8/14/26

My friends and countrymen, this is an explainer for Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial, for which case I made in The Case for the conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte. For a moment on the fifteenth day of Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial, a single Facebook post from a lawyer, one with no seat on the bench and no witness stand to answer from, threatened to become the day's biggest story. House private prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan posted a general statement about courtroom procedure. The defense called it a violation of Rule 18. The presiding officer promised a formal ruling. Before any citizen judges whether a Facebook post can derail a trial of this magnitude, the rule itself deserves a plain explanation.

What Rule 18 Actually Says

Rule 18 of the Senate's impeachment rules prohibits senators, House prosecutors, defense counsels, private counsels, and witnesses from making public comments or disclosures about the merits of a pending impeachment trial. In plainer terms, everyone with a formal role in the trial is barred from arguing their case anywhere except inside the Senate chamber itself. This is a version of what Philippine law more broadly calls the sub judice rule, a principle that prohibits public commentary on matters still awaiting a court's judgment, precisely so that public opinion, media pressure, or courtroom theater performed outside the courtroom cannot substitute for the evidence and arguments a tribunal is supposed to weigh on its own.

This is a concern the American founders themselves anticipated, long before Facebook existed to test it. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist No. 65 in 1788 to defend the Constitution's design for trying impeachments, warned that such trials would rarely be decided on evidence alone, since the charges almost always touch matters that divide the public into rival camps before a single witness testifies. Hamilton's fear was that the accused's fate would turn on the comparative strength of the two parties rather than a fair demonstration of guilt or innocence, with the community choosing sides long before the tribunal rendered its verdict. Rule 18 answers a version of the same fear Hamilton raised two centuries earlier: that a trial conducted partly in public argument, rather than wholly within the chamber built to weigh it, ceases to be a trial in any meaningful sense at all.

The purpose is straightforward. A trial's integrity depends on the judges deciding the case based on what happens inside the proceeding, not on what lawyers post to their followers while the gavel is still in session. Impeachment court spokesperson Regie Tongol, addressing a separate Rule 18 controversy earlier in this same trial, put the principle plainly: senator-judges "are even more covered" by the rule than the lawyers arguing before them, since impeachment is inherently a political process, and any appearance that a judge has already formed an opinion risks damaging public confidence in the verdict itself.

What Actually Happened on Day 15

The controversy began during a heated cross-examination exchange between private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan and defense counsel Kristine Ferrer, in which Ferrer appeared to argue that misleading questions were permissible during cross-examination. At 11:29 that morning, Ligutan posted to Facebook a reminder that "misleading questions are not allowed even in cross-examination."

Lead defense counsel Sheila Sison raised the issue in a formal manifestation before the court, arguing the post mischaracterized Ferrer's courtroom position, disrespected a fellow member of the bar, and violated Rule 18's ban on public commentary about the case's merits. Ligutan defended himself to reporters afterward, saying his post named no one and referenced no case, and that he was confident he knew exactly where the line was and had not crossed it.

Presiding Officer Francis Escudero did not rule from the bench. He told the floor that he had directed the clerk of court to monitor counsels' public statements throughout the week, and observed that one side had been "crossing the line many, many times." He promised a formal ruling, warning, and order at the next trial date.

This Was Not the First Time

Weeks earlier, in June, Senator Robin Padilla, one of the senator-judges hearing the case, posted on Facebook defending his own courtroom questions about the authenticity of video evidence presented at trial. Tongol, the court spokesperson, confirmed that senator-judges are bound by Rule 18 as well, and warned that public statements suggesting bias could undermine confidence in the court's eventual decision. The Ligutan controversy is therefore not an isolated incident but the second public test of the same rule within a single trial, a pattern worth watching as the proceedings continue.

Two Honest Perspectives

Those who see merit in the defense's complaint argue that the timing and content of Ligutan's post make its target obvious even without naming names. A statement about misleading cross-examination questions, posted minutes after a public exchange in which the defense had just argued the opposite position, functions as public commentary on the case regardless of whether a name appears in the text. Under this reading, Rule 18 exists precisely to prevent lawyers from litigating their case in the court of public opinion between recesses, and a technical absence of names does not cure that.

Those unpersuaded by the complaint counter that Rule 18, as written, prohibits comment on the merits of the case, meaning the underlying facts, the guilt or innocence of the Vice President, the strength of the evidence, not general statements of settled legal principle. Representative Terry Ridon made this argument directly, asking whether the post named a person or discussed the case's merits and concluding it did neither. Under this reading, a lawyer restating a rule every law student learns in evidence class is teaching, not litigating, and treating every adjacent public statement as a Rule 18 violation would leave lawyers unable to discuss the law at all while a trial is ongoing.

Both readings rest on a genuine ambiguity in the rule itself: whether "the merits" means only direct commentary on guilt or innocence, or extends to any public statement whose obvious context relates to a specific courtroom dispute. Presiding Officer Escudero's own choice to draft a formal ruling rather than decide the matter immediately suggests the ambiguity is real enough to deserve careful resolution rather than a snap judgment from the bench.

Why This Matters Beyond the Courtroom

A citizen with no interest in impeachment law might reasonably ask why a lawyer's Facebook post deserves this much attention. The answer lies in a broader principle that touches every Filipino who has ever followed a court case in the news, or discussed one with a neighbor. Sub judice rules exist because trials are supposed to be decided by evidence presented and tested inside a courtroom, not by whichever side manages to dominate public conversation while the case is pending. The same principle that restrains Ligutan restrains a barangay official commenting publicly on a pending case against a political rival, or a company executive posting about ongoing litigation involving a competitor, or, for that matter, any citizen serving on a jury who might be tempted to discuss the case with family before a verdict is reached.

The Philippine Supreme Court took this principle seriously enough to formally rule, in a matter involving former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, that a public official's campaign of public statements about her own pending case violated the same sub judice standard now at issue in Ligutan's post, showing that this is not a minor procedural nicety invented for this trial but an established doctrine with real consequences reaching all the way to the nation's highest court.

My friends and countrymen, whether one Facebook post crossed a legal line is, in the end, a narrower question than the principle it tests. The principle is this: that citizens are entitled to a verdict reached through evidence weighed in the open chamber, not through whichever lawyer's post gained the most shares before the next recess.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: Understanding Rule 18 - What the Ligutan Facebook Controversy Actually Means first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7/27/26

My friends and American countrymen, before a single sail was unfurled on the morning of August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus had already survived a gauntlet of obstacles sufficient to have ended the enterprise a dozen times over. The voyage that ultimately gave birth to the civilization we now inhabit was not the product of favorable circumstance. It was wrested from fourteen years of institutional rejection, erroneous science, financial precarity, crew insubordination, inadequate vessels, powerful enemies at court, and contractual negotiations that collapsed entirely before being revived at the last hour. Each of these difficulties is documented. Each of them, had it prevailed, might have consigned the New World to centuries more of European ignorance.

1. Fourteen years of institutional rejection.

Columbus first presented his westward proposal to King John II of Portugal in 1485. The Portuguese crown convened a committee of maritime experts, which dismissed his calculations and declined to sponsor him. He subsequently petitioned the courts of England and France, receiving no support from either. When he finally appeared before the Spanish crown in 1486, Queen Isabella referred the proposal to a maritime commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, her own confessor. That commission deliberated intermittently for four years. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, the Talavera commission declared the idea "impossible and vain and worthy of rejection." This verdict, preserved by las Casas and cited by Samuel Eliot Morison in Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Vol. 1, p. 131), is the most authoritative documentary record of the institutional resistance Columbus faced. It was not until Luis de Santángel intervened personally in January 1492 — after Columbus had already been turned away a third time — that the enterprise was revived. Any man of lesser resolve would have abandoned the project after the first rejection, let alone the fifth.

2. Disputed and erroneous geography.

The scientific foundation of Columbus's proposal was, by the judgment of his own contemporaries, mathematically unsound. While Columbus knew the Earth was round, he calculated its circumference 25 percent smaller than it actually is, and he overcalculated the size of Asia so that Japan lay just over 8,000 miles from Spain. Many of Columbus's contemporaries disagreed with these calculations, saying he had vastly underestimated the numbers. The Portuguese scholars who rejected his petition in 1485 were, in strict scientific terms, more accurate than Columbus himself. A peer-reviewed analysis published in IEEE Spectrum further establishes that when faced with several possible values for a key variable, Columbus would invariably choose the most optimistic, and that the great 1492 Enterprise of the Indies owes its existence to three serious measurement errors. The sobering implication is this: had the American continent not existed precisely where it did, Columbus's fleet would have exhausted its provisions in open ocean and perished without ever sighting land. The voyage succeeded not because Columbus's calculations were correct, but because an entire continent interrupted his fatal miscalculation.

3. Chronic insufficiency of financing.

Even after royal approval was granted in principle, the financial foundation of the voyage remained precarious and dependent upon a single private actor. The path to funding was not smooth: a royal commission led by Hernando de Talavera had reviewed Columbus's proposal and, in 1490, dismissed it as "impossible and vain." Only after the conquest of Granada in January 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella override the commission and seal the deal in the Capitulations of Santa Fe on April 17, 1492 — a contract that promised Columbus ten percent of all gold, silver, spices, and precious stones he brought home. The royal treasury alone did not close the financial gap. The account books of Luis de Santángel and Francisco Pinelo preserve the transaction with precision: "Santángel is credited with an item of 1,140,000 maravedis which he gave to the Bishop of Avila for Columbus's expedition." Without that private advance — contributed by one man acting on his own conviction — the crown's commission would not have been sufficient to equip three ships for an ocean crossing of indefinite duration. Columbus was never more than one withdrawn patron away from the end of his enterprise.

4. Crew reluctance and the threat of mutiny.

The most dangerous crisis of the voyage did not arise from the sea. It arose from the men sailing it. After more than thirty-one days at sea without sight of land, the crew of the Santa María arrived at the threshold of open mutiny on Wednesday, October 10, 1492 — two days before landfall. Columbus records the moment in his own journal, as preserved by Bartolomé de las Casas: "Here the men lost all patience, and complained of the length of the voyage, but the Admiral encouraged them in the best manner he could, representing the profits they were about to acquire, and adding that it was to no purpose to complain, having come so far, they had nothing to do but continue on to the Indies, till with the help of our Lord, they should arrive there." A separate contemporary account, recorded by the historian Peter Martyr d'Anghera in De Orbe Novo (1511) and cited by Arnold K. Garr of Brigham Young University, establishes that the threat had reached a far graver dimension: the sailors even conspired to do away with their leader, whom they "planned to throw into the sea." Land was sighted less than forty-eight hours after that ultimatum. Had the crew acted on their conspiracy even one day earlier, or had Columbus yielded to their demands, the voyage would have returned to Spain having discovered nothing.

5. The inadequacy of the vessels.

The three ships assigned to the expedition were modest in scale, privately owned, and not originally constructed for open-ocean exploration of indefinite range. None of the three vessels were originally intended for oceanic exploration. Columbus was assigned the heaviest and slowest of the three. The peril was not theoretical. The Santa María, Columbus's flagship, ran aground on a reef off the coast of Hispaniola on Christmas Day, 1492, and was lost entirely. A single severe Atlantic storm — a routine meteorological hazard of the season — could have dismasted or sunk one or more of the vessels before any landfall was achieved. Samuel Eliot Morison, who retraced Columbus's voyages under sail before writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, captures the fragility of that final night at sea: "This night of October 11–12 was one big with destiny for the human race, the most momentous ever experienced aboard any ship in any sea. A brave trade wind is blowing and the caravels are rolling, plunging and throwing spray as they cut down the last invisible barrier between the Old World and the New." The fate of two continents rested on three wooden ships that the Spanish crown's own records describe as a low-risk gamble precisely because those in power did not expect to see them again.

6. Political opposition from powerful advisors.

The Talavera commission was not the only institutional force arrayed against Columbus. The commission first met in 1486 to investigate the feasibility of Columbus's proposal, seems to have met only intermittently, and it was not until 1490 that the board recommended against the plan. Later, in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella overrode the board's decision and decided to sponsor Columbus. For six years, the official machinery of the Spanish court produced nothing but delay and rejection. It required not the logic of Columbus's proposal — which the experts had already adjudicated and dismissed — but the personal advocacy of Friar Juan Pérez of La Rábida and the financial leverage of Luis de Santángel to displace the commission's authority entirely. Morison, the scholar who knew Columbus's career more intimately than any other, rendered his verdict in a single sentence: "He was man alone with God against human stupidity and depravity, against greedy conquistadors, cowardly seamen, even against nature and the sea." That sentence is not hagiography. It is a precise summary of the documentary record.

7. The contractual negotiations nearly collapsed.

Even after royal sponsorship was secured, Columbus's demands for hereditary titles and a ten percent share of all revenues proved so excessive, by the standards of the Spanish court, that the monarchs dismissed him entirely in early April 1492. Columbus departed court and was already on the road toward France to petition King Charles VIII when a royal messenger overtook him and summoned him back. Having endured years of scrutiny and rejection, Columbus prepared to abandon Spain in early April, intending to seek patronage from the French king. This departure prompted urgent intervention by Luis de Santángel, who personally financed much of the expedition and persuaded Queen Isabella of the venture's merits. Isabella recalled Columbus from the road and affirmed the crown's sponsorship. The Capitulations of Santa Fe, signed April 17, 1492, document the extraordinary terms Columbus ultimately extracted: Columbus was promised the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed viceroy and governor of newly claimed territories, and would receive ten percent of all revenues in perpetuity. The terms were unusually generous, but as his son later wrote, the monarchs were not confident of his return. A man who was not on the road to France at precisely that moment, or a messenger who did not ride fast enough, or a queen who did not reverse herself — any one of those variables would have ended the enterprise permanently.

Verdict.

My friends and American countrymen, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights did not emerge from favorable conditions. They emerged from a civilization that took root only because one man survived fourteen years of rejection, three erroneous geographic calculations, one near-fatal financing gap, a crew that conspired to drown him, three ships inadequate to the ocean they crossed, six years of expert opposition, and a contractual negotiation that had already failed before it succeeded. The record is documented. The sources are named. The verdict is not in doubt. Which of those seven obstacles would have broken you — and which of them broke Columbus? Long live the indomitable spirit that built this republic!

The post Seven Odds Against Columbus: How the Voyage That Built America Nearly Never Happened first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-24-26

My friends and countrymen, this is an explainer for Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial, which I mentioned in The Case for the conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte. On the seventh day of the trial, Senator Pia Cayetano raised an objection that many watching on television or scrolling through social media likely found confusing. She spoke of a "poisonous tree" and its "fruit." No plant was on trial, of course. She was invoking a legal doctrine, and it deserves an explanation in plain language before any citizen forms a judgment on whether her objection was sound. Her brother, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, raised a second and equally important legal question days later, one that turns on a distinction many citizens use loosely without realizing it carries a precise legal meaning: the difference between wealth that is merely unexplained and wealth that is proven ill-gotten. Both objections deserve a plain explanation before any citizen judges whether they were sound.

What the Doctrine Actually Says

The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine holds a simple idea: if the source of a piece of evidence was obtained illegally, then anything that grows out of that evidence, anything discovered because of it, is likewise tainted and should not be used in court. The tree is the illegal act. The fruit is everything that comes after it. If the tree is poisoned, the fruit cannot be clean, no matter how useful or damning it turns out to be.

Consider an everyday illustration. Suppose a police officer breaks into a person's home without a warrant and finds a ledger detailing a crime. If a court later allows that ledger into evidence, it rewards the illegal entry. Worse, if that ledger leads investigators to a second location, and a second illegal search turns up a weapon, the doctrine says the weapon cannot be used either, because the entire chain of discovery began with an unlawful act. The remedy is not to punish the officer alone. It is to remove the incentive for any officer to break the law in the first place, by making sure the fruits of that violation are worthless in court.

Where This Doctrine Comes From in Philippine Law

The concern is older than the Philippine Republic itself, and older than the United States as well. In 1761, a Boston lawyer named James Otis stood before a colonial court and argued against British "writs of assistance," general warrants that let customs officials search any home or warehouse without specifying what they sought. A young John Adams watched from the courtroom and later wrote that American independence was born that day. The grievance ran deep enough that the founders wrote its remedy directly into the Fourth Amendment, requiring every warrant to describe with particularity the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The Philippine Supreme Court applied this very reasoning in Stonehill v. Diokno, a landmark 1967 ruling that struck down evidence gathered against an American businessman under warrants so broad they authorized searches of nearly anything, anywhere, described only in general terms. The Court ruled that such general warrants violated the constitutional right against unreasonable searches, and that evidence obtained under them could not be used, regardless of what that evidence revealed.

There is a striking irony worth noting plainly. The very case Senator Cayetano invoked was decided against the father of the current lead private prosecutor questioning witnesses in this trial, Chel Diokno. The same precedent, coincidentally, was raised by Chief Justice Renato Corona's defense team during his own impeachment trial in 2012.

What Senator Cayetano Actually Argued

Senator Cayetano's specific objection concerned the Anti-Money Laundering Council, or AMLC, and whether it had legal authority to disclose Vice President Duterte's financial records to the House of Representatives committee that was investigating her. Her argument, reduced to its simplest form, was this: if the AMLC had no legal basis to hand over that information in the first place, then the tree from which the entire financial case grew was poisoned, and everything built on top of it, the House committee's findings, the subpoenas, the allegations, should not be admitted.

The Prosecution's Answer

Prosecutor Chel Diokno offered a narrower reading of the relevant statute. He argued that Section 8-A of the Anti-Money Laundering Act was written to prevent individual AMLC officials from leaking financial information on their own initiative, not to block a subpoena issued by a lawful tribunal such as an impeachment court. A subpoena from a constitutionally recognized body, in his view, is a fundamentally different legal act than an unauthorized leak, and the poisoned-tree analogy does not stretch to cover it.

A Related Objection: Two Different Kinds of Wealth

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano raised his own objection in the same exchange, pressing the prosecution on whether the House had actual evidence before it began investigating, or whether it went looking for evidence only after deciding Duterte was guilty. His questioning did not stop there. He pushed further into a distinction worth understanding on its own, since it turns on two terms that sound similar but mean very different things in law. He asked Diokno directly, "Do you have the evidence, or are you fishing for the evidence?" His deeper concern was whether a mere gap between what Duterte declared as income and what she actually owned was enough, by itself, to justify subpoenaing years of her financial life before she had any chance to explain that gap herself.

Here is the distinction his question rested on. Unexplained wealth is a description. It simply means a public official's recorded wealth exceeds what her lawful income can account for, and no explanation has yet been given for the difference. Ill-gotten wealth is a conclusion. It means that gap has been examined and found to come from an unlawful source. Cayetano's worry was that treating the first term as though it already proved the second would let prosecutors search first and justify the search later.

Diokno's answer rested on a specific law, Republic Act No. 1379, which governs the forfeiture of unlawfully acquired property. That statute holds that when a public official's wealth is manifestly disproportionate to her lawful income, and she cannot explain the difference, the law presumes the excess was unlawfully acquired, unless she rebuts that presumption with an explanation of her own. Diokno offered a simple illustration: wealth traceable to an appreciated land sale would be explained wealth, and only the records themselves, not an assumption of guilt, would reveal which kind Duterte's is. His closing line to the court captured the whole exchange: "That's precisely why, your honor, they call it 'unexplained wealth.'" The term itself, in other words, is not an accusation. It is the legal trigger that requires an official to speak up before the presumption against her hardens into something worse.

The Senate impeachment court, weighing all of these arguments, ruled in favor of issuing the subpoenas. Both objections were heard fully and fairly. Neither prevailed at this stage.

Two Honest Perspectives

A fair explainer must present both sides as their strongest advocates would, and let the reader judge.

Those who see merit in Senator Cayetano's objection point out that constitutional protections against unreasonable searches exist precisely to restrain the government when it is investigating the powerful, not only the powerless. If institutions can quietly hand over any citizen's financial data without proper legal basis, then no one, prominent or ordinary, is protected. A senator raising this objection loudly and publicly, they argue, does the nation a service by forcing prosecutors to prove their evidence was gathered lawfully rather than assuming lawfulness because the target is unpopular.

Those skeptical of the objection counter that Senators Pia Cayetano and Alan Peter Cayetano are widely known allies of the Duterte family, and that raising a procedural objection this technical, this late, and this specific to a single disclosure mechanism, functions as a delay tactic rather than a genuine constitutional concern. They further note that an impeachment court is not a criminal court bound by the same exclusionary rules developed for criminal prosecutions, and that Congress's oversight power to investigate a public official's conduct in office operates on a different constitutional footing than a police officer's power to search a private home.

A similar split exists over Senator Alan Peter Cayetano's unexplained-wealth question. Those sympathetic to his concern argue that due process matters even for the powerful, and that no official should have years of financial records exposed on the strength of an income gap alone, without first being asked to explain it. Those unpersuaded reply that Republic Act No. 1379 was written precisely to place that burden on the official, not on the accuser, and that Diokno's answer did not sidestep the law but applied it exactly as the legislature intended: the presumption exists so that citizens are not left waiting years for proof that may never surface if the official controls all the relevant records.

