24 Jan 2026 - 13:00 CST

Rather than begin with the newest outrage, I begin with a quieter fact about republican life: a nation is revealed not only by the laws it writes, but by the mood in which it enforces them. When fear rises, enforcement becomes a temptation - not merely to act, but to hurry, to harden, and to treat restraint as weakness.

Robert Treat Paine lived at the point where those temptations gather. He was a man of the courtroom and the committee room, a signer whose public life was less a blaze of rhetoric than a long practice of prosecuting and governing in unsettled times. In 1770, he served as counsel for the prosecution in the Boston Massacre trials - an event born of street tension, rumor, anger, and blood. Years later, as Massachusetts attorney general, he prosecuted treason cases in the aftermath of Shays’ Rebellion, when the young republic faced a different kind of alarm: not imperial troops in the streets, but citizens in arms, and institutions strained by debt, scarcity, and mistrust.

Those episodes matter because they train the eye to see what is happening now. The early weeks of this year have again carried the signs of a public climate warming toward coercion: intensified immigration enforcement, contested accounts of warrantless tactics, the detention of children, and a widening argument over whether constitutional limits are being treated as inconveniences. In Minnesota, federal operations have provoked protests, arrests, and broad civic disruption. Allegations surrounding the detention of a five-year-old have sharpened the moral edge of the debate precisely because they strike at the most fragile point in any state action: the treatment of those who cannot protect themselves.

Paine would not have met these facts with indifference, nor with theatrical fury. He was not built for slogans. He was built for records.

If we want to take guidance from him, the first lesson is procedural - and therefore moral. In moments when the public wants instant moral resolution, Paine’s instinct was to insist on the discipline of proof. His work in the Massacre trials was formed in the shadow of a crowd. His work after Shays’ Rebellion was formed in the shadow of panic. In both, he treated the law not as a club to satisfy anger, but as a form that must be kept intact if it is to keep its authority.

That discipline cuts in more than one direction.

It warns citizens against confusing passion with truth. A republic cannot allow rumor to substitute for evidence, nor outrage to substitute for judgment, without teaching itself that fairness is optional.

But the same discipline warns authority against confusing power with legitimacy. Paine spent his life inside institutions precisely because he understood that law gains its moral force only when it restrains the state as much as it restrains the accused. The moment enforcement begins to treat constitutional limits as technicalities - especially in the home - it does not merely risk legal error. It teaches a habit. And habits, once trained into a bureaucracy, outlive the headline that birthed them.

In unsettled years, Paine’s public work returned again and again to a single practical concern: order. But order, for him, was not simply quiet streets. It was a society in which disputes could be adjudicated without the crowd becoming a tribunal and without the state becoming a law unto itself.

That is the point on which today’s disputes turn.

If the Fourth Amendment can be narrowed by administrative convenience, then security becomes a permission slip. If detention becomes routine for people not convicted of crimes, then due process becomes a courtesy extended at will. If children can be swept up as collateral - whatever the contested particulars of a given incident - then the state begins to train itself to treat vulnerability as manageable rather than sacred.

Paine would have recognized the danger immediately because he lived through its earlier forms. He saw what mobs do to justice. He also saw what fearful governments do to liberty. He would have understood that a republic can be threatened from below and from above at the same time; and that the remedy for both is the same demanding thing: law administered with discipline.

So the question this moment presses is not whether we will enforce rules. We will.

The question is whether we will enforce them in a way that preserves the moral character of the nation doing the enforcing - whether we will insist on warrants that mean what they say, on procedures that do not collapse under urgency, and on a public language that refuses to treat human beings as instruments.

Robert Treat Paine’s legacy is not a set of quotations to deploy. It is a posture: patient, prosecutorial in its attention to fact, and unwilling to let fear become an excuse for abandoning the forms that make power answerable.

A republic does not survive by choosing between compassion and order. It survives by refusing to separate them.

When the room grows hot, the temptation is to settle matters by force of will - by crowd pressure or by administrative muscle - and to call that efficiency.

Paine would have called it decay.

The work of citizens now is therefore the same work he practiced for decades: slow the room; preserve the record; demand lawful forms; refuse shortcuts that train the state to forget its limits; refuse reactions that train the public to forget its standards.

