Democrat or Republican, over high-profile events like the 1979 Iran hostage crisis or the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In the bigger picture, Americans have become way too numb to sweeping uses and, arguably, abuses of presidential powers, whether that’s dropping bombs on Yemen with little more debate than an emoji-laden Signal chat, or imposing economic sanctions or, before last Wednesday, more targeted tariffs. This development is completely the opposite of the version of America sought by its founders, who envisioned a republic in which Congress — a large deliberative body, elected by the citizenry — would have the power to declare war or levy taxes, including tariffs. […]

Even some conservatives who were presumably elated over Trump’s victory last November are appalled over his abuse of the emergency law, including the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative legal outfit supported by the likes of industrialist Charles Koch and Supreme Court influencer Leonard Leo. This week, the group filed a complaint against the president’s new tariffs. But this moment should serve as a much bigger wake-up call for how far America has gone down the wrong track.

If Congress wants to listen to the more than 1 million people in the streets — and it should, if it wants to cling to any lingering claim on legitimacy — then it should first act immediately to use the power it has under the 1970s law to reverse the taxation-without-representation of a mad king, as soon as possible. Then it should repeal IEEPA and draft new legislation that severely restricts a president’s emergency-declaration powers, since we’ve now seen how badly these can be misused and abused by a power-hungry dictator.

HE TRIED TO WARN US:

Legalism Threatens Our Rule of Law: a review of Over Ruled by Neil Gorsuch (Larry P. Arnn, Law & Liberty)

Over Ruled is replete with harrowing, true tales like this one. It also explains how laws and prosecutions have grown in number and size, like metastasizing tumors. Today most of our “laws” (or rules and regulations with the full force and effect of law) come from administrative agencies that work like somnambulant beavers; half asleep, but numerous enough in their swarms to dam up the flow of society. The authors document that such laws and the agencies that make them are uncounted, or at least that their number is controversial, even among defenders of this regulatory swamp.

A bitter irony emerges: The sheer quantity of the laws and prosecutions negates the rule of law. Gorsuch quotes Publius: “If the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood … or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow”—then justice is dead. In other words, if citizens cannot know the law, they cannot obey it. Conversely, those who enforce the law may do what they please, and they will get used to it.

The one benefit of Trumpism: he’s made us all Gorsuchian.

WALLS ARE ANTI-TEXTUAL:

Church and State Unseparated: Why Protestants should take their foundational role in American society seriously again. (David Hein, October 8, 2024, Modern Age)

“What this volume proposes,” Smith writes, “is that the United States Constitution’s disestablishment did not secularize society, nor did it remove institutional Christianity” from the realms of education, law, and politics. That displacement “occurred nearly a century later.”

Informed by both the English Whig and late-eighteenth-century American republican traditions, this voluntarist order, which recognized that religious belief and membership must be the products of the individual’s untrammeled will, was, therefore, liberal in respect of the establishment of religion but conservative in its grasp of the role of Christianity in American society. Smith ably demonstrates how Americans by and large accepted this continuing role for Christian institutions, “perpetuating . . . Christianity through federal and state courts, state colleges and institutions, state legislatures, and executive proclamations from governors and presidents,” as well as “through state cooperation with religious institutions.”

Both church and state, he says, were united in working to achieve a common goal: fostering a moral realm that embraced “historically Christian conceptions of virtue.” The cultural weight of these institutions, which incorporated conservative understandings of ethics and social order, countered irreligious tendencies to moral radicalism. Christians believed that religious faith had a beneficial impact on law, politics, and education. Thus, it warranted the support of civil magistrates. At the same time, Christians believed in religious liberty. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville memorably depicts the benefits of the entanglement of religion and liberty. Unforgettably, too, Samuel Francis Smith highlights these themes in his patriotic hymn “My Country ’tis of Thee.”

Particularly valuable is this volume’s chapter on Thomas Jefferson, who aimed to do more than merely end the privileges of state churches; he also wanted to see Christianity removed from the civil sphere. The author makes it clear that Protestants in the early republic embraced freedom of religion but generally rejected the Sage of Monticello’s wish to remove institutional Christianity’s influence from civic life; they declined to join what Smith calls his “personal war against churchly authority.”

Among the most important spokesmen for religious institutions and their continuing influence were New England Federalists, intellectuals in colleges and universities, and religious and judicial elites: they generally upheld the fundamental role of Protestantism in American culture. Smith points out that they and their like-minded Protestant brethren would have agreed with most of the Framers, who did not endorse a wall of separation between church and state. Many Protestants in the early republic believed that American society needed the efforts of practicing Christians in order to prosper; good Christian men and women fortified the Republic.

At the same time, disestablishment had a positive impact on religion, strengthening Christianity in the public sphere. It prevented an Erastian subordination of the Church to the state. It reduced political interference with religion and avoided the negative reputation that came with state control.