Both positions rest on real legal principles. Neither is frivolous. The impeachment court chose to allow the evidence, but that ruling settles the immediate procedural question. It does not settle the broader debate over how far this doctrine should reach into congressional investigations, a debate legal scholars will continue long after this trial concludes.

Why This Matters to Every Filipino, Not Just Politicians

Here is the doctrine's practical relevance for readers who have never appeared before a Senate impeachment court and likely never will. The same protection Senator Cayetano invoked for Vice President Duterte is the protection an ordinary Filipino would invoke if police searched a home without a warrant and used what they found to build a criminal case, or if a barangay official accessed a person's bank records without legal authority and passed them to a rival for political leverage. It is the same principle cited in countless drug war cases nationwide, where defense lawyers have argued that evidence planted or seized without a valid warrant should never have reached a courtroom. It is the same principle a small business owner would rely on if a local government unit obtained financial records through an improper channel and used them to justify a politically motivated tax investigation.

The unexplained-wealth presumption has its own everyday counterpart, one many Filipinos already recognize by another name: the lifestyle check. When a barangay captain drives a vehicle worth many times her declared salary, or a customs employee builds a house no ordinary government paycheck could finance, ordinary citizens invoke the very same logic Diokno used in the impeachment court, that an unexplained gap between income and lifestyle is itself grounds for scrutiny, not proof of innocence until someone else proves the theft. This is not a special rule invented for a vice president. It is the same rule a barangay assembly can invoke against its own captain.

The doctrine exists because the government's power to gather evidence must be paired with a government that follows its own rules while gathering it. When a senator invokes it on behalf of a vice president, and a public school teacher's lawyer invokes the identical principle defending a student wrongly implicated by an illegal search, they are standing on the same constitutional ground. That ground either holds for everyone or it protects no one.

My friends and countrymen, understanding these two doctrines is not merely an academic exercise for lawyers and senators. Each is one of the walls the Constitution and our laws have built between citizens and the power of the state, walls that stand whether the person behind them is a vice president or a jeepney driver.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: Understanding Two Objections at VP Sara Duterte’s Impeachment Trial---"The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" and "Unexplained Wealth" first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-21-26

Updated:

7-25-26

My friends and countrymen, the Senate of the Philippines now sits as an impeachment court to try Vice President Sara Duterte for the second time in her single term of office, a distinction held by no other Filipino official since the restoration of our democracy in 1986. The House has already impeached her; what remains is whether the Senate will convict. The trial that began on July 6, 2026, is not a spectacle of dynastic rivalry, however much the Marcos-Duterte feud tempts commentators to treat it as one. It is a constitutional proceeding grounded in specific articles, specific sums of money, and a specific threat against the life of a sitting president. I have compiled the evidence for your consideration, and I trust you, as I always have, to draw the conclusion it demands.

The Constitutional Foundation

Article XI, Section 3(5) of the 1987 Constitution bars a second impeachment complaint against the same official within one year of the first. This is precisely why Duterte's first impeachment, initiated in February 2025, was struck down by the Supreme Court in July 2025 on procedural grounds, and precisely why the four complaints filed in February 2026 waited until the one-year bar expired before they were formally initiated. The process that produced the current Articles of Impeachment on May 11, 2026, when 257 of 318 House members voted to impeach her, followed the very roadmap the Supreme Court itself laid down. This is not a shortcut. It is compliance with the Court's own ruling.

Once the Articles reached the Senate, the Constitution left no room for delay or dismissal. Former Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio stated plainly that once the Articles of Impeachment are submitted to the Senate, trial must proceed at once, and that the process cannot be terminated by a mere motion to dismiss. Carpio noted further that the Constitution's own Filipino-language text uses the word "forthwith," meaning immediately, leaving no ambiguity for senators inclined to slow-walk the proceedings. This is not a partisan reading. It is the plain text of our founding law.

The Legal Grounds

The Articles of Impeachment allege culpable violation of the Constitution, graft and corruption, betrayal of public trust, bribery, and other high crimes. Article I concerns the alleged misuse of confidential funds: P500 million from the Office of the Vice President and P112.5 million from the Department of Education during her tenure as its secretary, totaling roughly P612.5 million. The Commission on Audit itself flagged P125 million of these confidential funds in July 2023 for having been spent in full within eleven days. Under Republic Act 3019, the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, public officials who fail to account for public funds entrusted to them face both administrative and criminal liability, a standard the Commission on Audit's own finding of an eleven-day disbursement window was designed to test.  Article II concerns unexplained wealth disproportionate to her lawful income. Article III concerns bribery and procurement irregularities at the Department of Education. Article IV concerns her documented threat against the lives of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

It is worth stating plainly what impeachment is and is not. It is not a criminal trial, and conviction here would not brand Duterte a felon; it would only end her tenure and bar her from future office. The Constitution set a lower threshold, betrayal of public trust, precisely because the public should not have to wait years for a criminal court before removing an official found unfit to hold power.

House Representative Terry Ridon, one of the complainants, described the scale of the flagged transactions as impossible to explain through lawful income or declared assets, calling the House vote a constitutional act of accountability rather than a political exercise. Regardless of the complainant's motives, the underlying claim is a legal one, and it deserves a legal answer, not a political one.

Duterte's counsel calls the case against her baseless and the product of a family feud with the Marcos administration. The prosecution calls the same set of facts a matter of public trust owed to the electorate. Both claims cannot be weighed by rhetoric. They can only be weighed against the Commission on Audit's own findings, the AMLC's own reports, and the Vice President's own recorded words, none of which originate with her political rivals.

The defense's strongest procedural objection came not from Duterte's own counsel but from the bench itself. Senator Pia Cayetano, presiding as a judge in the case, invoked the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine during the trial's seventh day, questioning whether the Anti-Money Laundering Council had any legal basis to disclose Duterte's financial records to the House committee in the first place. Her brother, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, pressed the same concern from a different angle, asking prosecutor Chel Diokno directly whether the House possessed evidence of wrongdoing or had impeached first and gone looking for evidence afterward. Both senators invoked Stonehill v. Diokno, a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down evidence gathered under an unconstitutional general warrant, a precedent that happens to have been decided against the prosecutor's own father and was previously raised in Renato Corona's defense as well.

The prosecution's answer rested on a narrower reading of the statute. Diokno argued that Section 8-A of the Anti-Money Laundering Act was written to prevent unauthorized leaks by individual AMLC officials, not to bar a subpoena issued by a lawful tribunal, including an impeachment court. Senator Cayetano pressed further still, asking Diokno directly, "Do you have the evidence, or are you fishing for the evidence?" His concern was one of definition as much as procedure. Unexplained wealth and ill-gotten wealth are not the same claim. The first describes a gap between declared income and actual net worth. The second describes a conclusion that the gap was filled unlawfully, and Cayetano questioned whether the prosecution was permitted to subpoena a lifetime of financial records before Duterte had any chance to close that gap herself.

Diokno's answer rested on Republic Act No. 1379, the law governing forfeiture of unlawfully acquired property, which holds that a documented gap of this kind creates a prima facie presumption that the excess was unlawfully obtained, a presumption the official may rebut with her own explanation. Wealth traceable to an appreciated land sale would be explained wealth, Diokno said, and only the records themselves, not an assumption of guilt, would show which kind Duterte's is. "That's precisely why, your honor, they call it 'unexplained wealth,'" he told the court. The impeachment court weighed both arguments and ruled in favor of the subpoenas. The objection was heard. It did not prevail. Even so, five senator-judges, Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Loren Legarda, Imee Marcos, and Camille Villar, later filed separate manifestations registering continued reservations about the subpoena's scope. The ruling settled the procedure. It did not settle every judge's mind.

The Criminal Exposure

Beyond the impeachment court, Duterte and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio, face independent criminal exposure. The Anti-Money Laundering Council confirmed that banks submitted 630 covered transaction reports and 33 suspicious transaction reports tied to accounts linked to the couple, amounting to roughly P6.77 billion in transactions dating back to 2006. Suspicious transaction reports of this volume are the statutory trigger under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, Republic Act 9160, for further civil forfeiture and criminal investigation, independent of whatever the Senate decides. The National Bureau of Investigation separately reported that handwriting analysis found signatures on confidential-fund liquidation documents inconsistent with authentic specimens, a finding at the center of allegations of falsification. None of these findings are convictions. They are, however, documented findings by government agencies charged with exactly this kind of forensic work, and they establish that Duterte's legal exposure does not end even if the Senate acquits her.

The Moral Argument

Here is where the case rests most heavily, my friends. Betrayal of public trust is not merely a legal category under our Constitution. It is a moral standard, and it applies to every official regardless of family name, regardless of popularity, and regardless of which political dynasty they descend from. Duterte's own words, delivered in a profanity-laced broadcast in November 2024, included an instruction that if she were killed, someone should go kill the President, the First Lady, and the former Speaker. She has never disavowed the remark as a joke. In fact, she said so herself immediately after making the threat, repeating the phrase for emphasis: "No joke. No joke."

Senior NBI Agent John Mark Calilung, the prosecution's first witness, testified under oath that the threat was absolute, telling the impeachment court it did not depend on Duterte's own survival to become real. A second NBI officer, Regional Director Jeremy Lotoc, went further days later, calling the threat "serious, actual, and real" and warning that leaving it unaddressed risked plunging the country into chaos. Two officers from the same bureau, testifying on separate days, reached the identical conclusion independently. Duterte's own defense is that the threat was conditional revenge, activated only by her own death, and therefore protected as an exercise of free expression rather than a genuine, actionable threat. Calilung's testimony that the threat was absolute cuts against this framing directly. A threat need not be immediate to be real: it commits a named person to kill three others the moment a single condition is met, and it is the commitment, not its timing, that the law treats as the offense.

On the trial's eighth day, NBI Director Melvin Matibag added a third layer of evidence, presenting the court with video from 2011 showing Duterte, then mayor of Davao City, striking a court sheriff four times during a property dispute. Matibag testified that pattern of violence is one of five factors the NBI weighs when assessing whether a threat is serious, a framework the bureau has said is modeled on the one used by the United States Secret Service. As part of that same assessment, Matibag testified that his task force had reviewed an affidavit filed with the International Criminal Court by former Davao police officer Arturo Lascañas, alleging Duterte's own involvement in the anti-drug operation known as Oplan Tokhang, the very operation at the center of her father's pending ICC prosecution. The following day, under cross-examination by the defense, Matibag went further still, testifying that Duterte's own statement was already an admission consummating a betrayal of public trust, since her oath of office bound her to execute the law and do justice to every man, not to execute the President. The defense moved to strike the remark from the record. The motion was overruled.

The record shows the assassination threat did not stand alone. In October 2024, Duterte warned Senator Imee Marcos that she would dig up her father's remains and throw them into the West Philippine Sea. Weeks earlier, she had publicly described her fantasy of beheading Marcos Jr.

Surely, Duterte, being a trained legal mind, does not need to be told that a documented pattern of this kind carries evidentiary weight in a court of impeachment. Indeed, a public official entrusted with the second-highest office in the land owes the nation sobriety in moments of crisis, not incitement, especially one elected by 32,208,417 voters--- the highest vote total of any vice-presidential candidate in Philippine history.

In 2012, the Senate convicted and permanently disqualified Chief Justice Renato Corona on a fraction of the documented irregularities now before it. A standard applied to a chief justice cannot quietly become optional for a vice president simply because her father commands a national following. The same standard I would apply to any official of any party, I apply here: documented misuse of public funds, a documented threat against the life of a president, and documented financial irregularities running into the billions of pesos are not matters that any elected official, however popular, should escape simply because a two-thirds vote in a divided Senate is difficult to secure.

Verdict

The evidence assembled here is not speculation. It is drawn from the Commission on Audit, the Anti-Money Laundering Council, the National Bureau of Investigation, sworn House testimony, and the Vice President's own recorded words. Even senator-judges sympathetic to Duterte's cause raised their strongest procedural objection to this evidence and lost. The Constitution requires 16 of 24 senators to convict. Whether the Senate finds the political courage to reach that number remains uncertain, given the shifting allegiances within that chamber. But the question before every citizen, Filipino and American observer alike, is not whether Sara Duterte is popular. It is whether a public officer who threatens the life of a sitting president and stands accused of misappropriating hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds should be permitted to remain a heartbeat from the presidency. Which standard would you rather see applied to those who govern you: the standard of loyalty to a name, or the standard of loyalty to the Constitution?

One more fact belongs on the record before you answer. Duterte herself has not once appeared before the court since the trial began on July 6. On July 16, with travel authority approved by the Office of the President, she left the country on a trip that included a stop in The Hague, the same city where her father remains in International Criminal Court detention awaiting his own trial for crimes against humanity. The House prosecution panel's farewell was brief and pointed. "Safe travels and happy trip, and hope she'll be back soon," said Representative Zia Alonto Adiong, the panel's spokesman.

My friends and countrymen, there is no shame in demanding accountability from those we once trusted. There is only shame in looking away.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7/9/26

My friends and countrymen, both American and Filipino, on July 6, 2026, the Senate impeachment court of the Republic of the Philippines opened the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, and within the first half hour, before a single witness was called, the senator-judges were locked in a constitutional dispute over who was even permitted to hold the gavel. Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, the ousted Senate President, insisted that only the sitting Senate President could preside over the trial. Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian and the majority bloc disagreed, and by a vote of 12 to 8, the court elected Senator Francis "Chiz" Escudero to preside instead. This dispute is not merely a Philippine curiosity. It sits atop the same constitutional silence that the United States has wrestled with since 1787, and understanding how the two nations have handled that silence tells us something important about what each constitutional order actually protects.

What Both Constitutions Actually Say

Article XI, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution states that when the President is on trial, the Chief Justice presides but does not vote, and conviction requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate. The American original is nearly identical in structure. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 of the United States Constitution provides that the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments, and that when the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside, with conviction requiring the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.

Both documents name a presiding officer for exactly one scenario: the impeachment of the sitting president. Both documents are silent on every other case. This is not an oversight. It is a structural choice, and Cayetano built his entire argument on the theory that the framers of both nations left that silence intentional in a specific direction, toward the Senate President by default.

Why the Chief Justice Only Presides for the President

The American rationale is documented and specific. The Chief Justice presides over a presidential trial because the ordinary presiding officer of the Senate is the Vice President, and the Vice President cannot be permitted to preside over the proceeding that could elevate him to the presidency. As the Library of Congress's Constitution Annotated explains, the framers built this exception around a specific danger: a sitting Vice President judging the very trial that might hand him the presidency. That risk was not theoretical in the founding era, when a President and Vice President could come from opposing factions rather than a single ticket, as the pre-Twelfth Amendment system allowed.

The Philippines inherited this same design, and for the same reason. Neither constitution asked the Chief Justice to preside as a general safeguard of gravitas. Both asked him to preside to solve one specific conflict of interest, and only that one.

What Hamilton's Reasoning Suggests, and What It Does Not

America's founders left no record addressing a Vice President's own impeachment trial directly, and honesty requires saying so before saying anything else. However, Alexander Hamilton did explain, in Federalist 65, why the Senate was entrusted with impeachment at all, and why the Chief Justice's role was carved out as narrowly as it was. Hamilton considered and rejected uniting the Supreme Court with the Senate as the impeachment tribunal, reasoning that the same judges might later face the convicted official again in a criminal proceeding, and that having tried him once, they could not be trusted to judge him a second time without prejudice. Giving the Chief Justice a seat only in presidential trials was, in Hamilton's own words, "the prudent mean" between two flawed extremes, a partial adoption of judicial involvement without its full cost.

That reasoning was built for one specific problem: the Vice President, as the Senate's ordinary presiding officer, could not be trusted to preside over a trial that might elevate him to the presidency he stood to inherit. Nothing in Hamilton's argument addresses what happens when the Vice President is not the beneficiary of the trial's outcome but its subject. The founders solved the conflict they saw coming. They left unaddressed the one they did not.

This matters for both nations weighing the current dispute. It means the American constitutional design was never silent by accident on the presidential case, and never silent by oversight on the vice-presidential case either. It was silent because the specific problem of a sitting Vice President as defendant did not present itself to a convention working from the more urgent fear of executive overreach. Cayetano's framers'-intent argument in Manila rests on an actual, documented convention exchange. An American framers'-intent argument on this exact question would rest on inference from adjacent reasoning, not a comparable exchange, and the piece should not claim more certainty for one side than the record permits.

The Genuinely Unsettled Question: Who Presides Over a Vice President's Trial?

Here the comparison sharpens considerably, because the American Constitution has never actually answered who presides when a Vice President, not a President, stands trial. The Congressional Research Service's own account of Senate impeachment procedure confirms the gap directly: outside the four requirements the Constitution itself specifies, the Senate writes its own rulebook for every trial, and no rule in that book has ever named who takes the gavel when a Vice President, rather than a President, sits in the dock. No provision addresses a sitting Vice President as defendant, and it is doubtful the Vice President would be permitted to preside over their own trial, since as president of the Senate, the Vice President would ordinarily preside over every other impeachment. Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 before it came to that. The question Cayetano and Gatchalian argued over in Manila this month is, in the American system, not a resolved precedent at all. It is an open constitutional gap, no different in kind.

Precedent for a Senate-Elected Presiding Officer

The United States has, however, tested a related question and settled it by vote rather than by court order. During Donald Trump's second impeachment trial in 2021, Senate Republicans argued the Chief Justice was constitutionally required to preside even after Trump had left office, though that objection was entangled with a separate dispute over whether a former officeholder could be tried at all. The Senate rejected the presiding-officer argument by a vote of 55 to 45, and Senator Patrick Leahy, the President pro tempore, presided instead. That is the closest American analogue to what happened in Manila. A minority raised a constitutional objection to the presiding officer's authority. The body did not accept the objection as self-executing. It put the question to a vote and moved forward with its chosen presiding officer.

The parallel extends further into procedure. Under long-standing Senate precedent, constitutional points of order in impeachment trials are not ruled on by the presiding officer alone. They are submitted to the full body for a vote. This is precisely what Escudero did when he declined to rule on Cayetano's objection himself and instead treated the matter as one for the Senate to resolve through the ballot, a procedural instinct both chambers apparently share.

Where the Two Situations Diverge

Here the parallel breaks, and it breaks in a way that matters more than the presiding officer question itself. The American precedent involved no dispute over whether Leahy was validly the President pro tempore, nor any question about whether the session that seated him was properly convened. The fight was confined to the single constitutional question on the table.

The Philippine dispute is layered atop a second, unresolved crisis: whether the June 3, 2026 Senate session that removed Cayetano as Senate President, installed Gatchalian, and amended the impeachment rules was itself valid. Petitioners before the Supreme Court, in a Very Urgent Manifestation with Motion filed the same day the trial opened, cite Senate attendance records showing only 12 of 24 senators present at that session and argue that if it lacked a proper quorum, everything built upon it, including the amended rule and Escudero's election, is void as well. University of the Philippines constitutional law professor Paolo Tamase offered a narrower reading of the underlying question, telling Rappler that "the Constitution only designated a specific presiding officer for the impeachment of a President, taking that from the US Constitution." Everything else, in his reading, was left open to the Senate itself. But Tamase's reading answers the constitutional silence question. It does not touch the separate quorum and legitimacy question that the Cayetano bloc has placed before the Supreme Court.

The Framers' Intent Argument, and Its Limits

Cayetano's strongest evidentiary claim was that the 1986 Constitutional Commission considered and withdrew an amendment naming the Senate President as presiding officer, not because it was rejected, but because commissioners believed it was already understood. He invoked the exchange involving future Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. to support this reading, and unbroken practice for nearly three decades appeared to bear it out. Davide himself, as sitting Chief Justice, presided over the 2000 to 2001 impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada, the one instance where the Constitution's own presidential-trial rule applied without dispute. Cayetano is entitled to his inference from the withdrawn amendment. However, an inference is not a ruling, and Senator Kiko Pangilinan countered with the text itself, noting that nowhere in the Constitution's provisions on impeachment does it state that the Senate President must preside over any trial but the President's. The American record offers no comparably specific withdrawn-amendment episode for non-presidential cases, which means the Philippine debate rests on a firmer documentary foundation than its American counterpart, even though it remains, at bottom, an argument from silence.

What Comes Next, and Why Americans Should Watch Too

The Supreme Court's ruling on the pending petitions will determine far more than who holds the gavel. Should the Court find the June 3 session void for want of quorum, the amended rule and Escudero's presidency of the impeachment court fall with it, and the trial already underway would face a retroactive legitimacy challenge rather than a prospective one. Should the Court instead treat the presiding-officer question as a political question left to the Senate's own rules, as the Philippine majority and scholars including Tamase and Molo have argued, the trial proceeds undisturbed regardless of how the quorum dispute resolves. American readers should not mistake this for a foreign curiosity. The United States has never tried a sitting Vice President, and the same silence that Manila is litigating this month sits unresolved in Article I, Section 3, waiting for the day an American Senate faces the identical question with no settled answer of its own.

Verdict

Two constitutions, drafted two centuries apart on opposite sides of the Pacific, arrived at the identical structural choice: name the Chief Justice for the President alone, and trust the Senate to govern itself in every other case. The United States has tested that trust once, in 2021, and resolved it by vote without a constitutional crisis attached. The Philippines is testing it now, in the middle of a leadership fight whose legitimacy the Supreme Court has not yet settled. The presiding officer question, standing alone, is not the threat to either republic. What threatens a republic is when a genuine constitutional silence becomes the seam through which a separate, unresolved power struggle tries to pass unnoticed.