A country can absorb sharp disagreement. It cannot absorb the steady teaching that rights are optional.

In times like these, it is not enough to be convinced. We must be governable by law, by conscience, and by the hard discipline that keeps both the crowd and the state from becoming their worst selves.

23 Jan 2026 - 19:54 CST 

Rather than begin with an argument about immigration, I instead begin with the older fact beneath it: the United States was not formed in isolation, and it has never been sustained in isolation. From the beginning, our experiment depended not only on the courage of citizens, but on the presence of strangers - allies, refugees, deserters, emissaries, financiers, laborers, etc. - who wagered something of themselves on an unfinished nation.

The news in recent days has forced that memory back into view in a painful way. Reports from Minnesota describe the arrest and detention of multiple children, including a five-year-old taken with a parent and transported out of state. In that account, community officials and witnesses describe a child used as leverage during an enforcement action; federal officials dispute key elements of the story, but the image and the allegations have ignited public fury because they touch a nerve older than any policy debate: the fear that the state is becoming comfortable using the vulnerable as instruments.

Alongside this, new reporting and public letters describe widening concern that immigration enforcement has shifted toward people with no criminal history, and that minorities are being disproportionately swept up; not merely as a byproduct of location, but as the felt experience of targeted pressure. A separate line of controversy has sharpened around claims of warrantless entry and weakened Fourth Amendment practice, with critics warning that administrative paperwork is being treated like judicial authority.

I do not pretend the nation has no right to borders, laws, or enforcement. The founders did not imagine a country without rules. But they understood something we are tempted to forget: the legitimacy of enforcement depends on its discipline. When the state trains itself to treat constitutional limits as optional (especially within the home), it does not merely injure those in its path. It teaches everyone that rights are conditional, and that power can be excused whenever it claims urgency.

Here is where the signers, taken together, become relevant - not as a chorus with one modern opinion, but as men who lived through the most dangerous moment in any republic: the moment when fear makes shortcuts feel reasonable.

They knew foreign assistance was essential. French arms and French credit were not decorative; they were decisive. The war for independence was not won by purity or self-sufficiency. It was won through alliances, diplomacy, and the willingness to accept help from beyond our borders while still insisting that our internal conduct remain governed by principle.

They also knew that foreign influence could corrupt a young republic, and they were wary of it. That tension - gratitude for assistance, vigilance about manipulation - is not hypocrisy. It is the permanent burden of self-government: to accept help without surrendering judgment.

What they did not do, at their best, was build legitimacy on the humiliation of the powerless. When Congress offered incentives and religious liberty to Hessian deserters, it was not because those men were saints. It was because the founders understood that a cause claiming liberty must behave like it believes in liberty, even toward enemies and outsiders.

So, I return to the question this moment forces: what sort of people are we training ourselves to become?

If the state can enter without meaningful warrants, then the Fourth Amendment becomes an ornament - praised in textbooks and ignored in practice. If children can be treated as operational assets in the pursuit of adults, then our moral language about family and innocence becomes performative. If detention becomes the default for people who have not been convicted of crimes, then the presumption that law is a measured instrument begins to disappear.

None of this requires sentimental denial of hard problems. It requires something far more demanding: a refusal to let fear rewrite our standards.

Foreign hands helped raise this country. Immigrants - named and unnamed - helped build it. Allies helped save it. The founders were not naïve about the dangers of the world, but they were clear-eyed about a deeper danger: that a republic might preserve its borders and lose its soul.

The test of a free society is not whether it can act. It is whether it can restrain itself while acting, whether it can enforce law without becoming lawless, whether it can protect its people without treating the vulnerable as expendable.

If we want guidance from the founding generation, it is not a blank permission slip. It is a standard. Enforce the law but do it lawfully. Guard the nation but do it without training ourselves to accept what we would once have called shameful.

A country that forgets how much it has owed to strangers will eventually treat strangers as threats by default. And a country that teaches itself to ignore its own restraints will eventually discover that those restraints were the very thing that made it worth defending.

22 Jan 2026 - 21:12 CST

Instead of beginning with reassurance or alarm, I begin with a question John Adams would have insisted we answer plainly: what do we believe the law is for when fear presses hardest? Is it merely a tool for securing order, or is it a discipline designed to restrain power precisely when restraint is least convenient?

