Join me in fighting for your rights (and mine)

Subscribing to Unreported Truths isn't just about supporting journalism. It's about believing the Constitution truly matters even now - that it protects every American from government overreach.

The older I get, the more I like our Constitution.

That’s not really true. “Like” is a way to avoid saying what I mean, because I worry it sounds over-the-top.

What I mean is this: the older I get, the more I revere and want to defend our Constitution.

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(You said you preferred subscriber appeals to paywalls. This is an appeal. But it’s more.)

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I felt this reverence again this week, as I read the preliminary injunction by federal Judge Amos Mazzant III demolishing efforts to create a national registry that would essentially end corporate anonymity. Mazzant, who serves in Texas, was appointed by President Obama. He was previously a magistrate judge, essentially an assistant judge who handles duties like setting bail.

In other words, Mazzant hardly has a super-conservative pedigree. Nor is he a famous legal scholar. His is just one of 667 federal district judgeships across the 50 states.

Yet that didn’t stop Mazzant from standing up to the entire executive and legislative branches of government. In the second paragraph of his 79-page-opinion, Mazzant laid out the stakes of his decision:

Ours is a written Constitution. The promises it makes to the People and the States alike are not hidden. The Court must enforce them.

Mazzant found the “Corporate Transparency Act” unconstitutional, mainly because it is a federal effort to take powers the Constitution reserves for states. He wrote:

Modern problems may well warrant modern solutions, but modernity does not grant Congress a roving license to legislate outside the boundaries of our timeless, written Constitution.

And so on his own authority - as a federal judge appointed under Article III of the Constitution - Mazzant prevented the law from taking effect nationally.

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(He’s right!)

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A law to make companies to disclose their owners might at first seem to have little in common with the White House conspiracy to censor me in 2021.

But they both show the power - and necessity - of the Constitution’s boundaries.

The leviathan that is government always has an excuse to extend its power. For the good of the people it serves, you see? And once it takes control of some sphere of economic or private life, it rarely relinquishes it without a fight.

The Constitution is an astonishing document, both in the individual rights it enumerates and in how carefully and thoughtfully it works to check the leviathan. Even now, over 236 years after the several states ratified it, it it makes America different than other wealthy democracies.

It makes us freer, freer in speech and attitude, freer to bear arms and stand up to tyrants. That difference was visible during Covid, when the United States stood nearly alone in robustly debating and in many places quickly discarding lockdowns.¹

But if we don’t keep fighting for it, we’ll lose it.

I’ve realized lately that I am not a conservative or a liberal, I am a constitutionalist - a constitutionalist as only someone whose rights were violated by the White House can be.

That’s what Berenson v Biden is about. The First Amendment issues it raises are real and serious. Win or lost, I will always know James Lawrence and I fought for speech and the Constitution.

With your help, I’ll never stop.

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(Thank you. For being a reader. And, I hope, a subscriber.)

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1. The only real exception, the only other democracy that didn’t impose long and harsh national lockdowns was Sweden. And Sweden followed a freer path largely by accident. Its system gave extraordinary power to a single unelected official, an epidemiologist named Anders Tegnell, and Tegnell didn’t think lockdowns made much sense.