My friends and countrymen, watch the Court's ruling closely, not because it will tell you who should have held the gavel, but because it will tell you whether the Philippine Senate's own house is in order. A trial cannot stand on ground that is still being surveyed.

The post When the Constitution Does Not Say: Presiding Officers, Precedent, & VP Duterte's Impeachment Trial first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-4-26

Note: The full version of this commentary can be accessed by clicking on this link.

My friends and American countrymen, for your convenience and in the interest of informed civic reflection on this 250th anniversary of America's independence, I have herein summarized the eight indisputable reasons why America remains an exceptional nation. These are not sentiments. They are documented facts, and I invite you to weigh them accordingly.

The first and most foundational reason is that America is a paragon of liberty in a form no prior civilization had achieved. Its government was the world's first to be constructed on the premise that sovereignty flows upward from the people rather than downward from a crown, a premise so radical in 1776 that King George III himself could not comprehend George Washington's voluntary resignation from power. That political liberty was reinforced by religious liberty, secured by the First Amendment against the very kinds of state-sponsored persecution that England under Henry VIII and France under Robespierre had inflicted on their own citizens. Liberty regardless of race, though delayed by the founders' tactical compromise with the slaveholding states, was ultimately vindicated by the 13th Amendment, the Civil War in which 324,000 white soldiers died in the cause of black freedom, and subsequent civil rights legislation that dismantled institutionalized racism across every sector of American life. Economic liberty, enshrined in a constitutional framework that no prior nation had attempted, generated a productive base so formidable that the United States surpassed Great Britain as the world's leading economy by 1900, issued 640,000 patents in its first century of operation, and produced the assembly line, the internet, and the smartphone. Finally, that liberty was extended abroad not through colonial annexation or resource extraction, but through military interventions in Korea, Kuwait, Kosovo, and elsewhere, in which America bore the cost and left the sovereignty intact. Political commentator Dennis Prager states the matter plainly: America has been the greatest model of liberty, the greatest spreader of liberty, and the greatest preserver of liberty the world has ever known. The most credible witnesses to that verdict are not partisans, but Orlando Patterson, a black Jamaican-born Harvard scholar who declares America "the least racist white-majority society in the world"; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called the Declaration of Independence "a promissory note" of universal natural rights; and Frederick Douglass, the former slave who revered the Constitution and called it "a glorious liberty document." (For the expanded first reason and full version of this commentary, click on this link.)

The second reason is the Constitution's unbroken operation across 238 years. Political scientists Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton calculated that the average national constitution endures only 17 years. The American Constitution has survived a civil war claiming 600,000 lives, two world wars, a Great Depression, and presidential assassinations, without once requiring replacement. France has replaced its national charter 15 times in the same period. Venezuela has done so 25 times. Haiti, 21. The Philippines, which shares significant constitutional DNA with the American system, has operated under 7 constitutions since 1899, each change following a period of political rupture. That America has required only one such reset in nearly two and a half centuries is not circumstance. Historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated that the founders designed their governmental architecture with a deliberate, historically informed understanding of how republics fail, and built the constitutional mechanisms to prevent each failure mode they had studied. Constitutional stability is not merely a legal achievement; it is the precondition for every other liberty enumerated above.

The third reason is that anyone can become an American, while no American can become a Filipino, a Nigerian, a Mexican, or a Russian in the same sense. Throughout history, national identity has correlated with ethnic or racial identity. America was among the first nations, if not exclusively the first, to de-emphasize bloodline in favor of individual achievement and the adoption of a shared creed. Political scientist Samuel Huntington defined that creed as the embodiment of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property, and demonstrated that millions of immigrants achieved wealth and status in America precisely by assimilating to it. Andrew Carnegie, born in Scotland, built Carnegie Steel. Jan Koum, born in Soviet Ukraine, co-founded WhatsApp. Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant who did not yet speak fluent English, wrote what became America's unofficial national anthem. The Latin motto E Pluribus Unum, from many, one, is not a slogan. It is a governing principle with no true parallel in the world's history of nations.

The fourth reason is that America's system of checks and balances was not derived from theory, but from the documented study of how every prior free republic had failed. The founders scrutinized Greece, Rome, France, and England, reading Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, Montesquieu, and Locke not as ornamental scholarship but as operational intelligence. Athens fell to the mob, as illustrated by the trial and execution of Socrates by a 500-member jury of legislators in 399 BCE, and by the summary execution of eight generals after the Battle of Arginusae in 406 BCE. Rome fell to the dictator, as Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE and the subsequent conversion of the Republic to an Empire under Octavian demonstrated. Britain fell to the monarch. The Constitution was designed, with historical precision, to prevent all three outcomes simultaneously, dividing power horizontally across three branches, and vertically between the federal government and the sovereign states, drawing on the Lycian Confederacy's model of proportional representation, which Montesquieu had identified in The Spirit of the Laws and Madison cited approvingly in Federalist 9.

The fifth reason is that America established and sustained the world's first tradition of the peaceful transfer of executive power, regardless of personal or political animosity between rivals. Every prior civilization had known violent, coerced, or dynastic transitions. Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times. King Charles I was beheaded. King Louis XVI was guillotined. George Washington, by contrast, voluntarily resigned the presidency and returned to his farm, prompting King George III to call him the "greatest character of the age," a reaction that itself confirms how incomprehensible voluntary abdication of power was to the world in 1797. When John Adams lost his reelection bid to his personal rival Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Adams attended Jefferson's inauguration. That institutional behavior in the face of personal hostility established the precedent that every subsequent American transfer of power has followed, and that other democracies have since attempted to emulate.

The sixth reason is that America has been, by measurable evidence, the most charitable nation in history. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831 that Americans of every condition perpetually formed voluntary associations to accomplish what Europeans left to the state. That observation has been vindicated by nearly two centuries of data. Americans gave an estimated $592.5 billion to charity in 2024, the largest sum the Giving USA Foundation has ever recorded, with roughly two-thirds coming directly from individuals. The United States supplies approximately 40 percent of all global humanitarian assistance. The difference between American generosity and European generosity is not one of character but of architecture: the European model channels solidarity through taxation and the welfare state, while the American model channels it through voluntary association, precisely as the founders intended and Tocqueville foresaw.

The seventh reason is that America leads the world in the sustained, bipartisan, and unrelenting prosecution of the war on terror, a campaign whose origins predate September 11, 2001 by two centuries. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched the newly established navy to confront the Barbary pirates of North Africa, terror-sponsoring states that had extorted over one million dollars annually in tribute from the United States government. The war concluded in 1815 under President James Madison, marking the first time in history that a Western power refused permanent submission to terrorist appeasement. In the modern era, Osama bin Laden was eliminated under President Obama in 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani under President Trump in 2019, and Ayman al-Zawahiri under President Biden in 2022, a sustained bipartisan campaign spanning over two decades. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign that opened with nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours and achieved the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man who had led Iran's terror-sponsoring regime since 1989. Sustained American pressure subsequently forced Iran's hand on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a substantial share of the world's oil flows, after Tehran closed it during the 2026 war. From the shores of Tripoli to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, the United States has never permanently yielded to Islamic terrorism, and no other nation on earth can make that claim.

The eighth reason is that the very existence of America required the overcoming of historical odds so formidable that its birth cannot be regarded as inevitable. China, under Admiral Zheng He, commanded the most powerful naval fleet in the world between 1405 and 1433, possessing, as law and public policy professor Ted Stewart documents in Seven Miracles That Saved America, the capacity for movable type, natural gas, smallpox inoculation, and oceanic circumnavigation while Europe was still copying scripture by hand. Had the Ming Dynasty not abandoned those voyages in 1433, and had China reached the Americas first, the Confucian administrative tradition, which political scientist Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations identified as placing authority, order, and the collectivity above the individual, would have shaped the New World instead of Magna Carta, Locke's natural rights philosophy, and Montesquieu's doctrine of separated powers. Within the American Revolution itself, George Washington commanded a chronically underfunded, undersupplied, and outmanned Continental Army, personally suppressed an officers' coup at Newburgh in 1783, and was the indispensable presence at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, whose delegates had conditioned their attendance on his. Remove Washington from the equation, and neither the Revolution nor the Constitution survives in the form that produced the republic we commemorate today.

Two hundred and fifty years of evidence constitute a verdict. The question Obama's 2009 remark implicitly raised, whether American exceptionalism is merely a sentiment indistinguishable from what any nation believes about itself, does not survive the historical record above. British exceptionalism does not include 238 years of unbroken constitutional operation. Greek exceptionalism does not include a founding creed that naturalizes any person on earth as a citizen. No nation's claim to exceptionalism includes all eight of the documented distinctions enumerated above. The record speaks for itself, and on July 4, 2026, we do not merely celebrate it. We inherit it.

Long live our brave soldiers!

Long live the Republic of the United States of America!

Note: The full version of this commentary can be accessed by clicking on this link.

The post The 250th Anniversary & Final Case for American Exceptionalism first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-4-26

My friends and American countrymen, we rightly celebrate George Washington as the founder of our republic, the father of our Constitution, and the architect of the American presidency. Yet we rarely pause to consider the more unsettling truth that underlies each of these achievements: he should not have survived long enough to accomplish any of them. The historical record documents, across three decades of military service and multiple theaters of combat, a pattern of close encounters with death so extraordinary that Washington's own contemporaries struggled to explain it in purely natural terms. I submit to you that this record deserves careful examination, not to inflate legend, but because the evidence itself is remarkable.

The first and most thoroughly documented of these encounters occurred on July 9, 1755, at the Battle of the Monongahela in present-day western Pennsylvania. Washington, then a 23-year-old colonel serving as a volunteer aide-de-camp to British Major General Edward Braddock, rode continuously across the field of a catastrophic ambush, delivering orders under conditions that killed or wounded sixty of the eighty-six British officers present by the battle's third hour. Two horses were shot from beneath him. Four bullets passed through his coat and hat. Every other British officer on horseback was shot. Braddock himself was mortally wounded and dead within four days. Washington survived without a scratch. In a letter to his brother John Augustine Washington dated July 18, 1755, preserved by George Washington's Mount Vernon from the Founders Online at the National Archives, Washington wrote: "By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my companions on every side." Dr. James Craik, Washington's physician and eyewitness, later told Washington's early biographer John Marshall that "I expected every moment to see him fall. His duty and situation exposed him to every danger. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him from the fate of all around him."

Washington's second major encounter with death occurred on January 3, 1777, at the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey. The Continental Army, already exhausted from the overnight crossing of the Delaware and the surprise attack at Trenton eight days earlier, was on the verge of collapse when General Hugh Mercer's brigade was overrun and Mercer himself was mortally wounded. Washington rode forward on a large white horse, conspicuous against the field, to within thirty yards of the British lines (well within effective musket range) to rally his disintegrating troops. According to George Washington's Mount Vernon, Washington called out to his soldiers: "Parade with us my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy and we shall have them directly!" His aide-de-camp John Fitzgerald reportedly pulled his hat over his eyes, expecting to see the General shot from the saddle at any moment. Both sides fired simultaneously at close range, filling the field with smoke. Historian W.J. Wood writes that "Colonel John Fitzgerald of [Washington's] staff covered his eyes so that he would not see his commander blasted from the saddle. Yet when the smoke began to clear, there was Washington, standing in his stirrups, calmly waving his men forward." The British broke and ran. Washington, untouched, shouted after them, "It's a fine fox chase, boys!" — a remark recorded by Mount Vernon and the American Battlefield Trust from contemporaneous accounts.

What is one to make of this evidence? The record establishes that upon at least five occasions when in great danger from gunfire, Washington remained unscathed — his hat was shot off his head, his clothes were torn, horses were killed beneath him, but he was never so much as scratched by a bullet, and for this immunity he consistently thanked Providence. Mount Vernon's own scholars have examined the so-called 'Indian Prophecy' — the account of an Indigenous chief who allegedly declared after the Monongahela battle that his men had fired repeatedly at Washington and missed, concluding that a spirit shielded him. Those scholars have determined that the legend as fully told by Washington's step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis in the 1820s almost certainly did not unfold precisely as described. What is not disputed, however, is that Washington escaped serious harm in a battle that killed nearly every officer around him, and that this feat, combined with his later prominence, was seen as remarkable, if not miraculous, by his contemporaries, and perhaps, even by Washington himself. The verified facts require no embellishment: on a battlefield that killed nearly every officer around him, and before a British firing line thirty yards distant, Washington was not struck. The historical record does not require a legend to produce astonishment. The record itself is sufficient.

My friends and American countrymen, we have in previous commentaries documented the five great junctures at which Washington's choices preserved the republic — Valley Forge, Trenton, Newburgh, Annapolis, and the presidency itself. What the evidence above adds to that argument is this: at two of those junctures, the republic's survival depended not only on Washington's willingness to act, but on his survival under conditions that should, by every calculation of probability, have produced his death. Had a bullet at the Monongahela in 1755 killed an obscure colonial colonel twenty years before the Revolution, there would have been no commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, no Newburgh Address, no voluntary resignation at Annapolis, and no presidency to define. Had a British musket ball at Princeton in 1777 struck the man thirty yards from its muzzle, the Continental Army might not have survived the winter of 1777, and the republic it was fighting to establish might have expired before it could be constituted. The indispensable man was, by the evidence of his own battles, a man who should not have been there to be indispensable.

Long live the spirit of George Washington and long live the Republic of the United States of America!

The post George Washington’s Close Encounters with Death first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7/2/2026

My friends and American countrymen, in 2009, President Barack Obama was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism. "I believe in American exceptionalism," he answered, "just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He went on, in the same remarks, to affirm America's "extraordinary role in leading the world toward peace and prosperity." The qualifying comparison, however, contained a philosophical claim worth examining on its own terms: that exceptionalism is merely a sentiment every nation holds about itself, with no nation's claim more documented or more verifiable than another's. That claim does not survive scrutiny. British exceptionalism rests on Magna Carta and parliamentary tradition; Greek exceptionalism rests on the legacy of Athenian philosophy and democracy. Neither nation can claim, as the evidence herein will show, an unbroken constitutional order of 238 years, a founding creed that naturalizes any man on Earth as a citizen, or two centuries of unrelenting resistance to terrorism stretching from the Barbary Coast to the present day. Whether the sentiment is sincere or merely diplomatic is not the question. The question is whether the claim is true, and on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of America's Declaration of Independence, the historical record answers it.

1. America is a paragon of liberty. 

Liberty in America takes several distinct forms, each with its own evidentiary record: political liberty, in which sovereignty flows from the people rather than a crown; religious liberty, secured against the kind of persecution that consumed Europe for centuries; liberty regardless of race, which survived the nation's founding compromise with slavery and ultimately triumphed over it; economic liberty, which built the most productive nation in history; and the liberty that America's military has, at great cost and with relative restraint, extended to others abroad.

First and foremost, America’s government is the world's first to be based on natural law and the principle that sovereignty emanates from the people, not from the monarchy or the government. That is in direct contrast to the theocratic concept of the "Divine Right of Kings,” which has pervaded the world for millennia until the American Revolution.  “Instead of rights and privileges flowing ‘down’ from the king,” states political historian Dinesh D’Souza, “they now flow ‘up’ from the people to the government.”  He further elaborates:

In the old case, the king granted limited authority and power to their rulers.  Elsewhere, the people are subjects and thus subjected to the laws, possessing rights only at the behest of the government.  In America, there are no subjects, only citizens.  Citizens are subject only to laws that they themselves make through their elected representatives.  The representatives possess this power at the behest of the people, and they must obey the same laws as the rest of the people.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood reinforces this point, arguing in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1993) that the founding represented nothing less than the destruction of the ancient assumption that some men were born to rule and others to obey. "The Revolution," Wood writes, "was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history." What made it radical was not battlefield victory but the wholesale dismantling of a social order in which birth, blood, and title determined one's place. For the first time in modern history, a government was constructed on the premise that no man was inherently superior to another — a premise so self-evident to Americans today that its revolutionary audacity is almost entirely forgotten.

This was no accident of rhetoric. Historian Bernard Bailyn, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, demonstrates that the founders' invocation of natural rights reflected a deeply constructed political philosophy — assembled from decades of reading Locke, Cicero, the English Whigs, and Montesquieu. The founders did not merely declare that rights were natural; they engineered an entire governmental architecture to protect those rights from the force history had proven most likely to destroy them: concentrated governmental power. The American founding was an act of deliberate intellectual design — not circumstance or accident.

That being said, the government of the world’s first modern constitutional republic (the U.S.A.) was not established to protect its own interests or even the interests of any one of its own branches independent of the people.  Nor was it framed to protect and perpetuate the privileged classes of dynasties, the wealthy, ecclesiastical, technocratic, or the intelligentsia.  Indeed, most of the founders who signed America’s Declaration of Independence essentially forfeited their money, property, and family in the cause for liberty---one from which they derived no economic profit.  Hence, President Abraham Lincoln aptly referred to the infant government as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” a radical concept unheard of then and often taken for granted today.  It is also the reason the founders rejected “titles of nobility” in Article II, Section 9 of the Constitution, and was illustrated by the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited America in 1831 and observed that even a waiter is often called “sir,” though he is not a knight.

Just as Americans sought refuge from political persecution in their pursuit of self-governance, so, too, did they seek freedom of religion and freedom from religious coercion by the state.   America’s founders scrutinized the history of religious persecution and abuse of political power among the great French and English empires, wherein only the religion of the despots was legally recognized, while religious minorities were oppressed, terrorized, or even executed.

For example, from 1533-1534, King Henry VIII of England severed ties with Pope Clement VII and the predominant state-sponsored Catholic Church in order to establish the Church of England of which he declared himself its “Supreme Head.”  As such, he outlawed papal authority, making any dissent of his title treasonous and punishable by death.  He seized vast lands and wealth of the Catholic estate, while destroying shrines to saints, and executing about 200 Catholic dissenters.

During France’s Reign of Terror (1793-1794) of National Convention leader Maximilian Robespierre, the deistic “Cult of the Supreme Being” was established, which was neither Catholic nor Protestant.  Since the Catholic Church represented the old regime, its members were the persecuted majority in that the clergy were imprisoned and executed, while the cathedrals were stripped of their religious symbols and repurposed for the state.  Protestants shared the same fate, since they were perceived as competing with state loyalty.  Finally, since Robespierre considered atheists to be immoral, they also became vulnerable to persecution and execution.

Cognizant that many Christians were fearful of such instances of a potentially oppressive national church or state-mandated religion under the new American government, President Thomas Jefferson assured them of the establishment of a “wall of the separation of church and state,” whereby the state could not hinder religious institutions or individuals with regard to religious beliefs, rituals, or practices.  Hence, the First Amendment of the Constitution asserts that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .”

After all, the primary reason the Pilgrims and Puritans settled in America in the early 17^th century was to evade religious persecution in England.  Such religious liberty was one of a few factors that inspired the Great Migration in which approximately 20,000 Englishmen settled in America within a decade.  Religious liberty was so highly regarded by Jefferson that his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was one of three of his achievements engraved on his tombstone.

Even liberty for blacks was no exception, for their time came to pass in the event of the Civil War (in which 324,000 white soldiers died defending the freedom of blacks) and ratification of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution (which abolished slavery).  Subsequent amendments and laws were passed to deinstitutionalize racism and racial discrimination, which included equal rights to citizenship, suffrage, public transportation, educational and employment opportunities in both the public and private sectors, and the abolition of apartheid.

For example, the Insurrection Act of 1807 and Enforcement Act of 1871 were invoked to allow the President to use military force against the Ku Klux Klan (the anti-black terrorist organization) to protect the civil rights of blacks.  This led to mass arrests and prosecutions of Klan members.  During racial integration of public schools and universities in the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy sent the national guard to several schools to protect the new black students.

Such anti-racist measures have been proven to be very effective in that blacks have not only been able to occupy positions traditionally held by whites, they have climbed the corporate ladder as CEOs, board directors, and major shareholders.  Many have become entrepreneurs, starting and growing small businesses.  They have excelled in media and entertainment.  They have occupied every branch of government---local and federal.  America’s first black president, Barack Obama, was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012 (a feat that would have been mathematically impossible without the white vote, thereby debunking the myth of America as a predominantly racist nation).  Even the second highest public office was presided over by America’s first black female vice president, Kamala Harris.

In a word, social progress in that the redress of racial grievances has been fairly swift and impactful since America’s founding.  Even the black liberal sociologist Orlando Patterson, who was born under British colonial rule in Jamaica, emphasizes this point:

America, while still flawed in its race relations, is now the least racist white majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all of Africa; and has gone through a dramatic change in its attitudes toward miscegenation.

The naysayers may contend that all such redress of racial grievances and injustices are the result of reformers or public servants who lived long after America’s founders.  This may imply that not only are the founders unworthy of praise, but they may have even framed the Constitution embedding slavery and racial inequalities in the DNA of America.  Of course, that would be a plausible contention that America was, indeed, founded on the sin of slavery, or that its founders were pro-slavery.  However, history proves otherwise.