John Adams’s journals and correspondence reveal a man deeply suspicious of moral shortcuts. He distrusted crowds not because he preferred authority to liberty, but because he understood how easily passion can eclipse judgment. Yet his skepticism toward popular fury was matched by an equally firm suspicion of officials who invoked necessity as a warrant for excess. In Adams’s mind, disorder and overreach were not opposites; they were twin failures born of the same impatience.

His defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre is often misunderstood as hostility toward protest or resistance. It was neither. It was a declaration that justice cannot change its rules in response to public pressure without forfeiting its legitimacy. Adams believed that when law bends to outrage, it teaches power that principles are conditional - a lesson that rarely remains confined to a single case.

This discipline shaped his view of authority as well. Adams warned repeatedly that power seldom announces itself as tyranny. It arrives instead as urgency - confident, insistent, and dismissive of limits. He rejected this reasoning outright. Emergencies, he believed, do not suspend constitutional discipline; they reveal whether it has ever truly been embraced.

Seen through that lens, the present moment comes into focus. The question is not whether the nation requires law enforcement, borders, or order. Adams never doubted that it did. The question is whether those entrusted with enforcing the law remain visibly bound by it, or whether enforcement itself is treated as sufficient justification.

When warrants are bypassed, Fourth Amendment protections narrowed, or due process treated as optional, the harm extends well beyond any single incident. Such practices teach citizens that legality is flexible, that rights are contingent, and that power need not explain itself when it invokes necessity. Adams would have regarded this not as strength, but as erosion.

The detention of children under claims of administrative convenience would have troubled him deeply. Adams did not separate legality from moral responsibility. He understood that law stripped of humanity does not become neutral; it becomes brittle. Authority that cannot distinguish between firmness and cruelty weakens the very legitimacy it depends upon.

What unites Adams’s critique of both popular passion and official excess is a single principle: restraint is the measure of legitimacy. Protest that abandons judgment undermines itself. Enforcement that abandons humanity undermines the law. In both cases, impulse replaces discipline, and trust quietly drains away.

This is not a call for disorder, nor for indulgence. It is a call for seriousness. Govern firmly, but govern within limits that remain visible, explainable, and answerable. Demand accountability from citizens, but demand it first from those entrusted with power.

Adams accepted that this posture would invite criticism and isolation. He believed that a republic worthy of survival required citizens and officials willing to bear that cost. The Constitution, he insisted, does not exist to make governance easy. It exists to make abuse difficult; especially when doing so slows outcomes and frustrates certainty.

A free society cannot be preserved by choosing sides and relaxing standards accordingly. It endures only when law is treated not as a weapon, nor as a convenience, but as a discipline to which all submit - particularly when fear presses hardest.

John Adams believed that fidelity to that discipline was worth misunderstanding. It did not make him gentle. It made him reliable.

The question before us is whether we are prepared to hold both ourselves and our institutions to the same demanding standard, or whether we will excuse the failures we find most comfortable to defend.

21 Jan 2026 - 18:41 CST

Rather than begin with the noise of recent headlines, I begin with a more durable concern: the habits we are quietly reinforcing as the year takes shape. Moments of strain do not merely test institutions; they train citizens. Over time, they teach us what shortcuts we are willing to accept, what standards we are prepared to relax, and how much care we believe public life deserves.

Samuel Adams understood that liberty is not primarily threatened by dramatic acts of oppression, but by erosion - by the steady normalization of impatience, confusion, and moral convenience. His writings return again and again to a single warning: that power advances most effectively when citizens lose the discipline required to notice it.

Adams was not a romantic of spontaneity. He distrusted unstructured outrage as much as he distrusted unaccountable authority. His essays, resolutions, and correspondence reflect a man convinced that resistance, to remain just, must be intelligible. Grievances had to be recorded. Claims had to be reasoned. Actions had to be explainable not only to allies, but to the broader public whose consent ultimately mattered.

The Committees of Correspondence were the practical expression of this belief. They were not instruments of agitation for its own sake, but mechanisms of civic coherence. They slowed events long enough for facts to be assembled, principles to be articulated, and communities to understand one another’s concerns. Adams believed that without such connective tissue, even righteous causes would fracture under their own haste.

