By Gregory J. Wallance, opinion contributor,
19 hours ago
I find myself thinking these days about the American revolutionaries, especially Thomas Paine.
Paine immigrated from England to the American colonies in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Less than two years later, he wrote “ Common Sense ,” the pamphlet that gave the American Revolution its moral authority.
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Crisp and passionately written, “Common Sense” explained to the American colonists that King George III and the British Empire had left them no middle ground. Their choice was between independence and monarchy.
“In America the law is king,” wrote Paine. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The concept was revolutionary, and “Common Sense” became a colonial bestseller.
Paine would tell us that, almost 100 days into Trump’s second term, we similarly face a stark choice. It is either to stand up to a president increasingly untethered from the Constitution, or to surrender. If a galvanizing act of the American Revolution was the “shot heard ’round the world” at the battle of Lexington and Concord, the equivalent rallying event today may be Harvard University’s refusal to surrender its right of free expression to the Trump administration.
We are not now living under authoritarian rule. But as President Trump rules by decree, displays contempt for the courts and instructs the Department of Justice — whose lawyers appear to have forgotten their oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution — to retaliate against his perceived enemies, the trend lines are not good.
Conservative federal appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, is no alarmist. But he sounded a bit like Thomas Paine in his opinion condemning the Trump administration for defying a lower court’s efforts to return the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. from El Salvador.
The administration is “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Wilkinson wrote. “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
The fact that the Supreme Court had to issue a midnight order instructing the Trump administration to, in effect, comply with the court’s previous order forbidding the deportation of alleged “alien enemies” without notice and a hearing says it all.
One of the most alarming trend lines is the unwillingness of the Republican-dominated Congress to do its constitutional duty and rein Trump in. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) admitted that “we are all afraid” of retaliation for criticizing Trump. “We are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before.”
Congressional Republicans need a refresher course in the courage of the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress who, just months after the publication of “Common Sense,” signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. In doing so, they effectively handed the British Empire a warrant for their own arrests on charges of treason if the American Revolution failed.
These men stood to lose a lot more than their law practices (25 of the signatories were lawyers) or businesses, since treason was punishable by disemboweling, drawing and quartering, followed by hanging if the accused was somehow still alive. Nonetheless, as they went to war with the greatest empire on Earth, the 56 signatories unhesitatingly signed the Declaration of Independence in which “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
If that doesn’t inspire — or shame — at least some congressional Republicans to stand up to Trump, nothing will.
Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia . ”
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