26 Jan 2026 - 7:59 CST 

Two facts now sit on the public record in Minneapolis, and neither can be responsibly ignored.

First: on January 24, federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen, during an immigration enforcement operation. Federal officials asserted self-defense and claimed he was armed. Video reviewed by major outlets shows Pretti holding a phone during critical moments, being pepper-sprayed, forced to the ground, and shot. The precise sequence of events remains disputed, but the evidentiary conflict itself is no longer hypothetical.

Second: state and local officials have publicly stated that federal agents restricted or delayed their access to the scene. That dispute over who controls evidence, jurisdiction, and investigation has become as consequential as the use of force itself.

These facts do not stand alone. They follow the January 7 killing of Renée Good, also a U.S. citizen, also in Minneapolis, also under contested claims of threat and justification. That case is now moving through litigation and raising broader questions about federal accountability, immunity, and oversight when lethal force is used in civil enforcement contexts.

Behind both incidents lies a structural issue that predates Minneapolis and will outlast it if left unresolved. Reporting has confirmed the existence of internal ICE guidance asserting authority to enter homes and make arrests using administrative paperwork - documents generated within the executive branch - rather than warrants signed by a neutral judge, where the agency believes a final order of removal exists.

Whether that authority is lawful in each instance is a question for courts. Whether it is healthy for a republic is a question for citizens.

This is where Elbridge Gerry becomes relevant; not as a mascot for a position, but as a diagnostic voice trained on precisely this kind of ambiguity.

Gerry’s objections during the ratification debates were not abstract. He was alarmed by systems in which power blurred its own boundaries - where executive authority could drift into legislative or judicial space, and where the absence of explicit restraints invited officials to treat internal certification as sufficient proof of legitimacy. He warned repeatedly that liberty is most endangered not by declared tyranny, but by undefined power exercised as routine.

Read through that lens, Minneapolis is not only a tragedy. It is a test.

When an agency’s own paperwork begins to function as a substitute for judicial warrants, the distinction between permission and proof erodes. Entry into the home - a place the Constitution treats as uniquely protected - shifts from judicial authorization to administrative confidence. That shift does not require malice to be dangerous. It requires only habit.

Gerry understood that rights do not survive on goodwill. They survive on structure. He described declarations of rights as “guards… intended to secure the people against the mal-administration of the Government,” precisely because he assumed future officials would face incentives to act first and justify later.

His second concern follows naturally from the first. Gerry was deeply skeptical of force that grows without clear civilian restraint. At the Constitutional Convention, he objected to language normalizing standing military power in peacetime, warning that security rhetoric has a way of becoming justification for domestic domination. His fear was not disorder. It was power becoming comfortable with itself.

That perspective does not reject enforcement. It demands something harder: enforcement that remains legible, reviewable, and subordinate to law.

If Gerry were observing the present moment, he would not reach first for denunciation. He would reach for records. He would insist that disputed facts be tested openly, that evidence be preserved, that warrants be warrants, and that no agency be allowed to mark its own homework when lethal force is involved.

A republic can absorb anger. It cannot absorb the steady narrowing of scrutiny.

So, the work before citizens now is not theatrical. It is procedural. Demand transparent, independent investigation of the Pretti shooting, with public accounting of evidence and jurisdictional authority.

Demand clarity, legal, not rhetorical, about what constitutes a valid warrant, who signs it, and under what circumstances administrative documents can justify home entry.

Demand accountability in the Good case, including clear articulation of the standards governing federal use of force and the limits of immunity.

These demands do not presume guilt. They presume seriousness.

Gerry’s relevance is not that he would have taken a side. It is that he understood how republics erode: not all at once, but through tolerable shortcuts that accumulate into a governing style.

A nation that preserves order by teaching itself to live without enforceable limits eventually discovers that liberty was the limit it quietly abandoned.

Gerry would remind us of what his generation learned the hard way: rights are not secure because officials mean well. They are secure only when officials are required - by law, by structure, and by public insistence - to prove that they have acted lawfully.

25 Jan 2026 - 9:48 CST

Rather than begin with the loudest claim, I begin with the most fragile thing a republic possesses: the ordinary citizen’s expectation that the home is still a boundary, that arrest is still answerable to a neutral judge, and that the state - precisely when it is most confident in its necessity - still submits itself to procedures it did not write for its own convenience.

This morning’s news out of Minneapolis forces those expectations into the open.

A U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, was shot and killed during a federal immigration operation. Federal officials say he approached agents with a handgun; bystander video reviewed by major outlets shows him holding a phone, assisting others, and being shot after he was pepper‑sprayed and pinned down. State and local officials report being denied access to the scene by federal agents. The death comes weeks after another U.S. citizen, Renée Good, was killed by an ICE agent during a separate Minneapolis encounter, further sharpening the question that always follows a contested use of force: not simply whether officials claim authority, but whether the public is permitted to examine its exercise.