What gives me pause in the present moment is how readily speed is now mistaken for seriousness. Judgments are rendered before records are complete. Moral certainty often arrives before verification. Silence is treated as betrayal, while deliberation is dismissed as weakness. In such an environment, both authority and opposition are tempted to bypass explanation in favor of escalation.

Adams would have regarded this as dangerous ground. He warned that liberty decays when citizens abandon the labor of thinking together; when correspondence is replaced by reaction, and vigilance gives way to spectacle. Power thrives not only on obedience, but on confusion. Faction thrives on the same fuel.

This is not an argument against action. Adams was tireless in action. It is an argument for method. He believed that rights defended carelessly are often lost precisely because they are defended without regard for credibility. Moral authority, once squandered, is difficult to recover.

The guidance his example offers now is neither quietism nor fury, but discipline. Slow the room. Insist on clarity. Preserve records. Demand reasons. Refuse rumors that require indignation to be persuasive. Treat explanation as a civic duty, not an inconvenience.

A republic cannot be sustained by intensity alone. It endures when citizens cultivate the habits that make disagreement survivable - patience, precision, and a shared commitment to truth that holds even when outcomes are uncertain.

Liberty requires vigilance, but vigilance is not frenzy. It is sustained attention, deliberate communication, and the refusal to trade long-term legitimacy for short-term satisfaction.

Samuel Adams understood that freedom is not secured by how loudly it is invoked, but by how carefully it is practiced. That lesson has not expired. It waits, as it always has, on whether we are willing to do the work it demands.

19 Jan 2026 - 9:56 CST

After observing the course of public life in these opening weeks of the year, I find myself returning to a quieter question beneath the noise: whether we still understand leadership - civic or personal - as a burden of responsibility, or merely as an opportunity to assert will.

John Hancock is remembered for his signature, but the mark itself matters less than the discipline behind it. He did not treat public action as something to be done anonymously, impulsively, or without consequence. He understood that authority in a free society is not secured by volume or speed, but by visibility - by standing openly behind one’s words so that the public may judge not only the claim, but the character of the claimant.

What troubles me in the present moment is not disagreement, nor even intensity. Those are familiar features of republican life. What troubles me is how easily urgency is now used to excuse the abandonment of restraint - how quickly explanation gives way to assertion, and accountability is treated as an obstacle rather than an obligation.

Hancock’s correspondence and public conduct reflect a man acutely aware that power, once exercised without care, rarely confines itself to its original justification. He insisted on lawful forms even in moments of resistance, not because he feared action, but because he understood that unexplained action erodes consent, and consent is the oxygen of a republic. When people no longer know who speaks for them, or why, authority begins to rely on force - and force is a poor substitute for legitimacy.

We are again living through a season in which everyone invokes law, and few demonstrate patience with its discipline. Courts are appealed to as weapons. Institutions are treated as obstacles when they slow outcomes. Protest and enforcement escalate in tandem, each citing necessity, each convinced the moment absolves excess. History suggests otherwise. The founders did not design our system for convenience. They designed it precisely to frustrate certainty, to slow ambition, and to force justification into the open.

Hancock’s example offers a sober corrective: public action must be owned. Decisions must be explainable. Power must be willing to be seen. A republic cannot be held together by anonymous pressure or theatrical righteousness. It is sustained by citizens and officials alike who accept that credibility is earned through restraint - especially when restraint is unpopular.

This is not a plea for passivity. Hancock was no passive man. It is a plea for proportion. Resistance without responsibility degenerates into chaos. Authority without explanation drifts toward coercion. The health of a free society depends on both sides honoring limits at the same time - a demanding standard, but the only one that works.

If there is guidance to be taken from Hancock now, it is this: do not hide behind the moment. Do not trade clarity for applause. Do not act in ways you would refuse to sign. Put your name, your reputation, and your conscience where your words are - and insist that institutions do the same.

A republic is not preserved by declarations alone. It is preserved by the daily habit of standing openly behind one’s actions, submitting them to judgment, and accepting correction when warranted. When that habit erodes, no amount of rhetoric can replace it.

The work before us is not to accelerate conflict, but to reestablish credibility - through speech that explains rather than inflames, through authority that restrains itself, and through citizens who remember that liberty survives only where responsibility is visible and shared.

That standard is demanding. It always has been. Hancock knew it. We would do well to remember why.