The former American republic is now an empire, the type of government from which Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues violently seceded, writes Andrew P. Napolitano.
Qatari jets escort Air Force One carrying U.S. President Donald Trump before landing in Doha on May 14. (White House /Daniel Torok)
We are independent of London, but are we independent of Washington? Is there more freedom when governed by one tyrant 3,000 miles away or by 3,000 tyrants a few miles away?
Does government today remotely resemble the values articulated on July 4th 1776?
When the president of the United States bombs the lawful facilities of a foreign country that pose no threat whatsoever to American national security and does so without a congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires; when thousands of non-violent folks in America are arrested by masked federal agents without warrants and kicked out of the country without due process; when troops patrol the streets of a large city in defiance of federal law; when both major political parties support mass surveillance, undeclared foreign wars and borrowing trillions of dollars a year to fund a bloated government — nearly all of which is nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — we can safely conclude that personal liberty in our once-free society has been radically diminished and is in the twilight of its existence.
Two hundred and forty-nine years ago this week, Thomas Jefferson was fuming in his rented rooms in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress was softening the tone of his final draft of what would become the most critical document and radical articulation of the origins of human freedom in American history. [Read Jefferson’s first draft.]
The Declaration of Independence is an indictment of King George III as well as a manifestation of limited government and maximum individual freedom.
Though the final version dropped some of Jefferson’s more bellicose language, the document as we know it is largely his — not only his lofty language but also the three principal Jeffersonian values that it manifests.
Philadelphia No Kings Protest on June 14. (Manny OA/Flickr/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
The first of those values is natural law. The natural law teaches that our rights come from our humanity and our humanity is a gift from God. Jefferson recognized this when he wrote that we are all created equal and endowed by our “Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Recognizing the origin of human freedom in the Creator and referring to our rights as inalienable expressly accepts the concept of natural law and thereby liberty, assembly, private property, travel, self-defense, due process and privacy every day.
At the outset of the Declaration, Jefferson appealed to “the Laws of Nature’s God.” He could have appealed to the British tradition of individual rights. He could have appealed to the Magna Carta. He could have appealed to numerous acts of Parliament that stated — but pretended — that all men are equal and their rights are natural. But he didn’t.
He appealed to the natural law.
Consent of the Governed
Jefferson in a portrait by Rembrandt Peale. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The second Jeffersonian value is the consent of the governed. Jefferson argued, and Congress agreed, that no government is moral or consistent with the natural law unless it enjoys the consent of all those it governs.
Yet, historians today believe that at the time he wrote this, about one-third of the adult, white, land-owning males in the colonies supported revolution, about one-third opposed it, and about one-third were undecided.
The very Congress that declared that no government is moral without the consent of the governed wouldn’t achieve the consent of even a majority until after the war.
Surely, voting or walking on a government sidewalk is not consent. If you think it is, then the victims of 20th-century Nazism and Communism consented to those dreadful forms of government. Of course they didn’t.
Consent today is a myth just as much of government today is a myth. We pretend that we have self-government. We pretend that we consented to it. We pretend that our elected officials actually do represent us. We pretend that we are all created equal.
And we pretend that elections actually do change things in a material and substantial way. We even pretend that we have rights that the government protects. And we embrace these pretenses knowing all along that it is the government that assaults our rights, takes our property and kills in our names.
Protecting Natural Rights
The third Jeffersonian principle is that the proper role of government is not to give the people whatever they want but to protect their natural rights. Moreover, Jefferson wrote, whenever the government — even one consented to by the governed — is destructive of natural rights, the people may morally alter or abolish it.
That was July 4, 1776.
On July 4, 2025, the Jeffersonian principles that animated the just war for secession called the American Revolutionary War have all been discarded.
Think about it: Do you know anyone today who has consented to the monster government we have today? A government that claims out of its own belly that it can right any wrong, regulate any behavior, tax any event, steal any property, transfer any wealth, borrow any amount and kill any person — foe, friend or imagined foe?