First and foremost, it is important to understand that declaring a universal truth is different from declaring it to be in full unimpeded operation at a particular time and place.  Circumstances at a given time may not permit a certain group or class of persons to freely exercise their natural rights and liberties.  President Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his rebuttal to pro-slavery Senator Stephen Douglass:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects . . . . They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

Even the black civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated that “when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” and it was a “promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable rights’ of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”  Now that it is established that the founders understood the universality of natural rights, what follows are some of the measures they took to uphold such a self-evident truth.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he condemned King George III for several grievances, one of which was slavery, stating:

He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.
He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a Market where Men should be bought and sold, and that this assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die.

Unfortunately, the dissenting committee members, who oversaw the draft, omitted it permanently from the adopted draft.  Regardless, the Declaration’s preamble asserts “that all men are created equal.”  It does not qualify a specific group or kind of men.  It clearly states “all men,” which would logically include blacks, would it not?

In Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Three-Fifths Clause states:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons

This indicates that every five slaves will be counted as three people (three-fifths or 60% of the slave population) for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives.  The alternative would be to legally count one slave as a single person, and as such, would empower the slaveholding states further due to increased representation.  Hence, diminishing the slave population by two-fifths restricts the power of the slaveholding states.  As the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass states:

I answer — It is a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding States; one which deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation. A black man in a free State is worth just two-fifths more than a black man in a slave State, as a basis of political power under the Constitution. Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of “two-fifths” of political power to free over slave States. So much for the three-fifths clause; taking it at is worst, it still leans to freedom, not slavery; for, be it remembered that the Constitution nowhere forbids a coloured man to vote.

Other anti-slavery measures included the 1787 Northwest Ordinance which outlawed slavery in the territory that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law a bill that outlawed the importation of slaves.  Of the thirteen original states, five either abolished slavery outright or were trending towards abolition by the time the Constitution was signed in 1787.  Among them were Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  Although Vermont was not one of the original states, it was the first territory to outlaw slavery in 1777.  Additionally, Benjamin Franklin co-founded a Philadelphia abolitionist organization, and George Washington willed all of his slaves free upon his death.

Furthermore, it is clear that not all of America’s founders supported slavery or its perpetuation.  All things considered, it seems grossly unfair to condemn all the founders as pro slavery or to assert that America’s government was founded on slavery in light of the anti-slavery policies legislated by various states and the federal government.

Perhaps skeptics or naysayers may then question why the anti-slavery founders did not simply reject slavery outright at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.  My answer is politics, which sometimes necessitates short-term compromises in order to secure long-term gains.  Political historian Dinesh D’Souza elaborates:

So the choice facing the founders in Philadelphia was not whether to have slavery or not.  Rather, it was whether to have a union that temporarily tolerated slavery, or to have no union at all.  The continent of North America might then have become an amalgam of smaller nations---vulnerable to the depredations of foreign empires---and slavery might have continued longer than it actually did.

Just the fact that the anti-slavery founders had the foresight to engineer such a government that would severely restrict and facilitate the eventual demise of a perennial, universal institution, illustrates their remarkable prescience.  Hence, America’s history of slavery and racial injustices, in no way, undermines the nation’s exceptionalism.  On the contrary, the self-corrective mechanisms embedded in its founding documents only confirm it.  No other 18^th century government can make that claim, not even contemporaneous empires like Britain, France, or Spain.

In America, liberty also extends to the economic sphere in that, as economist Milton Friedman stated, “it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities.”  He further elaborates:

The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal.  The seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom he can sell.  The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on.

In other words, a centralized authority does not exist to govern such an autonomous arrangement of various competitors.  Instead, the entire system is regulated by what economist Adam Smith, in his pioneering work, The Wealth of Nations, dubbed “the invisible hand of the market,” otherwise known as the free market system or capitalism.  What makes it unique to America is that the nation was the first to frame a legal system built on market principles enshrined in the Constitution, which is why we are also celebrating, alongside America’s 250 years of independence, the publishing of Smith’s book in 1776.

Additionally, while free market capitalism developed only partially or with feudalistic restrictions in Europe (whereby upward social mobility was stagnant due to class rigidity imposed by an established aristocracy), full-fledged capitalism developed in America with respect to the individual rights of “the common, ordinary man” without an aristocracy of nobility coupled with the elements of low taxation, minimal regulations, secure property rights, and strong patent and copyright protections, essentially allowing upward social mobility to anyone of any class and encouraging new inventions and technology.

The results were not merely theoretical.  Economic historian Angus Maddison, whose reconstruction of global GDP data remains the authoritative benchmark for pre-modern economic history, calculated that between 1800 and 1900, average global income nearly doubled (rising from approximately $1,140 to $2,180 per person annually).  Yet America did not merely keep pace with that global trend; it surpassed it so decisively that by the close of the 19th century, the United States had overtaken Great Britain (the world's previous economic leader) in both GDP per capita and labor productivity, which was a gap that would only widen further into the 20th century.  No nation in history had risen so far, so fast, within a single constitutional framework built explicitly to protect economic liberty.

Nor was this prosperity accidental.  The founders encoded innovation into the Constitution itself.  Article I, Section 8 empowered Congress to secure "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the only clause in the Constitution where the framers took the unusual step of specifying not merely a power, but its explicit purpose.  The Patent Act was signed into law in April 1790, just one year after ratification.  In that first year, 3 patents were granted. By 1830, that annual figure had grown to 544. By 1900, the United States had issued a cumulative 640,000 patents (a figure that prompted a former Prime Minister of Great Britain, perhaps the most industrially advanced nation of the era, to observe that "in no one country, I suppose, is there so careful a cultivation of the inventive faculty.")  From the cotton gin to the telegraph to the lightbulb, the constitutional protection of intellectual property was the invisible scaffolding beneath America's century of invention.

Even in the modern era, America has the comparative advantage due to the entrepreneurial traits of risk-taking, ambition, and self-promotion being entrenched in the national culture, whereas economic equality and economic security are valued more than economic liberty in Western Europe (hence, higher taxes, more regulations, bigger safety net).  Likewise, the world’s brightest minds are nurtured in the most prestigious institutions of innovation like MIT, Caltech, and Silicon Valley.  Finally, starting a business in the country that provided the world with the assembly line, the internet, and the smartphone inspires consumer trust, enhances credibility, and facilitates access to international markets.

With regard to upward social mobility, in Rage and the Republic (Simon & Schuster, 2026), political commentator Jonathan Turley cites a recent study of wealthy individuals in the Forbes 400 with these findings:

. . . in 2011, only 32 percent came from wealthy families---down from 60 percent in 1982.  Twenty percent came from poor families, and the majority did not inherit a family business.  Roughly 70 percent started their own businesses (up from 40 percent in 1982).  In 2019, another study found that 79 percent of millionaires were self-made.

As a result, America has quickly become a prosperous nation, so much so that it can and does expand its wealth abroad in the form of jobs, goods and services, and foreign aid.  “More people have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism,” states Ambassador Mike Huckabee, “than any other economic system ever to appear in the history of the world.  This is a proven fact and it is a primary reason why the United States is a superpower that has blessed the rest of the world with its innovations and generosity when need has arisen.”

In addition to defending liberty within its own borders, America has utilized the world’s most powerful military for the defense of other free nations and the spread of liberty in others enveloped in a tyrannical government.  In 1950, the U.S. sent troops to Korea to prevent the communists from dominating the entire peninsula.  The result was an independent South Korea in which hundreds of American troops are stationed to guard against a potential North Korean invasion until today.  Related to the Korean conflict, the U.S. has provided military defense for Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China.  (Perhaps you should express gratitude for your smartphone or laptop and their AI chips.)  In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. led a 42-country coalition to liberate it and restore its independence.  During the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” massacre of thousands of Muslim ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999, the U.S. led NATO on a bombing campaign to quash Serbian forces, eventually leading to Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

What all such military missions share in common is America’s benevolence in preserving and spreading liberty globally without colonial annexation or even usurping natural resources from the aforementioned countries, unlike other historical great powers.  As I pointed out in The Full Ledger: Why America Remains the Philippines’ Greatest Ally, it could be argued (as an exception) that the U.S. annexed the Philippines without its consent in 1898.  However, the former educated Filipinos, taught them English, fought alongside them against the Japanese imperialists, and assisted them in establishing their own constitution for self-governance, which eventually led to their independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946.  By stark contrast, the Philippines’ former colonial power, Spain, ruled the islands for over 300 years and left no such democratic infrastructure to speak of.

In spite of the aforementioned U.S. military missions, as well as numerous others not mentioned, it is notable that military expenditures have remained below 4% annually.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (the globally recognized benchmark for defense expenditure data), U.S. military spending in recent peacetime years has hovered between 3 and 4 percent of GDP: in 1999 it reached a post-Cold War low of 3.09 percent; in 2019, despite spending $732 billion (nearly as much as the next ten nations combined), it amounted to just 3.4 percent of GDP; and in 2025 it stood at approximately 3 percent.

By contrast, Russia devotes 7.1 percent of its GDP to its military, and Ukraine, in wartime, has committed 39.6 percent. The reason America can project unmatched global power at a comparatively modest fiscal burden is the same reason it surpassed Great Britain as the world's leading economy by 1900: the free market system (economic liberty enshrined in its Constitution) generates a productive base so vast that military supremacy becomes, in relative terms, economically sustainable.  That accounts for the nation’s relative safety and security from foreign invaders by a mighty and exceptionally advanced military apparatus.  (U.S. is the only nation with stealth bombers, deep bunker buster bombs, and Space Force which played a critical role in intercepting Iran’s ballistic missiles during Operation Epic Fury.)

In summary, political commentator Dennis Prager elucidates the role of America with regard to liberty:

It was the country that most inspired other countries to be free.  It is the country that has been free the longest. . . More people from more countries have immigrated to America in order to be free than to the rest of the world’s countries put together.  More black Africans have immigrated to the United States voluntarily---looking for freedom and opportunity---than came to the United States involuntary as slaves. . . The fact is that America has been the greatest model of liberty, the greatest spreader of liberty, and the greatest preserver of liberty the world has ever known.

Perhaps the most credible verdicts are those rendered not by partisans, but by witnesses: Orlando Patterson, the black Jamaican-born Harvard scholar of slavery, who declares in The Ordeal of Integration (Basic Books, 1998) that America is "the least racist white-majority society in the world"; black civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who acknowledged that the Declaration's universal natural rights constituted "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir"; and Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and former slave, who revered the U.S. Constitution and dubbed it "a glorious liberty document."  Indeed, their testimony is that of witnesses, not partisans, and any competent attorney will affirm that witnesses provide the most persuasive evidence of all.  I rest my case.

2. America's Constitution has been in continuous operation for 238 years.

The average national constitution lasts 17 years, a figure calculated by political scientists Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton in their landmark study The Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  That single arithmetic fact may be the most concise summary of American exceptionalism ever produced.

Constitutional law professor Hugh Hewitt captures why:

The work of collective genius that is the Constitution has been tested by everything from an actual civil war that claimed 600,000 lives to various panics, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession, not to mention impeachments and assassinations, political-judicial meltdowns like Florida in 2000, and dozens of scandals---and it does not break.  It is more resilient than any other modern constitution, a remarkable, nearly perfect balance of competing powers and separated authorities that has endured and will endure.  Those who fear it is off the road and in the ditch have to ignore history’s many examples of America righting itself after trauma and setback.

Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar, whose book entitled America's Constitution: A Biography (Yale University Press, 2005), remains the definitive academic treatment of the document, reinforces Hewitt’s assessment, noting that the Constitution's genius lies not in its rigidity but in its capacity to absorb conflict through amendment, interpretation, and institutional adaptation rather than replacement.

The historical record of other nations throws this achievement into sharp relief.  The Philippines, which has operated under 7 constitutions since 1899, offers a particularly instructive contrast: each charter change has followed a period of political rupture, from the Marcos dictatorship to the EDSA revolution to the ongoing debates over federalism. By contrast, the American Constitution has absorbed comparable pressures: a civil war, two world wars, a Great Depression, and presidential assassinations, which never resulted in the national charter’s replacement. Each constitutional replacement represents not merely a legal revision but a fundamental collapse of political order.

That America has experienced only one such reset in 238 years, while France has experienced 15, Germany 4, China 8, Greece 10, Venezuela 25, and Haiti 21, is not coincidence. It is the compounding dividend of founders who, as historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated, designed their governmental architecture with a deliberate, historically informed understanding of how republics fail and built the mechanisms to prevent it.

Hence, constitutional stability is not merely a legal achievement.  It is the precondition for every other liberty described above, e.g., the freedom of religion, the free market, the protection of civil rights, and the projection of military power in defense of others. Without the document, none of the rest follows.

3. Anyone can become an American, but not vice-versa.

Indeed, no American can become a Filipino, a Nigerian, a Mexican, or a Russian in the same way virtually any one of those nationals or ethnic groups can become an American.  Throughout history, virtually all societies (whether tribes or countries) had a national or group identity correlated with its ethnic or racial identity.  Such groups were further divided by blood and marital bonds.  Hence, employers (often distrustful of non-blood relations) generally offered jobs and other opportunities to family members (being of the same race or ethnicity), unlike in America.

In fact, America was one of the first nations, if not exclusively the first nation, to deviate from this historical norm by de-emphasizing nationality, ethnicity, family, and bloodline in favor of individual worth or individual achievement---one of the country’s most cherished values.  That is why, as political commentator Dennis Prager states, “A third-generation Turk in Germany, born in Germany, fluent and accentless in German, is rarely considered a German by other Germans.  In America, however, a first-generation Turk who is not fluent in English and speaks with a distinct accent is considered an American by other Americans.”

This is due to America’s motto, E Pluribus Unum, which is a rare governing principle with no true parallel, translated literally from Latin as “from many, one.”  That is to say, from the assimilation of diverse ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures, is a unified nation, namely, the United States of America.  Members of such groups need simply adopt the American creed.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington defined the American creed as the embodiment of “liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property” and argued that “millions of immigrants and their children achieved wealth, power, and status in American society precisely because they assimilated themselves into the prevailing American culture.”  Two examples include the founder of Carnegie Steel Company, Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland and co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, who was born in Soviet Ukraine.  Perhaps the most striking example of immigrant assimilation is illustrated by Prager in explaining why “God Bless America---probably the American people’s favorite national song and its unofficial anthem---could be written by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Israel Isidore Baline, aka Irving Berlin,“ and “he felt as American as someone whose ancestors came to America on the Mayflower.”  Hence, my point remains that anyone can become American, and that no other nation can make the same claim.

4. America’s government has a unique system of checks and balances, whose methodology is based on the historical rise and fall of tyrannical governments, rather than a mere theory of self-governance. 

Indeed, the founders scrutinized the world’s governing systems---ancient and contemporary, along with great thinkers as Socrates, Cicero, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and William Blackstone.  The civilizations included Greece, Rome, France, and England from which the founders derived the concepts of liberty, justice, trial by jury, separation of powers, federalism, democracy, republicanism, and self-government.  The founders were informed by their own tyrannical experience with King George III as well.

For example, the French political philosopher, Montesquieu (1689 – 1755), studied Rome and France in which power was concentrated in the former’s dictator (Julius Caesar) and the latter’s monarch (King Louis XIV).  He concluded, “When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.”  In Federalist 47, James Madison echoed Montesquieu when he stated that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Of course, the obvious remedy for such a concentration of power was mixed government.  Aristotle first derived the idea from his study of ancient constitutions, arguing in his Politics that a stable republic must blend monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements to prevent any single faction from seizing total control.  Polybius then applied the theory to Rome in his Histories, identifying the Roman Republic's consuls, Senate, and popular assemblies as precisely that balance and crediting it for Rome's rise to greatness.  Cicero absorbed Polybius and elaborated the argument in De Re Publica, where he defended the mixed constitution as the form of government most consistent with natural law and human reason.  In turn, that work reached America's founders directly: John Adams cited Cicero extensively in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, and Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention reflect the same classical inheritance.

The founders also rejected democracies, since they empower the majority without protecting the minority.  Madison perceived such an arrangement of power as “mob rule” or even as “tyranny of the majority,” which is just as pernicious, if not more so, than the rule of aristocracy or an elite, since it simply entails provoking an emotionally charged crowd (whether of the legislative body or a massive jury) into rash action.  Consider Socrates’s condemnation to death in 399 BCE by jurors who also happened to be legislators.  A massive jury of 500 members serving a dual role, bereft of any check on its whims or bias, was inherently vulnerable to emotional manipulation.

Another example entails eight generals in 406 BC.  During their naval victory of the Battle of Arginusae, a storm prevented them from rescuing shipwrecked sailors.  Consequently, the infuriated Athenian assembly voted to try and immediately execute all eight generals for their alleged negligence.  Clearly, the single, unchecked body acted impulsively, rather than rationally.  There were other cases elsewhere which is why in Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers (Rowman & Rittlefield, 2009), the classical historian Carl Richard stated, “the founders learned to see Athens as the epitome of the democratic state, a chronically unstable, often hellish, society controlled by violent and erratic mobs that frequently executed their nation’s best citizens on the flimsiest of grounds.”

That is why the founders divided Congress into a bicameral chamber.  The founders criticized Greece’s unicameral legislature due to its unstable, democratic character.  They pointed out that a unicameral legislature expressed the unruly passions and whims of the people at a given time, and was hence, short-lived and fickle.  For that reason, the Senate was a check on the House.  As I cited George Washington from my federalism commentary, “we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it” from the “hot” chamber of the House of Representatives.

Aside from the founders' structural ingenuity in the checks and balances and separation of powers at the federal level (horizontal power), they also confronted a problem that had destroyed every prior confederation in history: how to balance the power of a central government against the sovereignty of its member states (vertical power) without the whole collapsing into either tyranny or anarchy, namely, the engineering of federalism.

The founders perceived the Amphictyonic League in ancient Greece to be a failed model, since its central council lacked the power to implement its laws on the individual city-states, leading to internal conflict and the Peloponnesian War.  Other rejected examples include the Swiss Confederation and the Dutch Republic due to the former’s weak executive and lack of shared national identity (making it vulnerable to foreign manipulation) and the latter’s mandatory unanimity in public policy, rather than majority rule with protections for the minority.

However, the founders favorably viewed the Lycian Confederacy model.  It consisted of a federation of 23 city-states in what is now southwestern Turkey, operated from roughly the 1st century BC into the Roman period. Its system of proportional representation allocating votes in the federal assembly according to the size of each city was most impressive to Montesquieu, who cited it in The Spirit of the Laws as the model federal republic. Madison cited Montesquieu's endorsement in Federalist 9. The institutional DNA of the Lycian Confederacy, transmitted through Montesquieu to Madison, is traceable in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which empowered the U.S. as a great empire (e.g., national defense, currency, interstate commerce), while preserving the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual states (e.g., local policing, education, property law).

Furthermore, as classical historian Carl Richard argues in The Founders and the Classics (Harvard University Press, 1994), the founders' deep study of Greek and Roman history was not merely ornamental. It was operational — a systematic effort to identify the precise mechanisms by which free republics had failed, and to engineer constitutional barriers against each of them. Athens fell to the mob; Rome fell to the dictator; Britain fell to the monarch. The Constitution was designed, with historical precision, to prevent all three, which is one of the features of American exceptionalism.

5. Among modern constitutional republics and large nation-states, America’s government has been the world’s first to sustain a tradition of the peaceful transition of power from one head of state to his successor, regardless of political or personal animosity between them (unlike in Greece, Rome, France, or England). 

Historically, transitions of power in empires---both ancient and modern---have been violent, sanguinary, or tyrannical.  For example, in 44 BCE, the Roman dictator, Julius Caesar, was assassinated by a group of rival senators that stabbed him 23 times.  Civil war ensued after which two of Caesar’s assassination conspirators committed suicide, and Caesar’s great nephew, Octavian, became the first official emperor of Rome, converting it from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.

In 1649, King Charles I of England was overthrown and beheaded by Lt. General Oliver Cromwell, who replaced the monarchy with a republic and presided as its next head of state---“Lord Protector,” until his death from urinary tract infection or kidney disease in 1658.  Ironically, after the monarchy was restored in 1660 with King Charles II (only 2 years after Cromwell’s death), he ordered Cromwell’s corpse be exhumed, hanged, and beheaded as a symbolic act of vengeance on the 12^th anniversary of the execution of his father, Charles I.  Cromwell’s severed head was placed on a pike to be displayed in Westminster Hall for the next 20 years.

In 1793, King Louis XVI of France was violently overthrown and guillotined, and the power of the monarchy devolved to the legislative body called the National Convention, which was dominated by Maximilien Robespierre.

By contrast, America’s first two heads of state have deviated from this pattern in the transfer of power.  After George Washington served his last presidential term and resumed his simple farming life, King George III styled him “the most distinguished of any man living” and the “greatest character of the age.”  This was a reflection at that point in history of the incomprehensibility of a head of state voluntarily giving up power.  Incidentally, this act symbolized Washington’s virtue and the political reality of the U.S.A. as a republic, not a monarchy.

