Independence Day 2007

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Our mandate for freedom was written by men who knew firsthand the peril of allowing a single man to accrete to himself unchecked and unlimited power. As Jefferson and his small committee drafted these legendary words, they did so with the full intent that no man would ever be allowed to exert his seigneur and that all men would be afforded an equal measure of justice and an equal measure of representation in the governance of their daily lives.

Many of these men would reconvene five years later to draft a second document that would put into practice these ideals and intentions by creating a framework for a system of governance that depended on a careful balance of authority in the institutions they stipulated, and, when that seemed to be insufficient to safeguard the liberty and equality of the populace from the excesses of government, they took the additional step of drafting amendments that specifically guaranteed those civil liberties to one and all.

At different times and under a variety of circumstances, it has sometimes been necessary to further amend this framework, it has been necessary to re-interpret ideas written by men who could not conceive of the future that would unfold before them, it has been necessary even to engage in civil war to reassert the primacy of our national structure over specialized interests.

But rarely has it been necessary to call the nation's leaders to account for their overreach of their justly-derived power. Rarer still has it been necessary to invoke the spirit and the intent of the Declaration itself to make it plain that this nation should not and will not be in the hands of tyrants who disrespect those basic ideas.

Now that time has come. The actions of the President and Vice President of the United States have crossed a threshold far beyond any reasonable expectation of "executive privilege". They have exceeded their authority by their direct disregard for the laws of the United States, by their deliberate deceptions which have led the nation into an illegal war, and by their systematic erosion of the fundamental liberties enshrined by the Continental Congress on this very day two hundred and thirty-one years ago.

The public cry for impeachment of these men falls on deaf ears in the Congress. Now the call has begun to sound for the resignation of the President and the Vice President, and that is equally likely to go unheeded. And thus I say to you that the only alert that can be sounded is to the people of this country themselves. Like Paul Revere riding his horse through the night to warn the people of Concord, we are charged with, indeed obliged to shout throughout the land and to prepare to battle for our freedom.

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

-- Thomas Paine, "Common Sense", 1776