The former American republic is now an empire, with an annual military budget — one trillion dollars! — that is larger than those of the next nine countries combined; and with troops on more than 750 American military installations in 80 nations around the globe.
As George III once boasted of his empire, the sun never sets on the American empire.
Empire: That would be the form of government from which Jefferson and his colleagues violently and successfully seceded.
Unchecked government is the archenemy of personal liberty. And a government that rejects its founding values, that keeps persons dependent upon it rather than independent of it, one that recognizes no limits to its powers and assaults the liberties of those it governs should be altered or abolished before liberty’s last gleaming becomes a long cold darkness.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, was the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and hosts the podcast Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit here.
Published by permission of the author.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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This President has to go! Every day the scofflaw walks freely is an insult to a just, democratic society.
Amerika has always been about profit.
After Reaganism , it was there to see.
Now it is , we can do whatever we want to do.
Easy to declare our independence, much harder to achieve. We, the interdependent working class, require unity and organization to overthrow corporate/military dictatorship. We need an organized movement, a broad front coalition of labor, civil rights, eco-activissts and socialists capable of a national strike and of making demands. We need an anti-corporate progressive-populist party.
I wish I could see this happening. The seeds are there but scattered, crippled by identity politics and liberal delusion. Class experience and solidarity are key in overcoming this, in my opinion.
Those of us who are atheists also believe in natural law. It is not “given” to us by some mythical being, but it is ours by right of being alive.
Agree.
Yes
Our constitutional rights are no more than formalities ignored by corrupt judges, legislators, and secret agencies.
All branches of our former democracy and mass media are completely corrupted by money power, a corruptocracy of billionaires and corporations who prevent all reform, not a democracy, and serves only to mask control by partisan gangs. Our legalized bribery elevates tyrants over ignorant tribalists. Any hope of recovery requires getting money power out of government and mass media.
Any hope of recovery requires the overthrow of capitalism and a socialist revolution.
Agreed
I love Judge Napolitano, but I have to say that I am just as worried about being the victim of unchecked corporate power as I am of unchecked governmental power. All workers are at the mercy of the corporations they work for, where constitutional rights are often nonexistent. Our government acts unconstitutionally in large part due to the billionaire donor class that controls it. You will never fix the problems of an unaccountable government until you fix the problems caused by the unaccountable billionaires that control the government.
We need to abandoned the notion that government power and corporate power are separate. We have a corporate owned government. Libertarians are loath to admit it. It’s so in our faces you have to be willfully blind not to see it. It is painfully obvious that our elected officials do not represent the public interest. They do the bidding of the corporate ruling oligarchy.
I believe we were set up to end up where we are by the founders. The trajectory has been steady even if it followed a crooked line. We were going to end up in the fix we’re in. Clearly, this empire is crumbling. We will have to evolve to a more humanitarian system if we are to survive into the future.
Fascinating that on Independence Day, the piece by the Democrat does not mention Mister Jefferson, while the piece by the Libertarian does mention the author of the Declaration of Independence. Interestingly, both authors follow the modern practice of omitting the right to declare independence from their discussion of the Declaration of Independence. That is the section that immediately follows the declaration of natural rights.
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” hxxps://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
One would think that the statement of the right to declare independence would be an important part of a Declaration of Independence, but in modern America, that is the part is that omitted by modern writers across the spectrum.
As it has been an established fact for 249 years now, and was certainly relevant in Jefferson’s time, why would today’s writers need to mention the right to declare independence? From whom? California from the United States?
The people’s independence from capitalism.
I been saying that we in the US live under a capitalist dictatorship. We can’t really vote against it.
It is interesting that so many Americans believe that we had the right to declare independence from Britain, and that Taiwan has the right to declare independence from China, but that Donbass doesn’t have the right to declare independence from Ukraine unless we say so. And that Cuba doesn’t even have the right to maintain independence as our neighbor.
Hear, hear. Very selective, isn’t it?
Hypocrisy is the national religion.