Similarly, when President John Adams ran for a second term in the 1800 presidential election against his personal and political rival, Thomas Jefferson (and lost), Adams proceeded to attend his inauguration, regardless of personal animosity.  This established the precedent for America’s long tradition of transferring power peacefully from one head of state to his successor for other democratic countries to emulate.  More importantly, the contrast between the two rivals’ personal hostility and their institutional behavior is the exact point that distinguishes America from the preceding examples.

6. America has historically been the most charitable nation. 

Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in 1831, observed that Americans of every age, condition, and disposition perpetually formed voluntary associations to accomplish what Europeans left to the state.  Nearly two centuries later, the figures vindicate his observation.  Americans gave an estimated $592.5 billion to charity in 2024, the largest sum the Giving USA report has ever recorded, of which roughly two-thirds came from individuals directly and nearly three-quarters once their bequests are counted.

The American nonprofit sector remains the largest in the world.  More than one in four Americans, some 28 percent, formally volunteered through an organization in 2023, while a majority assisted their neighbors informally. No comparable nation sustains a private philanthropic culture of this scale.

The contrast with Europe is instructive, though it must be drawn with precision.  Measured in dollars per capita, the American gives more than his European counterpart; the United Kingdom, America's nearest rival, records a higher share of citizens who report donating in a given year, yet does not approach the American total.  The difference is not that Europeans are less generous by nature, but that the European model channels solidarity through taxation and the welfare state, while the American model channels it through voluntary association, precisely as Tocqueville foresaw.

The same distinction governs the foreign-aid record.  The United States supplies the largest volume of humanitarian assistance in the world, accounting for roughly 40 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked in 2024, even as it commits a smaller share of its national income to official government aid than the Nordic states do.  American generosity has always been private before it was governmental, and associational before it was bureaucratic.  That is not a deficiency.  It is the founding premise, and it is what political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his own framework, was reaching for when he tried to name what distinguishes America.

7. America leads the world in the war on terror.

Perhaps, it is noteworthy to recall when America’s original “war on terror” occurred in the nation’s infancy in 1801.  Prior to that year, American merchants sailed the high seas to the Mediterranean, wherein Islamic terrorists (also known as Barbary pirates) from Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, and Morocco seized their ships and cargo and ransomed the crew.  As a result, the U.S. government complied and even paid annual tribute (essentially bribe money of over $1 million) to keep further piracy at bay in order to “protect” future merchants.  During President Thomas Jefferson’s term, the newly-established navy (America depended on the British navy before its independence) was sent to battle the terror-sponsoring states in a war which successfully ended after 14 years under President James Madison’s term in 1815.  Consequently, those North African states signed a peace treaty, effectively abolishing further ransoms and bribery payments, and marked the first time in history that a Western power refused to succumb to terrorist appeasement.

More recently, justice for the victims of Islamic terrorism has been exacted in the targeted elimination of Osama Bin Laden (founder of al-Qaeda & mastermind of the September 11 attacks in 2001), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (ISIS leader), Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s successor), and Qasem Soleimani (commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is responsible for Iran’s foreign proxy terrorist network).

These eliminations were not isolated acts of retribution, but rather a sustained, bipartisan campaign spanning over two decades across multiple presidential administrations: Bin Laden under Obama in 2011, al-Baghdadi and Soleimani under Trump in 2019, and al-Zawahiri under Biden in 2022.  This demonstrates that American resolve against Islamic terrorism does not expire with any single election cycle, a resolve that, as history demonstrates, traces its origins not to September 11, 2001, but to the shores of Tripoli two centuries prior.

In 2025, U.S. Central Command led partner forces in Syria to strike over 100 ISIS infrastructure and weapons site targets, captured over 300 ISIS operatives, and killed over 20. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign against the Iranian regime, opening with nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours alone. The campaign's opening strike achieved what two decades of sanctions and diplomacy had not: the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man who had ruled Iran's terror-sponsoring state since 1989. By the time the campaign concluded on May 5, 2026, it had dealt the regime's military and nuclear infrastructure a blow from which it has yet to recover.

Sustained American pressure, military and diplomatic alike, also forced Iran's hand on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a substantial share of the world's oil flows. After Tehran closed the strait amid the 2026 war, President Trump issued repeated ultimatums demanding its reopening, warning that continued closure would invite further destruction of Iran's infrastructure. Over the following months, through a mix of American military pressure, economic strain on the Iranian regime, and diplomatic mediation (including from Pakistan), Iran moved by stages toward reopening the strait, though compliance remained halting and incomplete even as late as June 2026. Whatever one's final judgment of how completely the waterway has reopened, the basic dynamic is plain: it was American resolve, not Iranian goodwill, that placed Tehran under the pressure to relent in the first place.  Indubitably, from the shores of Tripoli to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, the United States has never permanently yielded to Islamic terrorism nor allowed a hostile regime to choke off the world's commerce, and no other nation on earth can make that claim.

8. The overwhelming odds against America’s birth were decisively overcome.

For example, China very nearly became the civilization to project power across the world's oceans before any European fleet did, only to abandon that role and leave its consequences, including the eventual encounter with the Americas, to Europe. The disparity in advancement was not trivial. As law and public policy professor Ted Stewart observes in Seven Miracles That Saved America (Shadow Mountain, 2009), while medieval Europe was still copying scripture by hand and burning whale oil for light, China had already developed movable type, exploited natural gas, inoculated against smallpox, and built fleets capable of circumnavigating the world.

That capacity found its fullest expression in Admiral Zheng He, who commanded the most formidable naval force in the world between 1405 and 1433.  Emperor Zhu Di, whose expansionist ambitions had already extended Chinese imperial reach across Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast, provided him both the mandate and the means to project power further still. Yet the Ming Dynasty ultimately abandoned those voyages and turned inward. The decision carried practical causes, including the enormous cost of the fleets relative to their tribute-based returns and a long-running rivalry between the eunuch faction Zheng He served and the Confucian scholar-bureaucracy that resented their influence, but it was the Confucian court officials' argument, that China was self-sufficient and that the world existed to serve it on its own terms, which ultimately prevailed and left the Americas to be reached by others. That philosophical premise, that the state is supreme and individuals exist to serve its harmony rather than the reverse, was neither new nor confined to the Ming court, yet the 1433 decision stands as one of its most consequential expressions, for it foreclosed, by deliberate choice rather than misfortune, the path that China alone among the powers of that era possessed the capacity to take.

As I stated in my commentary Could America Be a Province of China Without Christopher Columbus?, had Ming China carried that same expansionist will across the Pacific and become the civilization to shape the world's encounter with the New World, the intellectual inheritance that produced our founding documents would never have arrived on these shores, for the Declaration of Independence was not conjured from thin air but was the product of Magna Carta, John Locke's natural rights philosophy, Montesquieu's doctrine of separated powers, and one hundred and fifty years of colonial self-governance. None of these exist in the Confucian administrative tradition, where, as political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations (Simon & Schuster, 1996), the emphasis on "authority, order, hierarchy, and supremacy of the collectivity over the individual, creates obstacles to democratization."

George Washington’s contribution to the existence of America is, in no way, less significant than Columbus’s.  What follows is excerpted from my commentary entitled Would America Exist Without George Washington?  During the American Revolution, Washington commanded a Continental Army that was chronically underfunded, perpetually undersupplied, constantly on the verge of dissolution (not to mention desertions), and outmanned by a well-equipped, professionally trained British army.  Regardless, he refused to abandon it. In March 1783, at Newburgh, New York, disgruntled revolutionary officers conspired to implement a coup d'état against the newly formed government for neglecting to compensate them for their military service. However, Washington persuaded them to abandon their planned mutiny.  At the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the assembly came near collapse in June, when delegates from the smaller states, refusing a national legislature apportioned solely by population, threatened to walk out before the Connecticut Compromise secured their participation. Initially, the presence of the delegates was largely incumbent upon Washington’s anticipated attendance, which nearly did not occur, if not for James Madison’s persistent persuasion. Aside from Washington’s birth as an essential part of the American equation, the odds of his survival were quite slim, close to nil, since gunfire crossed his path on numerous occasions.  (I elaborate in George Washington’s Close Encounters with Death.)  Hence, while Columbus opened the western hemisphere to European contact, which forged centuries of English constitutional development and political thought in America, Washington is credited with the founding of America’s government and his virtuous restraint that made the republic survive (quelling of military mutiny to overthrow the government, refusal of a crown, voluntary resignation after two presidential terms).

Furthermore, the case for America’s exceptionalism has been made.  It would be wise that we continually reflect those points and contemplate our nation’s greatness and status, as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story elucidates the significance of imparting its history to the youth:

If these Commentaries shall but inspire in the rising generation a more ardent love of their country, an unquenchable thirst for liberty, and a profound reverence for the constitution and the union, then they will have accomplished all that their author ought to desire. Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence. The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

Indeed, President Ronald Reagan aptly called America “the shining city upon a hill.”  It is certainly a nation unlike any other and the last best hope for the world.  Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to preserve it.  As we commemorate the 250^th anniversary of America’s independence on July 4, 2026, we must likewise commemorate the death anniversary of two of the nation’s founders, namely Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on July 4, 1826 (the 50^th anniversary of independence).  Such a convergence of events makes July 4 an exceptional American day.  In A Toast to Our Independence and Alliance, I quoted Senator Daniel Webster in his eulogy about the timing, who said, “It cannot but seem striking and extraordinary, that these two should live to see the fiftieth year from the date of that act, that they should complete that year, and that then, on the day which had fast linked forever their own fame with their country's glory, the heavens should open to receive them both at once.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small confederation of states declared to the world that government derives its power from the people, not the other way around.  Every reason enumerated above, from the rejection of monarchy to the resolve against terrorism, is simply that founding premise working itself out across two and a half centuries, refined by trial, tested by war, and renewed by each generation that has refused to let it die.  As we celebrate this anniversary, let us also salute and pay tribute to Jefferson and Adams, and all those past heroes who have died to defend our liberty, and the current soldiers who continue to put our safety before their own.

Long live our brave soldiers!

Long live the Republic of the United States of America!

The post 8 Indisputable Reasons America Remains Exceptional at 250 first appeared on Marcial's Law.

My friends and countrymen, no nation on earth has shaped the political, educational, military, financial, and charitable fortunes of the Philippines as thoroughly as the United States, and it is time this fact was stated plainly, with the evidence laid beside it, so that no honest reader need take it on faith. Indeed, a reader is entitled to weigh the source of any argument as well as its evidence, and a pro-American commentator arguing for America's record in the Philippines is exactly the voice one would expect to make this case, regardless of the underlying facts. The only honest answer to that suspicion is to check the dates and figures that follow against their sources rather than the name attached to them. That evidence must include the conflict that began this relationship, for a commentator who hides the wound cannot be trusted with the cure.

I. The Original Wound: The Philippine-American War

Honest accounting begins before independence, before the schools, before the typhoons, with the war that the United States itself fought against the Filipino people it would later claim to have uplifted. Fighting broke out on February 4, 1899, between American forces and Filipino revolutionaries under Emilio Aguinaldo, who had declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898, and refused to accept a transfer of colonial masters rather than the freedom he believed his people had already won. The United States Office of the Historian records that the war killed more than 4,200 American service members and roughly 20,000 Filipino combatants, while as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died of violence, famine, and disease, including a cholera epidemic that alone claimed some 150,000 lives in the war's final stretch. Some Filipino historians, including Luzviminda Francisco, place total Filipino deaths far higher, as much as one million, and that dispute in the historical record should be stated rather than buried.

The conduct of the war does not flatter the United States. After Filipino fighters killed fifty-four American soldiers at Balangiga on Samar in September 1901, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered Major Littleton Waller to "kill everyone over the age of ten" and turn the island into "a howling wilderness." That order led to between 2,000 and 50,000 Filipino deaths on Samar alone, depending on whose count one accepts, and it became public only through Waller's own court-martial. Smith was tried for it in 1902 and convicted, though only of "conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline," a sentence amounting to a forced retirement rather than the punishment the crime deserved. President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war officially over on July 4, 1902, though Moro resistance in the south continued for another decade, ending only at the Battle of Bud Bagsak in 1913.

None of this can be justified. It must, instead, be weighed honestly against what followed, because accountability without exemption applies to nations as much as to candidates. The same United States that ordered Samar's devastation is the one that, within three years of that war's end, was dispatching six hundred of its own teachers to build a free school system for the children of the people it had just finished fighting, and that within forty years would bind itself by statute to surrender every particle of the sovereignty it had taken by force. A nation's worst chapter and its best one are both part of its record. The question a fair reader must ask is not whether America's hands were ever bloody in the Philippines, for they were, but whether the decades that followed represent atonement through action or merely words. The evidence that follows is offered for the reader to judge that question for themselves.

II. The Political Inheritance

The Philippines did not borrow a flag from America. It borrowed a framework. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of March 24, 1934, authored by Senator Millard Tydings and Representative John McDuffie and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, set a ten-year transition to full Philippine independence and required the Filipino people to draft their own constitution under its terms. That constitution was completed by a 202-member convention on February 8, 1935, certified by Roosevelt on March 25, 1935, and ratified by the Filipino people themselves on May 14, 1935. The result, as the National Historical Commission of the Philippines records, was a charter built "based on the American model," republican in form, containing a bill of rights, and widely regarded as the best-written Philippine charter ever produced. Independence followed precisely as promised, on July 4, 1946, when President Truman signed Proclamation 2695 recognizing it. No other colonial power in the history of the Pacific bound itself by statute to a date certain and then kept that date through a world war.

III. The Educational Foundation

In August 1901, an army transport ship named Thomas arrived in Manila Harbor carrying roughly six hundred American teachers, men and women drawn from 193 colleges and universities across forty-three states, dispatched under Act No. 74 to build, from the ground up, a free public school system taught in English. They became known as the Thomasites. They built the Philippine Normal School to train Filipino instructors, the Philippine School of Arts and Trades for vocational training, and in 1908 the University of the Philippines itself. The results were not symbolic. School enrollment surged from 150,000 students in 1903 to 1.2 million by 1934, and literacy, which stood below ten percent at the end of Spanish rule, climbed to roughly sixty-five percent under the American system. This is also why the Philippines stands today as one of the largest English-speaking nations on earth, a fact that continues to open doors in commerce, diplomacy, and overseas employment for millions of Filipinos who have never set foot in Tacloban or Cebu, let alone Boston or Sacramento.

IV. The Military Sacrifice

When Japan invaded the Philippines on December 8, 1941, the United States did not abandon its commonwealth. General Douglas MacArthur commanded a combined force of roughly 100,000 Filipino and 20,000 American troops in defense of Luzon. When the position became untenable, President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to Australia, and MacArthur left behind 90,000 American and Filipino soldiers who would endure the Bataan Death March and the fall of Corregidor. Historians at the George C. Marshall International Center record this as among the worst military defeats in American history, with 23,000 American personnel and roughly 100,000 Filipino soldiers killed or captured. MacArthur did not let that loss stand. He kept his word. On October 20, 1944, he waded ashore at Leyte and declared, "People of the Philippines, I have returned." The fighting to retake the islands killed more than a thousand American soldiers in Manila alone and cost the United States more than 8,000 killed or missing on Luzon in 1945. Men from Iowa and Texas and California did not die on Philippine soil by accident. They died there because their country had made a promise and intended to keep it.

V. The Living Alliance

The promise did not end when the surrender documents were signed on the USS Missouri. Six years later, on August 30, 1951, the United States and the Philippines signed the Mutual Defense Treaty in Washington, binding each nation to treat an armed attack on the other in the Pacific as a threat to itself. That treaty has now outlived every other security guarantee America has built in Asia, and Washington has reaffirmed it repeatedly, including through the 2011 Manila Declaration and a 2025 Senate resolution condemning Chinese coercion in the West Philippine Sea. The Mutual Defense Treaty is the trunk from which every later branch of the alliance grows: the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement, which gives American troops legal standing to train alongside Filipino soldiers, and the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which allows the United States to build and stock supplies at nine Philippine military bases without ever establishing a permanent American base on Philippine soil.

This architecture is not free of friction, and an honest reckoning says so plainly. The Visiting Forces Agreement has long drawn criticism over its jurisdiction provisions, which determine whether American servicemen accused of crimes against Filipinos are tried by Philippine courts or held by their own command, a grievance sharpened by the 2014 killing of Filipino transgender woman Jennifer Laude by a U.S. Marine. President Duterte moved to terminate the agreement outright in February 2020, only to suspend that termination three times before fully reversing it in 2021. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement has drawn its own controversy, particularly the 2023 expansion to four new sites in northern Luzon facing Taiwan, which provincial governors and members of the Marcos family itself criticized as exposing the Philippines to Chinese retaliation in a conflict not its own. These are legitimate Filipino objections rooted in legitimate Filipino sovereignty, and no honest commentator should waive them away simply because the alliance they concern is otherwise sound.

Yet when the test came, the alliance held. In May 2017, militants loyal to the Islamic State seized the southern city of Marawi, raised the black flag over its mosque, and triggered the longest urban battle in modern Philippine history. Within weeks, United States Special Operations Command Pacific confirmed, at the request of the Philippine government, that American special operations forces were assisting Armed Forces of the Philippines commanders on the ground, while a Navy P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft and an armed Gray Eagle drone provided intelligence over the besieged city. In the same month, the United States delivered 200 Glock pistols, 300 M4 carbines, one hundred grenade launchers, and four mini-guns worth roughly five million dollars to the Philippine military, followed by two Cessna surveillance aircraft worth thirty-one million dollars in July and a radar system for the Philippine Navy in August. The five-month siege killed more than a thousand Filipino soldiers, militants, and civilians and reduced much of Marawi to rubble, but it did not end in an Islamic State stronghold in Southeast Asia, and American intelligence, equipment, and personnel were present at the request of Manila for that very reason. This is what a defense treaty signed in 1951 still means in practice three generations later: not a yellowed document in an archive, but American assets over a Philippine city the week Filipino soldiers needed them most.

VI. The Comparison Nobody Asks For: What China Offers Instead

It is fashionable in certain circles, both Filipino and American, to wave away the entire American record as colonial guilt repackaged as friendship, and to suggest that China offers a cleaner, more equal partnership unburdened by the sins of empire. The evidence does not support that suggestion, and a fair accounting requires naming what China has actually done in Philippine waters rather than what it claims to offer, which is what I did in Why Filipinos Should Give a Damn about Panatag Shoal. In 2012, China seized effective control of Scarborough Shoal, a reef well within the Philippines' own exclusive economic zone, following a standoff with Philippine vessels, and has occupied it ever since. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled, in a case the Philippines itself brought, that China's expansive "nine-dash line" claim over the South China Sea had no basis in international law and that China's land reclamation and harassment of Philippine vessels violated Philippine sovereign rights. China rejected the ruling outright, calling it "null and void," and has simply continued the conduct the tribunal found unlawful.

That conduct has only intensified. Philippine Coast Guard and fisheries vessels attempting to resupply Filipino soldiers and fishermen near Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal have been repeatedly rammed, blocked, and blasted with water cannons by Chinese Coast Guard ships, with documented incidents in 2023 and 2024 alone causing damage to Philippine vessels and injuries to Filipino personnel, including one sailor who lost a finger in a June 2024 confrontation. Chinese vessels have used military-grade lasers against Philippine Coast Guard crews, temporarily blinding them, and Chinese ships have on occasion swarmed Philippine waters in numbers exceeding 190 vessels at a time. The United States, by contrast, supported the 2016 arbitration ruling, has formally confirmed since 2019 that Philippine vessels, aircraft, and forces operating anywhere in the South China Sea fall under the protection of the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, and pledged $500 million in foreign military financing in 2024 to help the Philippines defend its own waters. One ally helped the Philippines win a legal judgment against the very claims now being enforced with water cannons. The other is the power firing the water cannons. China extends the Philippines no defense treaty, no comparable disaster relief record, and no comparable investment in Filipino education or institutions, only a competing claim to Filipino territory backed by ships that ram Filipino sailors. The contrast is not rhetorical. It is observable in the West Philippine Sea on any given month of the year.

VII. The Financial Rehabilitation

Manila in 1945 was, after Warsaw, the most thoroughly destroyed capital city on earth. The United States Congress responded with the Philippine Rehabilitation Act of April 30, 1946, which appropriated $400 million for war damage compensation, part of a rehabilitation package that the National WWII Museum records eventually rose as high as $620 million, later $800 million. This was not foreign charity extended at arm's length. It was restitution paid by the same government that had pledged, in President Roosevelt's own words, that Filipinos would get back everything they lost in the war "to the last nipa hut and the last carabao." The funds rebuilt public utilities, hospitals, schools, and the agricultural base of a nation that had just spent three years under occupation.

It must be acknowledged, in fairness, that this rehabilitation money carried a price. The Bell Trade Act, passed two days before independence, tied the rehabilitation funds to a "parity" amendment to the Philippine constitution granting American citizens equal rights to exploit Philippine natural resources, a condition that Filipino economists and nationalists have criticized for decades as a lopsided bargain extracted from a nation with no leverage to refuse it. This criticism deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissal, but fairness cuts both ways: no nation rebuilding from the ashes of total war was in a position to negotiate from strength, and the rehabilitation funds were disbursed and did, in fact, rebuild the islands, regardless of the terms attached. A hard bargain is not the same as no bargain at all, and the alternative on offer from the imperial powers of that era, as Japan's occupation had just demonstrated, was no bargain whatsoever.

