What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to establish and to limit the federal government? What if Congress’s 16 enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limit Congress but are actually used as a justification to extend Congress’s authority over nearly every aspect of human life? What if Congress bribes the states with cash, the rich with bailouts, the middle class with tax cuts and the poor with wealth transfers?
What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has instead become a democratically elected, term-limited, monarch? What if the president claims that everything he did was legal, just because he’s the president? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and your texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without due process or warning?
What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Framers? What if our once revered Bill of Rights has become a bill of temporary privileges?
What if the 50 states are no longer sovereign entities equal to each other and parents of the federal government they voluntarily constituted? What if the states are today mere provinces of a totally nationalized and fully centralized government? What if the Constitution was amended stealthily, not by constitutional amendments duly ratified by the states but by the constant and persistent expansion of the federal government’s role in our lives?
What if the federal government alone decided if its own powers were proper and constitutional? What if the Constitution is no longer the supreme law of the land?
What if you need a license from the government to speak and assemble publicly, or to protest against it? What if the government didn’t like what you plan to say and so it didn’t give you the license?
What if the Posse Comitatus Act, the federal law that prohibits the military from engaging in law enforcement, is still on the books but no longer followed? What if the government considered the military an adequate dispenser of domestic law enforcement?
What if cops acted and dressed like troops and you couldn’t distinguish the military from the police? What if some of them wear masks so you can’t identify them in a courtroom? What if you are not secure in your person or in your papers or on your property, as the Fourth Amendment guarantees?
What if federal agents could write their own search warrants in defiance of the Fourth Amendment? What if masked federal agents can demand to see your papers on a public street? What if you don’t have the papers the feds want? What if they can arrest you if you don’t show your papers?
What if the government could decide when you were, and were not, entitled to a jury trial?
What if the government could take your property whenever it wanted? What if the government could continue prosecuting you after an acquittal until it got the verdict it wanted? What if the government could force you to testify against yourself, simply by labeling you a domestic terrorist?
What if the government could torture you until you said what the government wanted to hear? What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing, so long as the government’s procedures were nominally followed? What if America’s prison population, the largest in the world, was a cruel and unusual way for a country to be free? What if half the prison population never harmed anyone but themselves?
What if the people have no rights, except those the government chose to let them have? What if the states have no powers, except to do as the federal government commands? What if our elected officials may live among us but have their hearts and heads in Washington, D.C.?
What if the government could strip you of your rights because of where your mother was when you were born?
What if the states were convinced to give up their representation in Congress? What if the government tried to ban you from using a substance in your body that is older than the government itself?
What if voting didn’t mean anything anymore because both political parties stand for big government? What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, the Constitution be damned? What if we have only one Uniparty — with a Republican wing and a Democratic wing? What if wars rage, presidents kill, debt increases, regulations expand and liberty shrinks no matter who is in the White House or controls Congress?
What if the government is the reason we don’t have a constitution anymore? What if government doesn’t create wealth; it seizes it? What if government doesn’t build; it destroys? What if government transactions aren’t voluntary; they’re compulsory?
What if the government regularly lies to you? What if government at its core is the negation of freedom?
What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if our foreign wars haven’t brought peace and democracy but violence and death? What if searching for monsters abroad brings them home? What if bullets killing babies in the Middle East have been paid for by funds borrowed in the American taxpayers’ names?
What if the Constitution no longer applies? What if that government is best which governs least? What if Thomas Jefferson was right? What if I’m right? What if the government is wrong? What if it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger in America is now?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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