My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a part:

The structure of our constitutional republic sits on pilings of genius sunk in a deep understanding of the human condition. Our Founders understood that any government requires some humans to hold power over other humans. They also understood that all humans are inherently flawed — sinful, in ecclesiastical parlance — and could not be trusted with power over others.

 

To square this circle, our Founders developed a constitutional framework that trifurcated power into three separate and coequal parts. Each part had distinct powers and restrictions with the other two parts serving as a check lest too much power be usurped by one part. In essence, the genius of our Founders’ construct is that it uses the worst parts of the human condition — envy, pride, bigotry, hubris, etc. — as a millstone to grind down the sharpness of concentrated power.

 

In order for our great constitutional republic to function, it requires widespread consent of the governed in the form of mass voluntary obedience to the rule of law. We are a nation full of diverse opinions on what our laws should be and we hash that out through our elected government. Inevitably, there will be swaths of people who disagree with various laws for various reasons. For our society to function, it requires that the vast majority of the people accept and obey the laws even when they disagree with them. A small percentage of ne’er-do-wells will violate laws for which we maintain a nominal police force to correct and punish, but most people must obey constrained only by their consciences and adherence to our form of government.

 

When laws are unjust, mass civil disobedience is a legitimate form of corrective action in a free society. This is when a significant percentage of citizens refuse to obey the unjust law. In response, the government can either enforce the law with increasingly aggressive tactics at the risk of enraging the larger citizenry, or forgo enforcement, thus undermining the authority of the law. We have seen that civil disobedience in response to a just law fizzles under the weight of societal indifference.

 

When we move beyond individual laws being unjust to government itself being unjust, then we venture beyond civil disobedience into the realm of uncivil disobedience. It is incumbent on a free people to throw off a government that has become tyrannical, but such action must be embarked upon with great prudence such that ”Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” But when there is a sober realization that the totality of the government has become intolerably tyrannical and it can no longer be rectified through the established constructs of our constitutional republic, then rebellion is the only recourse left to the dignity and conscience of a free people.