The financial relationship today bears no resemblance to that postwar arrangement, for it is chosen rather than imposed. The Philippine information technology and business process management industry closed 2025 with more than $40 billion in export revenue and nearly 1.9 million Filipino employees, according to the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, with the sector now accounting for more than 8 percent of national gross domestic product. American companies remain the largest client base for that industry by a wide margin, a position no other foreign market rivals. This is not a treaty obligation or a war debt. It is millions of American businesses choosing, contract by contract and year after year, to place call centers, finance and accounting operations, healthcare information processing, and increasingly software engineering and analytics work in Filipino hands, because Filipino workers do it well. Thousands of new such jobs are created every year by a single industry built almost entirely on American demand, the largest employer of college-educated Filipinos in the country's modern history, and one no Philippine president has had to beg, borrow, or surrender sovereignty to secure.

VIII. The Charitable Hand, Extended Repeatedly

When Super Typhoon Yolanda struck in November 2013 and killed more than 6,000 people while displacing 4.1 million more, the United States deployed a USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team within days, mobilized roughly 9,500 military personnel, delivered hundreds of thousands of pounds of relief supplies by air, and ultimately provided approximately $143 million in humanitarian and development assistance. This was not an isolated gesture. The United States Embassy in Manila confirms that since 2010 alone, the American government has provided more than $393.6 million in disaster relief, preparedness, and early recovery assistance to the Philippines. When the earth shakes or the sea rises in the Philippines, it is consistently the United States, among all the nations of the world, that arrives first and stays longest.

IX. The Living Lifeline: Filipino Labor and American Remittances

Beyond government programs and battlefield alliances lies a simpler, more intimate form of benefit that touches Filipino households directly, every month, without a single act of Congress required. According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, overseas Filipino workers sent home a record $39.62 billion in personal remittances in 2025, equal to roughly 7.3 percent of the entire Philippine gross domestic product, and the United States alone accounted for 39.7 percent of that total, by far the single largest national source, more than double the share from Singapore, the next-largest contributor. This is not ancient history measured in war reparations from eighty years ago. It is a wire transfer landing in a Filipino bank account this month, and next month, sent home by some of the more than 4.4 million Filipino Americans now living, working, and in most cases, naturalized as citizens in the United States, a community the Migration Policy Institute records as 76 percent naturalized, a far higher rate than immigrants to the United States overall.

For decades, the income Filipino workers and Filipino American citizens have sent home from the United States has cushioned the Philippine economy through financial crises and pandemics alike, funded school fees and small businesses in provinces no foreign aid program reaches, and helped the Philippines build the foreign currency reserves that credit rating agencies cite when upgrading the nation's investment status. No other country on earth hosts a Filipino community of this size, this naturalized, sending this much money home. That is not colonial residue. That is millions of individual Filipino families voting with their labor and their loyalty for where opportunity actually lives, and choosing, year after year, to send the proceeds home.

The Verdict

Consider what this means together rather than separately. No nation gave the Philippines its constitutional template and then surrendered sovereignty on the date it promised. No nation built a school system from bamboo huts to a 65 percent literacy rate inside three decades and gave the Filipino people the English language as a permanent global asset. No nation lost tens of thousands of its own sons defending Philippine soil, then returned at even greater cost to liberate it, then bound itself by treaty to do so again and honored that promise in the streets of Marawi seventy years later. The financial reparations, the disaster relief, and the remittance lifeline detailed above complete the record; they do not need restating here to prove the point already made.

Measure that record against the only honest alternatives. Spain ruled the Philippines for over three hundred years and left behind a literacy rate beneath ten percent. Japan occupied it for three years and left behind a million dead Filipino civilians and a capital city in ruins. China today offers no defense treaty, no disaster relief comparable to America's, and no legal support for Filipino sovereignty, only coast guard cutters contesting Philippine outposts in waters a tribunal has already ruled are not its own.

We must not pretend that America's own record in the Philippines began without sin; it did not. The war of 1899 to 1902 killed tens of thousands by the bayonet and hundreds of thousands more by famine and disease the war set loose, and the howling wilderness ordered on Samar stands as a permanent stain that no subsequent generosity erases. However, a stain is not the whole garment, and the question before any honest judge of nations is not whether a power's hands were ever bloody (for every empire's hands have been), but what that power built afterwards with the years it was given. Spain answered that question with three centuries of stagnation. Japan answered it with three years of slaughter. China is answering it right now, in real time, with the same coercion named above. America answered it with schools, with a constitution surrendered on the date it promised, with tens of thousands of its own dead retaking islands it could have written off, with hundreds of millions in reparations, with disaster relief that arrives before the floodwaters recede, and with a wire transfer that lands in a Filipino household every month of every year. Measured against every honest alternative, in every category that matters to a nation's survival and its future, no other power on earth has done for the Philippines what the United States has done, and none has done more to answer for its worst chapter with its best ones, a testament to what I wrote about American exceptionalism to commemorate its 250^th anniversary.

My friends and countrymen, the next time someone tells you that America has only ever exploited you, hand them the dates, the dollar figures, and the dead---all of them---the shameful and the sacrificial alike, and let the full ledger speak.

Long live the Philippines, and long live its alliance with the USA!

The post The Full Ledger: Why America Remains the Philippines' Greatest Ally first appeared on Marcial's Law.

6-22-2026

My friends and American countrymen, as the United States of America approaches the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence in 2026, it is fitting that we pause to consider a question which, though seldom asked, carries enormous weight: would this republic exist at all without the life and character of one man, General George Washington? I submit to you that the evidence, drawn from primary sources and the testimony of Washington's own contemporaries, compels a sobering answer: it would not.

Let us begin where the republic itself began, on the field of war. From 1775 to 1783, Washington commanded a Continental Army that was chronically underfunded, perpetually undersupplied, and constantly on the verge of dissolution. At Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 to 1778, approximately 2,000 of his 12,000 soldiers perished from disease, cold, and starvation. Desertions were rampant. Enlistment terms expired faster than they could be renewed. Yet Washington remained. No other figure in the Continental Army possessed the combination of military credibility, personal fortitude, and political legitimacy required to hold that force together. Had Washington resigned, been captured, or been killed at any point during those eight years, there is no historical basis to believe any subordinate commander could have sustained the army long enough for France to enter the war or for Cornwallis to be cornered at Yorktown in 1781. The Revolution did not survive because of its army alone; it survived because one man refused to abandon it.

Consider, additionally, the events of December 26, 1776 — a night on which the Revolution was, by most reasonable assessments, already dying. After a string of demoralizing defeats, with enlistments set to expire on January 1, 1777, Washington led his exhausted men across the ice-choked Delaware River in a driving sleet storm and launched a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton, New Jersey. The victory that followed did not merely capture prisoners. It restored enlistments, revived public confidence, and demonstrated to France and to the American people that the Continental Army remained a fighting force. Without the moral and strategic audacity of that single night's crossing, the Revolution may well have expired before the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris.

The military argument alone would be sufficient. But Washington's indispensability did not end on the battlefield; it extended, with equal force, into the constitutional order he was uniquely positioned to protect. On March 15, 1783, with peace negotiations underway and the Continental Army encamped near Newburgh, New York, a circle of discontented officers (unpaid, embittered, and encouraged by certain nationalist politicians in Congress) circulated an anonymous letter calling for a mutiny against the civil government. Washington arrived at the assembly unannounced. He addressed his officers with evident feeling, reminding them of what they would destroy if they proceeded. Then, as he prepared to read a letter from Congress documenting its financial straits, he reached into his pocket and put on a pair of spectacles, saying softly, "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country." According to witnesses, many of the officers wept. The mutiny collapsed. Washington's surprise arrival, his address, and that single unrehearsed gesture caused the officers to see their wrongdoings, and they overwhelmingly put their faith back in the Confederation Congress. No other figure in the Continental Army commanded sufficient moral authority to produce that result. Had the conspiracy succeeded, the Continental Army would have seized governing authority over a nation that had just spent eight years and thousands of lives fighting to escape precisely that form of tyranny, and the Constitution, still four years from being written, would never have been conceived in a republic already ruled by its own generals. The republic was saved not by an institution but by one man's sacrifice made visible.

Nine months later, on December 23, 1783, Washington performed an act so extraordinary that it astonished the world. Having led the Continental Army to victory, at a moment when the army itself might well have supported his claim to permanent power, he appeared before the Continental Congress in Annapolis and surrendered his commission. His own words that day, preserved in the National Archives, were characteristically spare: "Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action; and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life." The reaction across the Atlantic was immediate. Upon learning of Washington's resignation, King George III reportedly told the American-born artist Benjamin West: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." The king understood what Washington had done. In an age when military conquest routinely produced permanent rulership, Washington had established by personal example that republican self-government could survive the most dangerous moment in any republic's life: the moment of victory, when the armed man who won the war must decide whether to keep or to relinquish his power.

That demonstration, however, was not yet complete. Washington's indispensability did not confine itself to the battlefield or to the preservation of civilian authority against military conspiracy. It extended, with equal consequence, to the very document upon which the American republic rests. When the Virginia legislature first appointed Washington as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, he declined, preferring to remain in retirement at Mount Vernon. It required the persistent persuasion of James Madison and other prominent figures to convince him that his presence was essential, and Washington's attendance proved essential in ways no other delegate could have replicated. To many of those assembled, and especially to Madison, Washington's mere presence boded well for the Convention, for the illustrious general gave to the gathering an air of importance and legitimacy. The delegates unanimously elected him to preside over the proceedings, the only vote of that kind the Convention produced. He said little during four months of contentious debate, yet his authority over the room was total. Factions that might otherwise have dissolved the Convention in acrimony held their positions at the table in deference to the man who sat at its head. When the delegates finally reached agreement on September 17, 1787, James Monroe, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, summarized Washington's role with the economy of a verdict: 'Be assured, [Washington's] influence carried the government.' Without Washington in Philadelphia, there is no credible historical basis to believe the Convention would have produced a ratifiable constitution, or that the thirteen fractious states would have trusted its product sufficiently to adopt it.

Washington's indispensability extended, finally, into the presidency itself. The Constitution ratified in 1787 was, as Washington recognized with characteristic precision, a document of general principles rather than operational detail. In a letter to Catharine Macaulay Graham dated January 9, 1790, drawn from the National Archives and the Papers of George Washington, he wrote: "The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society... In our progress towards political happiness my station is new; and, if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any action, whose motives may not be subject to a double interpretation." Washington understood that he was not merely executing a government; he was inventing one. He believed the precedents he set must make the presidency powerful enough to function effectively in the national government, while at the same time showing no tendency toward monarchy or dictatorship. His choices (the cabinet structure, the principle of executive neutrality in foreign affairs, and above all, the voluntary surrender of the presidency after two terms in 1797) established the constitutional customs on which the republic operated for generations. A less disciplined man in that office could have bent the Constitution toward personal rule before the republic had grown strong enough to resist it.

My friends and American countrymen, the evidence presented here was not gathered to flatter a monument or to indulge in comfortable mythology. It was gathered because the republic we inhabit was not inevitable. It was contingent, dependent at every critical juncture between 1776 and 1797, upon the choices of a single man who consistently chose the republic over himself. At Valley Forge, he chose to remain. At Trenton, he chose to advance when every prudent calculation counseled retreat. At Newburgh, he chose to confront a conspiracy with his own conscience rather than a court martial. At Annapolis, he chose to surrender power that no law required him to surrender. And in 1797, he chose again to walk away from an office that a grateful and exhausted nation might well have given him for life. Each of these choices was made in the absence of any institutional guarantee that the republic would survive. Each of them was, in the fullest sense, a free act. It is therefore not sentiment but evidence which compels the conclusion that without George Washington, the United States of America, as a constitutional republic under the rule of law, would not exist.

Long live the spirit of George Washington and the Republic of the United States of America!

The post Would America Exist Without George Washington? first appeared on Marcial's Law.

6-11-2026

My American friends and countrymen, consider what our nation might look like today had a Chinese fleet, rather than a Spanish-commissioned Genoese navigator, first established a colonial presence on American shores in the fifteenth century. This is not merely an idle historical curiosity. It is a precise instrument for measuring the value of what you possess and what you stand to lose if you cease to understand how it came to exist.

The voyages of Admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 demonstrated that China possessed, at that moment, the most formidable naval capability in the world. His treasure ships, by most scholarly estimates, dwarfed anything sailing under European flags. However, the Ming Dynasty ultimately abandoned those voyages, turned inward, and left the Americas to be reached by others. This is due to Confucian court officials, who viewed foreign engagement as wasteful and destabilizing, successfully arguing that China was a self-sufficient civilization. Emperor Zhu Di, whose expansionist ambitions had already extended Chinese imperial reach across Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast, provided Zheng He both the mandate and the means to project power further still. Under so aggressive an imperial commission, and commanding the most formidable fleet in the world, Zheng He possessed the capability and the institutional authorization to extend that reach across the Pacific to American shores, had the political will in Peking survived him.

Had Zheng He established a lasting colonial presence in America rather than Christopher Columbus, the intellectual inheritance that produced our founding documents would never have arrived on these shores. After all, the Declaration of Independence was not conjured from thin air. It was the product of a specific and irreplaceable genealogy: Magna Carta of 1215, which first established that even a king was bound by law; the English Civil War, which demonstrated that a sovereign could be held accountable by his subjects; John Locke's natural rights philosophy, which articulated that life, liberty, and property are not privileges granted by government but endowments antecedent to it; Montesquieu's doctrine of separated powers; and one hundred and fifty years of colonial self-governance in which Americans developed both the habit and the expectation of ordered liberty. None of that intellectual inheritance exists in the Confucian administrative tradition. In Confucian political philosophy, the individual does not possess rights which the state cannot touch. The state, properly ordered, is the guarantor of social harmony, not the threat against which the individual must be protected. From that premise, no Declaration of Independence can ever be constructed, because its self-evident truths are not self-evident within that framework. They are, in fact, incomprehensible within it. Political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996): "The Confucian heritage, with its emphasis on authority, order, hierarchy, and the supremacy of the collectivity over the individual, creates obstacles to democratization."

To understand precisely what American life would resemble under the governance that a Chinese colonial inheritance would have produced, one need not speculate beyond what is documented. Mao Tse-tung's seizure of power in 1949 and his subsequent administration of China produced, by credible historical estimates, between 45 and 55 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward alone (the largest man-made famine in recorded history, achieved not by natural catastrophe but by deliberate policy). Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), documented that Mao said privately to associates: "Deaths have benefits. They can fertilize the ground." This was recorded in the context of his indifference to mass casualties during the Great Leap Forward. His Cultural Revolution then systematically destroyed China's intellectual class, abolished private property, criminalized religious practice, and subjected the entire population to ideological surveillance administered through neighborhood denunciation sessions. Every American freedom you exercise without a second thought (to speak, to worship, to publish, to own property, to demand a fair trial) was precisely what those policies extinguished, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people who possessed no constitutional mechanism to resist them.

Xi Jinping's governance represents the mature and technologically sophisticated continuation of what Mao began. Consider the specific instruments currently applied to China's own population. The Social Credit System assigns behavioral compliance scores to citizens and restricts their movement, employment, and economic participation based on political obedience. An estimated seven hundred million surveillance cameras, equipped with facial recognition technology, monitor public and private behavior continuously. More than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been interned in Xinjiang without trial, charge, or conviction under any recognizable standard of law. Hong Kong's common law protections, which had guaranteed its residents freedoms approximating those of the American Bill of Rights, were systematically dismantled after 2020. Xi Jinping himself abolished presidential term limits in 2018, making himself ruler for life. These are not mere hypothetical projections of what Chinese governance might become. Indeed, they are already its documented present condition, applied to 1.4 billion human beings who have no First Amendment, no Second Amendment, no Fourth Amendment, no Fifth Amendment, and no independent judiciary empowered to enforce any equivalent protection.

Apply those instruments to the American population and the implications become precise rather than abstract. The American who writes political commentary critical of his government would face not disagreement or social disapproval but the documented fate of those who have done so in China. Liu Xiaobo, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for advocating constitutional democracy, died in Chinese government custody in 2017. Journalists like Chen Qiushi, who reported honestly on the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020, disappeared, were silenced, or imprisoned.

The Chinese government's own official criminal conviction rate stands at approximately 99.9 percent, a figure that is not evidence of exceptional law enforcement competence but of a judiciary that exists to serve the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rather than to adjudicate truth. An acquittal implies prosecutorial error, and prosecutorial error implies Party failure, and Party failure is the one verdict no Chinese court will render.

Without our Declaration of Independence, the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, would have no legal standing and no philosophical foundation in civic life. Without our Constitution, freedom of speech and of the press would be replaced by what Xi Jinping's government formally designates as the correct guidance of public opinion, essentially meaning state media monopoly and criminal prosecution of unauthorized political expression. Freedom of religion would be replaced by the active subordination of all religious institutions to state authority, precisely as the CCP currently practices with Catholic bishops, Protestant house churches, Tibetan Buddhist leadership, and Muslim communities.

The right to keep and bear arms (which is the provision our founders most explicitly connected to the people's capacity to resist tyranny in protection of their property) would be entirely absent, as it is throughout the history of Chinese governance. Private property rights, which John Locke identified as the material foundation of all other liberties, would exist only at the pleasure of the state. In China today, all land is technically owned by the state, and private holdings may be seized by administrative order without judicial review.

The American who takes these liberties for granted has perhaps never asked himself why no equivalent of the First Amendment exists in Chinese law, why no equivalent of the Second Amendment has ever been proposed in Chinese governance, and why the Chinese Communist Party expends such extraordinary resources to prevent its own citizens from reading, writing, and speaking freely, and why no Chinese citizen may lawfully own a firearm with which to resist the government that owns everything he possesses. The answer is not that the Chinese people are incapable of valuing liberty. The answer is that a government which cannot survive honest scrutiny must suppress it, and a people which possesses no constitutional document enumerating their rights against the state, possesses no rights at all; they only possess privileges, which are revocable at the state’s will.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1835): "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." Our freedoms are not the natural condition of human civilization. They are the exception, which is precisely why the word exceptional applies. They required the right explorers arriving from the right civilization at the right intellectual moment, carrying with them a legal and philosophical tradition one thousand years in the making. They required founders who understood that tradition thoroughly enough to encode it in documents designed to outlast any single generation's virtue or vigilance, and they require a citizenry today that understands what it holds. It is not as a permanent birthright that needs no defense, but an inheritance so specific and so fragile that it can be lost by any generation that forgets the conditions of its creation. Benjamin Franklin, upon emerging from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, was reportedly asked by a citizen what form of government the delegates had produced. He replied: "A Republic, if you can keep it."

Therefore, my friends and countrymen, regardless of how you may personally feel about Columbus the man, Columbus the explorer played a crucial role in America as we know it today.  Hence, his voyage was essential to the establishment of a government engineered to protect our individual liberty. It was his voyage that delivered the civilization whose thousand-year legal inheritance made possible our freedom of speech, our freedom of worship, our right to bear arms, and our right to hold property that no government may seize without due process of law, none of which a Chinese colonial inheritance could ever have produced.

Long live Liberty, and long live the Republic of the United States of America!

The post Could America Be A Province Of China Without Christopher Columbus? first appeared on Marcial's Law.

By Marcial Bonifacio

My friends and countrymen, the founders of the American republic were students of failure. They did not theorize about self-government in the abstract; they autopsied every prior attempt at it and built constitutional barriers against the precise mechanisms by which free republics had collapsed. Chief among those mechanisms was what former Senator Richard Gordon identified was occurring in the Philippine Senate as the "tyranny of the majority." Of course, he was invoking what James Madison, the principal framer of America's Constitution, called the danger of a numerical majority wielding institutional power without check — using it not to serve the common good, but to entrench its own position at the expense of the minority.

The events of May 2026 gave that warning a local address. On May 11, 2026, amid the chaos surrounding Senator Ronald dela Rosa's evasion of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, the Senate majority ousted incumbent Senate President Vicente Sotto III and installed Alan Peter Cayetano in his place. Two weeks later, on May 26, Senator Rodante Marcoleta — a majority ally — moved to amend Senate rules to allow members to vote remotely through online platforms under "justifiable" circumstances. The minority bloc of eleven senators, recognizing the motion for what it was, walked out.

Their objection was straightforward: under prevailing Senate rules, senators may only vote while physically present in the plenary hall, with remote voting permitted solely in cases of force majeure or a nationally declared emergency. No such emergency existed. What existed, instead, was a majority whose two most legally embattled members (dela Rosa, evading an ICC warrant, and Jinggoy Estrada, facing legal jeopardy) could not appear in person to vote. The rule change, in other words, was not procedural housekeeping. It was a maneuver to manufacture votes the majority could not otherwise cast, and events quickly vindicated the minority's suspicion.

Within days of the walkout, Estrada, who had been present on May 26 but already facing Department of Justice recommendations for plunder and graft charges over alleged flood control corruption, was arrested on May 29 on graft charges and again on June 1 on plunder. The majority had not merely been protecting dela Rosa. It had been building a procedural shelter for a class of legally embattled members whose courtroom troubles were, even then, accelerating toward detention.