A republic can survive anger. It cannot survive the conversion of scrutiny into obstruction.

That is why the newly reported Fourth‑Amendment dispute matters as more than a technical argument. The Associated Press has reported on an internal ICE memorandum authorizing officers to enter homes and make arrests using administrative paperwork, rather than a warrant signed by a judge, where the agency believes a final order of removal exists. Separately, a U.S. Senate oversight letter describes a whistleblower disclosure alleging a secret policy to treat those administrative forms as sufficient for home entry, despite longstanding Fourth‑Amendment doctrine that treats the home as the place where judicial oversight is most exacting.

Even if one sets aside the strongest rhetoric on either side, the structural problem remains: when executive agencies begin to treat their own documents as functionally equivalent to judicial warrants, the distinction between “permission” and “proof” collapses. The Fourth Amendment was written precisely to prevent that collapse. It assumes that the state, left alone, will be tempted to certify itself.

The same pattern - speed treated as virtue, process treated as nuisance - appears in the due‑process disputes now surrounding deportation and detention. Critics argue that expanded fast‑track removals and a detention system that makes it difficult to obtain counsel or bond are creating outcomes that function as punishment without the full moral work of adjudication. Courts have already intervened in some areas, temporarily blocking attempted expansions of rapid deportation policies on due‑process grounds and entertaining challenges to other removal authorities. Whatever one’s policy preferences, the constitutional question is not exotic: when liberty and family unity are on the line, what procedures does the state owe before it acts?

A state that becomes comfortable acting first and explaining later does not merely risk error. It trains itself to prefer error.

At this point it is tempting, especially online, to rush from procedure to apocalypse. The founding generation gives us a better discipline.

They believed, emphatically, in enforcement and order. They were not anarchists. Many of them had seen riots, mobs, and violent intimidation. John Adams’s public life is a sustained argument that a free society depends on law being more than a slogan: “a government of laws, and not of men.” In other words: the legitimacy of power is measured by its willingness to be constrained by forms that prevent discretion from becoming dominance.

Yet they also insisted that when government becomes systematically arbitrary; when it displays, over time, a design to reduce people under “absolute despotism” - the people retain an ultimate right to resist. The Declaration’s standard is not the anger of a day, but the evidence of a pattern: “a long train of abuses and usurpations” pursuing a single object. Locke had made the same point earlier: not every abuse warrants resistance, but a sustained pattern that reveals a design changes the moral calculus.

Even then, the founders’ own logic makes armed revolt a threshold, not a reflex.

First, the justification is cumulative, not instantaneous. It rests on records: repeated injuries, failed petitions, closed avenues of remedy.

Second, it presumes that ordinary lawful remedies have been attempted or foreclosed. The Declaration itself speaks of “patient sufferance” before necessity.

Third, even where writers like Hamilton and Jefferson acknowledged an “original right of self‑defense,” they treated it as a last resource when representatives betray constituents and when constitutional remedies fail to restrain usurpation.

What follows for our present moment is both sobering and practical.

If the Minneapolis shootings are investigated transparently, if disputed claims are tested against evidence, if accountability mechanisms function, then the republic is doing what it was built to do - even in pain.

But if scrutiny is systematically blocked; if administrative paperwork is treated as a substitute for a judge; if removals are accelerated in ways that deny meaningful hearing; if the home is approached as a convenience rather than a constitutional line; then the country is not merely enforcing immigration law. It is rehearsing a broader idea: that rights exist until the executive branch decides they do not.

That is the habit the founders feared.

And that is why careful language matters. It is possible, at once, to demand lawful enforcement and to insist that lawfulness includes warrants that mean what they say, procedures that are not performative, and due process that is not treated as a discretionary courtesy. It is possible to condemn rioting and also condemn unaccountable state violence. A republic does not have to choose between order and liberty; it must refuse to separate them.

On the specific claim about violence: in the reporting available at the time of this writing, my own research confirms multiple civilians have been killed in Minneapolis in encounters with federal immigration agents this month; I have not found confirmed reporting of law‑enforcement deaths connected to these incidents. If that changes, the record should be corrected immediately; because the discipline of proof is not a weapon for one side, but the civic hygiene without which every argument becomes propaganda.

So the work now is not to inflame. It is to preserve the record.

Demand transparent investigations into each shooting.

Demand clarity about what counts as a warrant, and who signs it.

Demand that removal procedures provide genuine opportunity to be heard, and that detention does not become a mechanism of coercion-by-delay.

And demand these things in the old republican way: with evidence, with patience, and with a refusal to let fear - whether of disorder or of outsiders - become the excuse by which the state relearns lawlessness.

Because the founders’ warning was never merely that tyranny might arrive. It was that a frightened people might invite it piecemeal by allowing “temporary” shortcuts to harden into permanent habits.

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.