IF IT WERE EASY EVERYONE WOULD DO IT:

Solving Our Political Disarray: The Constitution is more than a legal code. It is also a framework for union and solidarity. (Yuval Levin, Fall 2024, American Heritage)

The problem is that we have forgotten that creating common ground is a key purpose of the Constitution and that it should be a key purpose of our own political and civic action.

We too often lose sight of how the Constitution creates common ground by compelling Americans with different views and priorities to deal with one another – to compete, negotiate, and build coalitions in ways that drag us into common action even (indeed, especially) when we disagree.

This points to an even deeper problem underlying our contemporary frustrations with our system of government: we have not only lost sight of the importance of pursuing greater unity, but we have also tended to forget what unity in our free and dynamic society really involves. Unity doesn’t quite mean agreement. Americans do have some basic principles in common – especially those laid out in the Declaration of Independence. But although those widely espoused principles impose some moral boundaries on our political life, there is enormous room for disagreement within those boundaries.

This includes some significant disagreement about exactly what the Declaration’s principles actually mean regarding the nature of the human person and the proper organization of society, let alone disagreement about discrete political and policy choices in response to the needs of the day. Our politics is unavoidably organized around these disputes and requires us to take on common problems while continuing to disagree about questions that matter a great deal to us. But that disagreement does not foreclose the possibility of unity.

A more unified society would not always disagree less, but it would disagree better – that is, more constructively and with an eye to how different priorities and goals can be accommodated. That we have lost some of our knack for unity in America does not mean that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.

The parties to our various disputes now tend to talk about one another more than they talk to one another, and, so, even very active citizens actually spend relatively little time in active disagreement with others, let alone in efforts to overcome such disagreement for the sake of addressing some common problems in practice. This is the sense in which we have forgotten the practical meaning of unity: in the political life of a free society, unity does not mean thinking alike; unity means acting together.

How can we act together when we do not think alike? The United States Constitution is intended, in part, to be an answer to precisely that question. And it is a powerful and well-honed answer. Alleviating the disunity of contemporary America would, therefore, require not recklessly discarding our Constitution as an antiquated relic but rediscovering its fundamental purposes, grasping just how powerfully it speaks to some of our most serious contemporary problems, and finding ways to better put it into practice to address those problems.

That approach involves pushing, plying, and pressuring Americans to engage with one another and so also to understand themselves as engaged in a common enterprise. The Constitution forces insular factions to forge coalitions with others and, thereby, to expand their sense of their own interests and priorities. It forces powerful officeholders to govern through negotiation and competition rather than through fiat and pronouncement and so to align their ambitions with those of others. It forces Americans to acknowledge the equal rights of fellow citizens, and has (gradually, and thanks to the heroic efforts and sacrifices of many) come to better align the definition of “fellow citizen” with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

None of this is easy or simple. All of it happens through politics and so through contention, competition, pressure, and negotiation. It’s a struggle. But the Constitution is rooted in the insight that this very struggle is, itself, a source of solidarity and an engine of cohesion.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY:

Individualism: Balancing freedom and social order is a fundamentally American challenge. (Wilfred M. McClay, August 28, 2024, Modern Age)

[A]lthough “individualism” is a relatively new term in Western intellectual and religious history, it has a long and distinguished pedigree, informed by rich antecedents and fertile anticipations. Belief in the dignity and worth of the individual person has always been a distinguishing mark, and a principal mainstay, of what we call Western civilization, the defense of which has become an increasingly central element in what now goes by the name of conservatism.

Elements of that belief can be detected as far back as classical antiquity, particularly in the Greek discovery of philosophy as a distinctive form of free rational inquiry, and in the Greco-Roman stress upon the need for virtuous individual citizens to sustain a healthy republican political order. Other elements appeared later, particularly in the intensely self-directed moral discipline of Epicureanism and Stoicism. Even more importantly, the traditions and institutions arising out of biblical monotheism, whether Jewish or Christian, placed heavy emphasis upon the infinite value, personal agency, and moral accountability of the individual person. That emphasis reached a pinnacle of sorts in Western Christianity, which incorporated the divergent legacies of Athens and Jerusalem into a single universalized faith.

None of these expressions of belief in the individual were quite the same as modern individualism, however, for the freedom the premodern individual enjoyed, particularly since the advent of Christianity, was always constrained. It was constrained by belief in the existence of an objective moral order not to be violated with impunity by antinomian rebels and enthusiasts. And it was constrained by belief in the inherent frailty of human nature, which indicated that virtue cannot be produced in social isolation.

The genius of our system of republican liberty is that the individual is entitled to exactly as much freedom as we afford to each other and no more.

MOJO VS ADMINISTRATIVE LAW:

The Original President (Garry Wills, 8/15/24, Mother Jones)

The originators of our government said that “We the People” are our country’s sovereign power. That is why the legislators, as the representatives of the people, are the only ones authorized to make law or make war. As James Madison said in Federalist 51, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” The executive power, as the name indicates, just executes the law—or the war, or the policy—given it by the legislators.

Amen, brother.