This is precisely what the founders meant by faction, Madison's term for a self-interested majority acting not in the common interest but in its own. In Federalist 10, Madison defined faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." The Philippine majority's push to rewrite the rules of the institution in order to count senators who cannot appear due to legal jeopardy is, by Madison's definition, faction in its most transparent form.

However, the minority's response is equally instructive, and herein the American constitutional inheritance reveals its full relevance. Senator Panfilo Lacson announced that if the rule change were forced through over the minority's objections, the minority would bring the matter before the Supreme Court for possible grave abuse of discretion. That instinct to seek relief, not in the streets, not in a counter-coup, but in an independent judiciary, is the founders' institutional logic in practice. Madison did not merely warn against majority tyranny; he engineered the remedy. Separated powers, bicameral chambers, and an independent judiciary exist precisely so that the aggrieved minority has somewhere to go other than the mob. The Philippine minority, to its credit, appears to understand this.

What makes the current dispute a particularly acute illustration is that it lacks even the passion of the classical mob. Madison warned against emotionally inflamed majorities — the Athenian assembly that executed eight generals in a fit of rage after the Battle of Arginusae, or the jury of 500 that condemned Socrates on the flimsiest of grounds. The Philippine Senate majority's maneuver is something colder: a calculated exploitation of institutional rules to compensate for numerical weakness. It is faction by arithmetic rather than by fury, which makes it pernicious, because it is more difficult to recognize and easier to justify in procedural language.

The Philippine Constitution, modeled substantially on its American counterpart, adopted the same architecture of checks and balances for the same reasons. The founders of both republics understood that the greatest threats to self-government do not announce themselves as tyranny. They arrive dressed as parliamentary procedure.

The minority senators who walked out on May 26 were not being obstructionist. They were doing precisely what a functioning bicameral system demands of a minority: refusing to grant legitimacy to a process that had abandoned the deliberative standards the institution exists to uphold. As Senator Lacson put it, the majority's numbers were not enough to sustain proceedings once the quorum was questioned. The minority did not defeat the majority by matching its votes. It defeated it by withdrawing the consent that makes majority rule legitimate in the first place. That is not mob rule. That is republican government working as designed.

Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary." The Philippine Senate in May 2026 offered a reminder of why that observation remains as true in Manila as it was in Philadelphia. The remedy is not cynicism about institutions; on the contrary, it is fidelity to them. The minority senators who stood their ground, and who now carry their grievance to the Supreme Court rather than to the barricades, are demonstrating that fidelity. Whether the institutions hold is the question every republic, American and Filipino alike, must answer in each generation.

The post Tyranny of the Majority in the Philippine Senate? first appeared on Marcial's Law.

This seems like a most auspicious occasion for Trump’s second term for several reasons. 

First and foremost, the American people have clearly spoken as manifested in his decisive landslide reelection with the electoral vote (312-226), the popular vote and the swing state vote, in spite of his two impeachments, a conviction, VP Kamala Harris’s outspending of Trump, and her command of the mainstream media and Hollywood celebrity elite.  Perhaps, this is due to Trump’s favorable public service and accomplishments, most of which I have listed in my commentary entitled “For Rational Voters Who Want to Give America a Huge Jump, Here Are 32 Reasons to Support Donald Trump.”

Second, Trump will have three branches of government at his disposal due to the GOP winning the majority in the Senate (53 seats) and in the House (220 seats) and a majority of 5 conservative Supreme Court justices (excluding Chief Justice John Roberts for his unconstitutional ruling of the alleged constitutionality of Obamacare).

Third, Trump has established a Republican base, even broader and more diverse than in his first term (e.g., blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, women, union workers, youth, Democrats, independents).

Fourth, Trump’s public service experience from his first term can serve as a guide in navigating and managing the political machinery of the federal government, and his new loyal appointees will only accommodate him.

Fifth, since this will be Trump’s last term, he should be able to implement most, if not all, of the conservative agenda, post-COVID, unimpeded by a political witch hunt, without fearing backlash that could hinder his run for another term.  

Finally, committed leftists have vowed to leave America, while their remaining female fanatics have pledged to be celibate as a protest against Trump.  (Although I fail to comprehend the logic of such drastic measures, I fully support them, since America is better without them.  As for the celibate females, if they all fulfill their vows of abstinence for life, then abortion would no longer be a concern, and they would eventually follow the footsteps of the dinosaurs into extinction---a win-win situation, but I digress.

Having presented all such favorable conditions, here is what Trump must do to keep conservatives in power in perpetuity, provided he has the political will to do so.

1. End birthright citizenship.  Congress should legislate a bill clarifying the meaning and application of the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in unambiguous language.  Since the law states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside,” it has been a commonly entrenched misnomer that all such “persons” (born on American soil) automatically become citizens without any qualifications or conditions.  

However, the author of its citizenship clause, Senator Jacob Howard, explicitly excluded “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States.”  Clearly, the offspring of illegal immigrants are no exception.  In fact, the law was enacted for freed slaves and their children, who were “born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” political jurisdiction, that is.  Civil rights and immigration expert Hans Spakovsky points out that the amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, wherein “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power,” would be considered citizens.  Hence, a law passed by Congress, clarifying the original intent of the 14^th Amendment, would supersede all judicial rulings favoring birthright citizenship.

Such a law by itself would eliminate the incentive for much illegal immigration, preempting “anchor babies” from eventually providing a legal path for their deliverers.  However, this law should be enacted in conjunction with the reinstatement of Trump’s immigration policies of “Remain in Mexico,” constructing the border wall, defunding sanctuary cities, and establishing more courts to swiftly adjudicate illegal aliens who currently await trial.

2. Repeal the federal income tax and abolish the IRS.  The federal income tax should be replaced by a national sales or consumption tax known as the “Fair Tax,” and should operate independently of Trump’s tariffs.  That was the proposal of newly-appointed ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee (when he ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary).  There is currently a proposal sponsored by Rep. Earl Carter in the House.

The Fair Tax would replace all personal and corporate income taxes, the death tax, gift taxes, and payroll taxes with a simple consumption tax of roughly 25%.  Since everyone must purchase food and water, and perhaps, other goods and services, it must follow that nobody can easily evade such taxes, including tourists, illegal aliens, and drug smugglers.  Hence, the Fair Tax is all-inclusive, simple, provides more individual control, and would increase tax revenue even more so than just reducing the corporate income tax rate or making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.

3. Promote the service or knowledge sector of the economy.  Although I was critical of Trump’s tariff policy, as pointed out in my previous commentary entitled “Historic GOP Wins for 2016, Flipping the Blacks, and a Little on Trump's Carrier Deal,” hindsight has persuaded me that it can be used as leverage against other countries which oppose American interests, at least temporarily.  However, I still maintain that the purpose of using tariffs to recover outsourced manufacturing jobs may be a pyrrhic victory.

After all, manufacturing is the second major sector and phase of a growing American economy---the first being the agrarian sector, the third being the service sector, and the fourth and current one being the knowledge or technical sector.  The service and knowledge sectors are currently the predominant ones, and most of the blue collar (including manufacturing) jobs have been lost to productive efficiency (automation), not outsourcing.

For that reason, Trump should encourage displaced blue collar workers to either learn new skills or acquire knowledge calibrated to the predominant service and knowledge sectors of the economy.  For example, electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and mechanics are all blue collar service workers in perpetual demand.  High-demand jobs in the knowledge/tech sector include bookkeeping, business analysis, drop shipping, financial coaching, programming, project management, SEO, IT training, insurance brokering, social media marketing, UX design, virtual assistance, web analysis, web design, AI, data science, etc.  

Trump should emphasize how these highly-skilled, highly-knowledgeable jobs will “make America great again.”  He could pitch them as highly paid jobs that provide excellent fringe benefits for employees and their family, which will raise their standard of living.  Such jobs will impact the fields of medicine, cybersecurity, accounting, finance, and research and would contribute to further technological advancement to keep the U.S. competitive on the world stage.  Many of them do not require a four-year college degree, but just several months of online training.  Perhaps best of all, the aforementioned tech jobs are all remote which accommodates the employees, who wish to spend more time with their family at home or virtually anywhere.

Surely, this pitch for perpetual knowledge/tech sector jobs sounds much more persuasive than obsolete manufacturing sector jobs, does it not?  After all, the Oxford Economics analysis firm predicts robots will replace up to 20 million manufacturing jobs globally by 2030.  So much for protectionism.

4. Promote financial literacy.  That includes education on credit building, picking a credit card, renting or purchasing a home, choosing a college or trade school or online educational program, asset protection, wealth building, tax savings, entrepreneurship, the use of limited liability companies and corporations as business entities, retirement planning, investing in stocks, bonds, gold, silver, real estate, cryptocurrency, etc.  Entrepreneur and financial advisor Robert Kiyosaki’s classic book entitled Rich Dad, Poor Dad is an excellent introduction to financial literacy.  In fact, there is an entire Rich Dad Advisors book series covering the aforementioned topics in detail.

Such education is precisely what made Trump a successful businessman, which is why he would be the ideal spokesman to encourage service or knowledge sector workers to start a business in their own respective areas of expertise.  Many of them already have.  

For example, food line servers have opened up their own catering business or restaurant.  Plumbers have become contractors or started their own plumbing business.  SEO specialists employed by digital marketing companies have established their own agencies.

Shows like Shark Tank, Blue Collar Millionaire, and Millennial Money present such real life cases, wherein employees have become successful business owners, many of whom were raised in poverty, were homeless, or migrated from the Third World.  Moreover, financial literacy should be taught during or before high school in order to prepare young adults.

5. Repeal and replace Obamacare.  This was a long overdue promise Republicans made since the enactment of this unconstitutional, doctor-depriving, economically disruptive monstrosity in 2010.  Although Trump nullified the individual mandate portion of the law, he and conservatives must repeal the rest of it.  Such a law would supersede the Supreme Court ruling on the alleged constitutionality of Obamacare.

Here are a few market-based alternatives that should operate simultaneously in order to optimize cost reduction and stellar quality private healthcare over a government-managed system with price controls and rationing:

• Wellness Education:  If everyone would practice basic self-care (e.g., nutritious diet, adequate exercise, sufficient sleep, effective stress management) daily, it is highly likely that the hospitals would have less than half of the current patients, and much fewer people would be consuming medication (with potential side effects that could cause other health problems).  However, such education would more appropriately be implemented by parents, civic organizations, or communities as a whole.  Perhaps, the federal government could temporarily appropriate funds for the states for that sole purpose.

• Tort Reform:  Another name is medical malpractice or liability reform.  Since physicians and other medical practitioners have been the financial target of trial lawyers for alleged malpractice damages, the former have resorted to preemptive measures (e.g., purchasing medical malpractice insurance, assigning numerous and extraneous examinations to patients), which have hiked medical care costs.  Hence, a fair system in which prudent physicians are protected from frivolous lawsuits, while negligent ones are penalized, is in order.  However, such policy must be enacted by the states, since federal tort reform would be unconstitutional, as it would violate Americans’ right to a trial by jury (6^th Amendment) and state sovereignty (10^th Amendment).

• Health Savings Accounts:  These are tax-advantaged savings accounts, which are generally for healthy people, who have little risk for developing chronic conditions.  Those recipients range from children to young adults (30 and below), hence negating the need for frequent office visits or numerous examinations.  Similar to a 401(k) investment plan, the recipient and employer both contribute to the fund.  Neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson proposed a version (known as a health empowerment account or HEA) for all Americans, effective at birth.  That would accommodate healthy patients in general and patients poised to develop pre-existing conditions in particular (since they would already be covered at the time such conditions are made manifest).

6. Abolish the Social Security system.  With more Americans receiving, rather than contributing to the fund (hence making it vulnerable to insolvency) it should be privatized.  Initially, Americans would be given the choice whether to privatize their share or remain with the government (until the deadline for complete privatization is reached).  Those who opt for privatization will also have the choice as to how their social security funds will be invested and in which assets (bonds, stocks, exchange traded funds, mutual funds) to invest.

7. Balance the federal budget in 4 years.  With the national debt currently at $36 trillion, balancing the budget is of paramount significance.  This can be accomplished in conjunction with more federal tax revenue from tax cuts and a robust economy and massive spending cuts from the abolition of the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and other agencies or departments, as well as outstanding leadership and an iron political will.

Similar reforms were implemented in the 1990s under then Speaker Newt Gingrich, who presided over four consecutive years of a balanced federal budget; this started within 3 years of implementing the deficit reduction plan of House members, though they aimed for 7 years.  Hence, balancing the budget should take effect on July 4, 2026 in order to steer the 2018 midterm elections in the GOP’s favor; this date also coincides with the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency’s deadline (headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy) for dismantling some of the government’s agencies or departments, which will free federal revenue from wasteful spending, and perhaps, finally end “the era of big government” once and for all).

8. Update the 1951 U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty to include the South China Sea.  Since China remains a threat, one of the ways the U.S. can project its military power and put this Asian juggernaut in check is by strengthening ties with the Philippines (its oldest treaty ally), which has been victim to China’s aggression for simply asserting its sovereign rights as awarded by the Permanent Court of Arbitration.  Currently the MDT stipulates that an “armed attack” on the “armed forces, public vessels or aircraft” of the Philippines or U.S. in the Pacific, obliges both countries to respond in mutual retaliation.

This treaty should be upgraded to include China’s “grey zone” tactics (e.g., blocking Philippine vessels, using military-grade lasers to temporarily blind Philippine coast guard crew, firing water cannons on Philippine vessels).  In fact, Sen. Marco Rubio (Trump’s incoming state secretary) introduced the U.S.-Philippine Partnership Act of 2024 to do just that, along with providing other defense measures, and negotiating critical minerals and energy products for supply chains.  Such an American projection of power in the South China Sea may even deter China from invading another Asian ally, namely Taiwan.

9. Replace Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  Perhaps Trump should not do this immediately upon returning to the White House, but he should at least have a shortlist prepared.  At 70 years of age and burdened with type 1 diabetes, it seems wise to preempt discontinuity in the functioning of the Supreme Court in the potential absence of Sotomayor.  Of course, a conservative replacement would tally 6 conservatives (again, excluding the judicial traitor, Roberts) and 3 liberals on the high court.

10. Promote 2-parent households.  Perhaps the only thing for which I credit Pres. Barack Obama is his citing of statistics that indicate “children who grow up without a father are 5 times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, 9 times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”  Consider that out-of-wedlock births for whites have gone from 5% in 1965 to over 25% in 2015.  For blacks, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 25% to 73% in those same years, hence accounting for the high rate of poverty, crime, gang-related shootings of other blacks, incarcerations, and unemployment.

Contrary to popular leftist belief, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws (state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation, denied blacks the right to vote, hold jobs, or acquire an education) are not the primary factors for the stagnation of the black community, since such conditions no longer exist today due to their systemic ban within the past century.  However, absent fathers among the black family have skyrocketed since 1964 with President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” or more accurately, “War on the Black Family.”  

Where have all the fathers gone?  Rather than marrying them to help raise their children, stresses the black conservative commentator Larry Elder (who leftists characterize as “the black face of white supremacy”), the welfare system has enabled single mothers to “marry the government, and this makes it all too easy for men to abandon their traditional moral and financial responsibilities.”  What’s worse was the political motive Johnson revealed when he told his colleagues that the bait of the welfare system would “have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.”

Hence, a call to dismantle the federal welfare state and devolve this function to the states is in order.  Parents and church or community leaders must inculcate to the youth the moral importance of the institution of the 2-parent family and establish a zero-tolerance policy for fathers who abandon their children.  They must also shun race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson, who profit from pitching the myth that the black community’s stagnation is due to systemic racism rather than absent fathers.

11. Purchase CNN, NBC, and TikTok.  This suggestion is directed to Elon Musk (who purchased Twitter and renamed it X), Kevin O’Leary (who offered $20 billion for TikTok), or anyone else, who is financially capable and aligned with conservatives.  The purpose is to purge those platforms of leftist and woke agendas, and restructure them into real news outlets, so that their viewers will have professional reportage of current events.  Analysts and commentators from the Left, Right, center, and independents will keep the networks fair and balanced as some of the current programs on the Fox News Channel or Pierce Morgan Uncensored.  Only then, will Americans be able to truly make informed decisions and even view presidential debates hosted fairly and professionally by objective moderators.

12. Promote civic education, and expand youth outreach.  Trump must reinstate the 1776 Commission, which was already created prior to Election Day in 2020; since he lost to Biden, it has remained dormant.  The commission’s purpose is to clarify for the official record, the genuine history of America, its founders, their concept of unalienable or natural rights as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, religious liberty, and the founders’ perspective on the role and function of a limited government with separated powers, a jury system, and the concept of American exceptionalism.  As I have pointed out in my commentary entitled “The Time-Tested Model”:

Consider America’s progress in the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, and civil rights for blacks, all of which happened within 229 years of the establishment of the U.S. government.  In spite of such turbulent occasions, the world’s oldest written supreme law of the land, the U.S. Constitution, remains largely intact.

Unfortunately, such a unique mix of concepts and historical facts are the antithesis of the revisionist history of the Left, which views the founders solely as wealthy, chauvinistic, white slaveholders, who established the American government in order to advance their racist agenda, while enriching themselves and exploiting others via the evil instrument of the capitalist system.  Such misguided people idolize criminals like George Floyd (a violent drug-addicted thief who died in police custody) or Luigi Mangione (an assassin who shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of a healthcare company).  The Left has been so obsessed with the latter, the females of their ilk admit to intimate fantasies with him.  Based on that fallacious perspective and misguided deification, the Left advocates for critical race theory indoctrination, affirmative action policies, wealth redistribution programs, laws and policies permitting men in women’s sports and women’s bathrooms.

Hence, Trump’s reinstatement of the 1776 Commission is the solution to counter such leftist misinformation and progressivism.  Other options include free online courses from Hillsdale College, particularly on the topics of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, foreign policy, progressivism, socialism, etc.  Turning Point, USA is a conservative organization that performs extensive outreach on college campuses, and has played an important role in mobilizing students to vote for Trump over Kamala Harris.

The National Constitution Center features numerous online lectures, speeches from Supreme Court justices, interviews with renowned legal and political experts and commentators, and interactive content on the Constitution.  Prager U provides informative 5-minute videos on various topics as the presidents, Black Lives Matter, voter integrity, education, economists, etc.  Perhaps Dinesh D’ Souza’s movie entitled America, which debunks the Left’s major myths and presents American exceptionalism at its finest, should be promoted in educational institutions on all grade levels. 

Furthermore, I would like to express my appreciation to everyone who contributed to this turning point in the reelection of Donald Trump.  That includes all pragmatic Nikki Haley conservatives, independents, Democrats, and former political rivals.  I wish I could extend my gratitude and praise to the #NeverTrump conservatives with whom I endeavored to persuade in my previous commentary.  Indeed, I have learned that conservatives do not have a monopoly on reason.  If they did, then #NeverTrump conservatives would at least be open to being #SometimesTrump conservatives.

In closing, my American friends and conservatives, it is time to celebrate a momentous occasion in American history.  Indeed, it’s morning again in America---not because of Trump’s short-lived wave of nationalist, protectionist, populism---but because of the aforementioned constitutionally limited government policies and civic/family-oriented initiatives, which the Trump administration will hopefully revitalize within the party of Ronald Reagan and throughout the country from which Americans will derive prosperity and a new sense of liberty.  That would definitely make America great again . . . . permanently!

Long live President Donald Trump!

Long live the U.S.A.!

The post It’s Morning Again in America!  Here’s How Trump and Conservatives Can Make It Permanent! first appeared on Marcial's Law.

1. Cruz is a trustworthy, anti-Establishment, public servant.

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, there can never be a question of where Cruz stands, and if he will ever compromise his principles out of political expedience.  Indeed, he has opposed both the Democrat and Republican Establishment equally whenever their agendas ran contrary to his mandate to Texans and the American people, even to the detriment of his own political career.  Cruz’s renowned 21-hour speech on the Senate floor (in direct opposition to the Senate majority leader of his own party) is an ostensible display of his passion, as well as his strong legs, large bladder, and enormous proverbial testicles.  In spite of such fierce opposition from his own political peers, Cruz never deviated from his promises and mandate to the American people. Thus, he has been consistently principled, whereas others have been principled only until Election Day. 

2. Cruz has more vast experience in legal and constitutional matters than Allred.

At roughly the same time when Allred was still attending high school in the 1990s, Cruz graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, served as a law clerk for a U.S. appeals court juror and then for a U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.  Between the time Allred finished his tenure at Baylor University and kicking a football around professionally for the NFL (2001-2010), Cruz already started serving the country in various capacities.

First, he taught U.S. Supreme Court Litigation as an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law.  Then, Cruz served as Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, as associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department, and finally as Texas solicitor general.  During that time, he authored over 80 U.S. Supreme Court briefs and argued 43 oral arguments, achieving an unprecedented series of landmark national victories, some of which I listed in a previous article.  Cruz is currently serving his second term as U.S. senator.  

Such an extensive legal background gives him the competitive advantage to effectively author or vote for or against legislation on a wide range of issues with legal and constitutional implications—concerns of privacy, free speech, property rights, criminal justice, immigration, foreign policy, etc. Allred would have to rely excessively on legal advisors or attorneys for their expertise or simply draw from his own limited knowledge and experience from being a short-term attorney and lawmaker.

3. As a U.S. senator, Cruz has crafted and supported several significant bills for Americans and the nation.

• He supported a bill which lowered taxes and increased income for the labor force (including wages and benefits), helped create thousands of jobs (some at record levels), accelerated economic growth, and contributed to America’s global competitive advantage.

• He introduced a bill to make the aforementioned tax cuts permanent.  Even Sen. Bernie Sanders agrees they were a “very good thing,” which is why they “should’ve made the tax breaks for the middle class permanent.”

• He supported a pipeline project which would create jobs and lower the price of goods and services due to the reduced cost of energy.

• He co-authored a law permitting the states to impose mandatory drug testing for federal unemployment benefit recipients.

• He introduced legislation that, if passed, would ensure all pertinent agencies report convictions to the National Background Check Database, which would have prosecuted anyone who attempted to illegally purchase a firearm, such as the Texas church shooter. It also would have provided more school security, e.g., metal detectors and police officers.

• In the midst of the fierce debate about separating undocumented parents from their children, he introduced emergency legislation that would permit them to remain together during detention.

• He co-authored a bill allocating a few billion dollars in tax relief to Hurricane Harvey victims, including tax credits for small businesses that kept paying their employees (even if such employees were unable to arrive at their workplace, or the business was shut down due to the storms).

• Amid attempts by numerous Chinese nationals and other illegal aliens to acquire unauthorized access to Department of Defense installations, Cruz introduced the GATE CRASHERS Act, which would strengthen criminal penalties for such trespassing.

• He added a provision to the Military Construction and Veterans’ Affairs Appropriations bill, which would address the long waiting period in which veterans must currently wait to receive healthcare at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System.

• He sponsored the Student Empowerment Act, which would expand the reach of 529 savings accounts for K-12 and college education to include public, private, religious, and home schooling expenses (e.g., tutoring, standardized testing fees, educational therapies for disabled students).

• He introduced the Expatriate Terrorist Act, which revokes the citizenship of any American who collaborates with Islamic terrorists and bans those who leave the country to join them.

4. As a U.S. senator, Cruz has worked in bipartisanship with his peers.

• Cruz worked with Rep. Henry Cuellar (Laredo) in expediting the permitting process in the expansion of 4 key bridges used to cross the Texas-Mexico border and bringing the inflow of over $800 billion in trade and commerce into Texas and America.

• Cruz collaborated with Javier Palomarez (president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council) to reform H1B high tech visas.

• Cruz worked with Sen. Maria Cantwell (Wash.) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) on the Pay Our Coast Guard Act, which would secure the salaries of Coast Guardsmen in the event of a government shutdown (like other military personnel)

• Cruz collaborated with Sen. Raphael Warnock (Georgia) in extending Interstate 14 from the Permian Basin to Georgia’s Atlantic Coast.

5. Cruz supports energy independence and the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in order to curb inflation (thereby lowering food and gas prices), while Allred opposes them.

• Cruz sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to appeal the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision to vacate permits for the Rio Grande LNG project and Texas LNG project.

• While Allred voted for a current law, which has increased taxes and fees on natural gas and energy production, Cruz introduced legislation to repeal them and help curb inflation.

• Allred voted against a bill, which would lift Biden’s pause on LNG exports.

• Allred voted against the Restoring American Energy Dominance Act.

• Allred voted against the Lower Energy Costs Act.

6. Cruz favors strong border security, while Allred opposes it.

• Cruz introduced the El Chapo Act, which would appropriate the seized assets of drug lords for the construction of the border wall that Allred has characterized as “racist.”

• Cruz included border security amendments to the 2022 Coast Guard Authorization Act, which enhances the surveillance capabilities for the southern maritime border.

• Cruz introduced the Secure the Border Act, which is a comprehensive plan that will provide physical and technological border improvements, manpower assistance to Border Patrol and ICE Enforcement Removal Operations, protection to families seeking entry at the border and unaccompanied alien children, and will reform immigration parole, asylum, and legal immigration workforce issues.

• Cruz sponsored the No FAMS at the Border Act of 2024, which allows for the deployment of federal air marshals to the southern and northern U.S. borders.

• Cruz co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, which mandates that the Homeland Security secretary incarcerate aliens who have been charged with crimes committed in the U.S.

• Allred voted against the Protecting our Communities from Failure to Secure the Border Act (11/30/2023).

• Allred voted against the Continuing Appropriations and Border Security Enhancement Act, 2024 (09/29/2023).

• Allred voted against the Secure the Border Act of 2023 (05/11/2023).

• Allred voted for an amendment to an appropriations bill, which would bar federal funds from being used toward the Texas border and immigration enforcement program.

• Allred voted against the resolution condemning the use of elementary and secondary school facilities to provide shelter for aliens who are not admitted to the United States (06/22/2023)

7. Cruz is a staunch supporter of law enforcement and public safety, while Allred has disregarded both.

• Before the Senate floor, Cruz criticized all government officials who led the charge to defund the police, while Allred supported the anti-police, anti-ICE organization, known as NetGen America.

• Cruz introduced a bill that would appropriate over $38 billion to enforce school security and double the number of school resource officers in order to reduce gun violence.

• Cruz introduced the Back the Blue Act, which would increase penalties for anyone who targets law enforcement officers and would provide news protective equipment.

• Cruz introduced the Texas Rangers Bicentennial Resolution in the Senate, which commemorates the 200^th anniversary of the founding of the Texas Ranger Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

• Allred voted against the Police Act of 2023.

8. Cruz favors the separation of biological males from biological females in sports, whereas Allred favors integration.

• Cruz introduced the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would protect athletic opportunities for female athletes.

• Allred voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.

• Allred voted against the Parental Bill of Rights, which mandated parental consent to change a child’s sex-based accommodations at school (e.g. athletic programs, restrooms, changing rooms).

• Allred opposed a proposal in the Texas legislature, which would have mandated schools to adopt a bathroom policy based on biological sex, not gender identity.

• Allred cosponsored the Transgender Bill of Rights resolution that permitted participation in sports based on gender identity and the elimination of restrictions on gender modification procedures.

9. As an ethnic minority, Cruz’s achievements make him an ideal role model for other minorities in forging their own American success story.

• He is the first Hispanic from Texas to serve in the U.S. Senate.
• He was the first Hispanic to serve the longest term of solicitor general in Texas history.

• He was the first Hispanic to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.

• At Harvard Law School, wherein Professor Alan Dershowitz referred to Cruz as being “off-the-charts brilliant,” he was a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.

• Cruz’s own role model, his father, was imprisoned and tortured for being an enemy of the Batista regime in Cuba, prior to Fidel Castro overthrowing it.  After fleeing Cuba and coming to Texas with $100 sewn into his underwear, he learned English, while washing dishes for fifty cents per hour.  After earning a mathematics degree from the University of Texas in Austin, he started a small business in the oil and gas industry.  Hence, Cruz’s father---raised in poverty (under an authoritarian government), migrating to the U.S. and assimilating, becoming an entrepreneur, and starting a family---has proven that the American Dream is achievable by virtually anyone, regardless of economic status, ethnicity, or nationality.

In conclusion, my Texan and American friends, I urge you all to support Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate for the simple reason that he is a trustworthy, astute, accomplished public servant. That is precisely what Texas and America need.  Also, ask yourself the following questions:  Do you support policies, which will keep food and gas prices high and possibly raise them higher?  Do you support weak border security, which have enabled murderers, rapists, and drug and human trafficking into America from Mexico?  Do you support defunding the police?  Do you want men playing in women’s sports, and should boys be allowed in the restrooms of girls in public schools?  If not, then we agree that Allred is not all right.  Therefore, choose Cruz.  Veto Allred.

The post 9 Reasons Texans Should Vote for Cruz and Toss Out Allred  first appeared on Marcial's Law.

My American friends and countrymen, although I correctly predicted the resignation of President Joe Biden from the 2024 presidential rematch with former President Donald Trump upon his disastrous debate performance on June 27, I did not predict his political ouster or coup.  Indeed, Vice President Kamala Harris did not win a single vote or delegate because she never entered any primary in any state.  Instead, Biden’s delegates (as represented by 14 million primary voters) were magically transferred to Harris (hence, unearned, especially considering she has scarcely participated in interviews).  Also, noteworthy is that Harris did not acquire a single delegate in her one and only presidential primary run against Biden in 2020.  Nonetheless, Harris has formally accepted the nomination (or coronation, depending on your perspective) at the Democrat National Convention in August.

Be that as it may, GovTrack.US has rated her as the most extreme politician, even left of the self-avowed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, due to her extreme voting record as a U.S. senator and tie-breaker as VP.  Hence, she supported all of Biden’s leftist policies, in spite of some of them appearing as moderate.  For this reason, I often contrast the policy results of Trump and Biden, the primary difference being that Harris would have moved farther to the left than Biden with regard to federal spending, regulations, tax increases, etc.  Therefore, the results would be equally disastrous, if not more so, since she herself claims to be “radical” and advocates for the country to become radical.

Now that Biden has served in the same role as Trump in the same capacity, with the same vested powers of the president, and with the same limited term of 4 years, the stark contrast herein, will be presented plainly.  Some of the points underscore what Trump has initiated or accomplished in order to mitigate the devastating results of President Barack Obama’s policies.  Some of those Trump policies were simply continued by Biden, and their impact have been made tangible under Biden, hence opening him up for mistaken attribution.  Although it may be a moot point to say whether or not job creation and the unemployment rate were better under Trump or Biden, the following points are indisputable:

1. Under Trump, the unemployment rate reached its lowest level (3.7%) since 1969.  Ethnic minorities achieved their lowest rate ever recorded--- blacks at 5.5%, Hispanics at 3.9%, and Asians at 2.2%.  Women’s unemployment reached the lowest rate since 1953 at 3.1%.  Youth unemployment hit the lowest rate in nearly half a century.  Finally, the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for Americans without a high school diploma occurred under Trump.

2. When Trump left office in 2021, inflation was at 1.4%.  After 18 months of Biden’s administration, it peaked to 9.1%.  Even the left-leaning news network Al Jazeera reports that between January 2021 and May 2024, the average price of a gallon of gasoline rose from $2.33 to $3.76, a loaf of bread from $1.55 to $1.97, and a dozen eggs from $1.47 to $2.70.  Hence, real wages drastically declined under Biden.
   
3. On federal deficits, Trump averaged $750 billion (if the two COVID years of 2020 and 2021 are omitted).  Biden averaged $1.5 trillion (even adjusting for inflation).
   
4. Under Trump, there was a 19% decline in food stamp recipients (from 44.2 million in 2016 to 35.7 million in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), which lowered the cost to taxpayers to $60 billion (the lowest since 2009).  Under Biden, food stamp recipients rose by 3%, and the program’s expansion increased the cost to taxpayers to $120 billion per year (doubling the cost under Trump).
   
5. Under Trump, Median household income hit its highest level ever recorded.
   
6. Much of the prosperous economy under Trump was attributable to the tax cuts bill he signed into law, which Harris voted against as a senator.  The law cut taxes for more than 90% of the workforce and reduced taxes for businesses, which stimulated growth and job creation.  The tax cuts are set to expire in 2025, and Harris is poised to oppose them upon a legislative vote for extension, thereby raising taxes.
   
7. Harris proposes an additional tax increase on corporations from a 21% rate to 28% in order to “soak the rich.”  However, in reality, such a tax increase will simply be passed on to the consumers in the form of higher prices.  It should be noted that Trump already lowered the corporate rate of 35% (then the highest in the world) to 21%.

8. On illegal immigration, Trump has instituted several policies to curb it, notwithstanding the issue of the 11 million illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S.  Over 400 miles of border wall was built.  The “Remain in Mexico” policy slowed down the rate of border crossings by detaining alleged asylum seekers (approximately 70,000 during Trump’s full term), pending the time of their hearings in the U.S.  Trump ended Obama’s policy of “Catch and Release” and replaced it with “Catch and Detain,” pending the removal of illegal aliens, and ultimately deporting them back to their home countries.  In contrast, Biden discontinued border wall construction, ended the Remain in Mexico policy, and reinstated the Catch and Release policy, in which 75% or 191,141illegal aliens were released into the American population in 2023.  The 11 million illegal aliens originated from more than 150 different countries, from which murderers, rapists, and Islamic terrorists stem.  Ironically, Harris stated, “We have a secure border.”
   
9. On the drug trade along the southern border, Trump threatened Mexico’s president, Andres Obrador, with designating the drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations,” which would enable the U.S. to deploy drones or even special forces to Mexico.  Such a specter prompted Obrador to station thousands of Mexican soldiers and national guardsmen at the southern border in order to keep the cartels at bay, as well as curtail much of the illegal migration.  As soon as Biden assumed the presidency, Obrador recalled those soldiers and guardsmen from the Mexican border, and the pre-Trump chaos resumed.
   
10. Harris supports defunding ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) and the abolition of ICE detainers (the means by which state or local law enforcement detains illegal aliens before being transferred to federal custody.

11. Harris supports providing Social Security and Medicare benefits to illegal immigrants.  Trump wants those benefits to be limited to American citizens, who have paid taxes.
    
12. Trump supported legislation to open ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) and approve Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines in order to keep energy prices low while creating more jobs.  The United States became a net natural gas exporter for the first time since 1957, hence making the country energy-dominant.  In contrast, Biden-Harris opposed Keystone, approved the Nord Stream Pipeline (which emboldened Russian president Vladimir Putin), and supported legislation to restrict oil drilling, hence accounting for high inflation and dependence on foreign oil once again.
    
13. In spite of Trump keeping America out of war, he has managed to annihilate some notorious terrorists, such as Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani (the second most powerful person in Iran, who concocted plans to attack American diplomats in Iraq) and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  With the latter’s demise, the caliphate was quashed.  Harris opposed Soleimani’s assassination.
    
14. Biden-Harris initiated the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which led to the deaths of 13 American servicemen and over 100 Afghani civilians from an ISIS suicide bombing.  It also led to the Taliban takeover of $7 billion in U.S. military assets provided to the Afghan National Army.  Perhaps, such a tragedy could have been averted had Biden fulfilled the request of then Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley of keeping a residual force of 2,500 troops, instead of a meager 650 that Biden deployed.

15. Under President George W. Bush, Putin invaded and seized Georgia.  Under President Barack Obama, Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea.  Under President Joe Biden, Putin invaded Ukraine again, which has been an ongoing war.  Under President Trump, Putin has refrained from invading any country.
    
16. Under Biden, the terrorist organization, Hamas, attacked Israel, giving rise to the current Palestinian-Israeli war.  Under Trump, Hamas refrained from such an attack.
    
17. Trump signed legislation imposing tariffs on China in response to China’s forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and chronically abusive trade practices.  As a result, $16 billion was collected by the government (after a single year of implementation), while the tariff burden fell on Chinese exporters.  Due to its efficacy, the Biden administration has continued the tariffs.
18. Trump negotiated NATO allies into spending $69 billion more on defense since 2016, rather than allowing the U.S. to continue carrying most of the financial burden.
    
19. On hostage releases, Trump imposed sanctions on two specific government officials in order to persuade Turkish President Recep Erdogan to release an American pastor (Andrew Brunson) from custody.  The sanctions froze the officials’ assets in the U.S., banned them from traveling to the U.S., and barred them from any financial transactions with Americans.  No money or hostages were exchanged in the pastor’s successful release.  In contrast, Biden negotiated a deal (entailing 7 countries), wherein Russia would release Americans from custody in exchange for Russians (imprisoned for terrorism, spying, cyber hacking, and conspiring to obtain military-grade technologies from U.S. companies for Russia’s interests).  Such exchanges could only encourage kidnappings and more incarcerations of Americans.
    
20. Under Obama, the Iran nuclear deal took effect with then VP Biden’s support.  It enabled the U.S., the European Union, and the United Nations to lift banking, nuclear, and oil export sanctions on Iran in exchange for its compliance  with UN inspectors to refrain from building nuclear weaponry for 10 to 15 years.  When Trump assumed the presidency, he withdrew the U.S. from the deal, reverting back to the energy sanctions which kept Iran in recession, currency depreciation, and inflation.  He was also concerned that the deal would stimulate Iran’s economy (not for the average household, but for the government), whereby it could raise funds for terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.  Harris has stated that if she becomes president, she would bring the U.S. back into the deal.
    
21. Trump has established a new branch of the military called the Space Force, which is engineered to enhance America’s defense, especially with regard to China and Russia’s aggression and imperialist tendencies.  In contrast, Biden has enabled “woke” policies within the military, thereby weakening it.
    
22. On the woke military front, Trump scaled back the transgender-accommodating policies of Obama.  Upon Defense Sec. James Mattis’s report indicating that transgender individuals (suffering from gender dysphoria) are 9 times more susceptible to suicide and severe anxiety than the general population, the Trump administration imposed restrictions on them.  However, not only did Biden (on his inauguration day) abolish those restrictions via executive order, he also enabled active military members to take time off for sex-change surgeries at taxpayer expense.
    
23. Harris supports taxpayer funding of transgender surgeries for federal prisoners and detained illegal aliens.

24. Under Trump, Operation Warp Speed was launched, by which the government collaborated with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines within 11 months---an unprecedented feat that would normally take over 4 years.  During the first 5 months of their availability, the vaccines prevented more than 139,000 deaths, which was estimated to save between $625 billion to $1.4 trillion.  Such an expedited process has not only been a boon to Americans, but for the entire world.
    
25. Trump signed Right-To-Try legislation, which permits terminally ill patients to consume newly developed drugs, hence bypassing the lengthy process of FDA approval, saving and prolonging the life of thousands.
    
26. On veteran medical care, Trump signed the MISSION Act, which expanded veteran access to include non-VA facilities, effectively streamlining the time and distance in which to receive care.  Trump also launched the “Anywhere to Anywhere” initiative, which allows VA doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers to administer care via telehealth and similar technology across state lines, including, but not limited to the veteran’s home.  In contrast to enhancing veteran medical care, Harris co-sponsored a bill that would eliminate the military healthcare system called TRICARE.
    
27. Trump signed the First Step Act, which reforms the criminal/prison system shortening the sentences of qualified, non-violent drug offenders.   In contrast, Biden supported the crime law which resulted in such a defective system to begin with, while Harris oversaw more than 1,900 convictions for “marijuana possession, cultivation, or sale” as California attorney general.
    
28. Trump staunchly supported the police in maintaining law and order, even supporting funding to provide them better body armor.  During the May 2020 riots, Harris encouraged defunding the police and allowing thugs to loot, damage, and burn over 1,000 businesses and a police station in Minneapolis to support their “right to protest.”  She even supported a fund to bail out the ones in police custody.  Also noteworthy, is that then Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (Harris’s VP pick) delayed sending the national guard to quell the riots in Minneapolis, in spite of Mayor Jacob Frey’s desperate request.  When he finally complied, Walz deployed only 100 guardsmen, as opposed to the 600 requested by Frey, hence endangering them for 4 days.

29. Trump supports school choice, which allows children (especially those from an impoverished situation) to attend public or private schools.  Harris only supports public schooling in order to empower the teachers’ unions rather than parents and their children.
    
30. Trump has nominated three justices to the Supreme Court, who will interpret laws in conformity to the U.S. Constitution and not legislate from the bench.  In contrast, Biden willfully nominated a black female to the Court, who could not even define what a “woman” is when asked in a Senate confirmation hearing.
    
31. In spite of the high risk of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. being a target of assassination and his numerous requests for secret service protection (an amenity granted to any major presidential contender), Biden refused it.  Only upon Trump’s insistence and own assassination attempt, did Biden capitulate.  By the way, Kennedy (a life-long Democrat) denounced the Democrat Party for opposing free speech, and has recently formed an alliance with and endorsed Trump as a “unity party.”

32. Trump is a popular, dedicated public servant.  In spite of two impeachments, a conviction, two assassination attempts, a rigged first debate with Harris (by which the moderators collaborated with Harris against Trump), and not receiving a federal salary, Trump remains in the presidential race.  In contrast, Biden dropped out of the race after the one and only debate with Trump.  Unlike Trump, who defeated 16 candidates in the 2016 Republican presidential primary in more than 35 contests, winning over 1,500 delegates, Harris did not win over a single delegate this year because she never entered a single primary in any state, as I stated from the beginning.  Neither did she acquire a single delegate in her one and only presidential primary run against Biden in 2020, hence displaying her unpopularity among the American people.

In conclusion, my American friends, simply ask yourselves under whose policies have food and gas prices remained relatively low.  Trump or Biden?  Under whose policies have the southern border and illegal immigration been most effective?  Trump or Biden?  Under whose policies do you think public servants (e.g., police, judges, military servicemen) should be hired based on competence over race or sex?  Trump or Biden?  To any sane, rational, or logical-minded voter---whether Democrat, Republican, or Independent---the choice for president should not be very challenging.  Therefore, my American friends, choose wisely for the welfare of family and country.

Long live the Republic!

Long live the USA!

The post For Rational Voters Who Want to Give America a Huge Jump, Here Are 32 Reasons to Support Donald Trump first appeared on Marcial's Law.