Quote of the Day
So as the nation continues to mark 250 years since the Declaration, Americans should ask themselves whether they still believe what that document actually says. If rights are unalienable, they do not vanish when they become politically inconvenient. If government exists by consent, then public officials are bound by limits they did not create and may not erase. And if one generation owes the next the full inheritance of freedom, then this generation has no right to reduce the Second Amendment to a loophole, a relic, or a slogan.
It is part of the American formula. It helped secure the first 250 years of American liberty. It will be just as necessary for the next 250.
Doug Hamlin
CEO of the National Rifle Association
July 7, 2026
Unalienable rights don’t expire at 250
While I generally agree with what is said here and think people should reflect on the document which conceived our nation and lead to its birth a few years later. There are two points I would like to make about this.
First, the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document governing our nation. It is historical background which can be used to determine the proper interpretation of other documents of actual legal documents of that era.
Second, there are far too many people in this country who think the rights are something completely different than what our constitution provides for and the Declaration of Independence asserts are true. For example, a scary high percentage of people believe there should be a right to health care, food, and shelter. They cannot seem to understand that if things like that are considered rights, then others must provide those things without compensation. No matter how you twist the words or hide the details in layers of legalize and bureaucracy, if someone gets goods and services without paying for them then someone else was, in essence, robbed in the process of providing them.
Don’t ever let conversations about rights get sidetracked into such distractions. Just tell them, “It is not a right if someone else has to provide it.”
The Declaration IS a legal document. At the very least, it is a legal separation from Britain. Many authorities assert it is more than that. We have had a system of governance, post-Independence that predates the Constitution. Taking a minimalist approach, the Declaration invalidates all British mechanisms of government. This would include the English common law that underlies/undermines so much of our judicial system. The recent birthright citizenship opinion by John Roberts is a striking example. I suggest everyone read the opinion piece by John Eastman on this topic. But it also underlies much of our self-defense law. English common law should be abolished in the US. If we find some of it useful (e.g. contracts), it can be reenacted by statute which is the constitutional way of doing things.
It is a legal document from the colonies to the king. The United States of America of today did not exist until our constitution was ratified years later. The Declaration of Independence is not referenced in the constitution, is it?
It didn’t need to be. That’s where the concept of inalienable rights comes from. The Constitution need the reaffirmation of those rights, including the 2A or ratification would have failed
Except the Declaration wasn’t the thing that was ratified as the manual for the country; the Constitution was.
The Declaration is a political document. A break-up letter, the reasons we are and what we play to do with your toxic ass out of our life. Too many people read the Declaration as somehow binding. It isn’t.
Neither is the preamble to the Constitution and that is where a lot of the “right to healthcare” crap comes from in the nebulous phrase “promote the general welfare”. The Articles and Bill of Rights that follows is the “how” that is done. Not a single court case upholding the Preamble as legally controlling.
The Constitution was not a reaffirmation; it was the literal definition of the rights sought.
Joe is right, the Declaration is a proclamation from the States (or more precisely, the Continental Congress as their representatives) to the King, and secondarily to the world. It isn’t a system of government.
Richard is right that there was a different system before the adoption of the Constitution, but that isn’t the Declaration but rather the Articles of Confederation.
And yes, the Constitution in its enumeration of powers never mentions Common Law (British or other) so anyone trying to apply “common law” in a Federal case is obviously wrong and ignorant.
No Declaration =no God given rights. The Constitution, even the BoR doesn’t mention that either. A system of government cannot take those away because they exist prior to the government. By asserting their existence, the Declaration becomes the true founding. The Constitution, like the articles of Confederation is implementation.
You do have a right to health care, food, and shelter, just like you have a right to firearms.
But like firearms you do not have a right to *free* health care, free food, or free shelter.
A right is not an entitlement, it is a thing that no one can morally prevent you from acquiring.
If I am sick the government cannot prevent me from getting the care I need. The government cannot legally prevent me from buying or growing the food I need, and the government is not supposed to be able to take my home, or forcibly evict me from a lease without “due process”.
Too many people don’t understand what a right *is*, and yes too many people in this country do think they *have* a right to free stuff.
And you have a right to travel among the 50 states without papers, but that doesn’t require the government to use other people’s tax dollars to buy your plane or bus ticket. It just means they can’t stop you at the county or state line.
As Rolf says below: it’s negative rights versus positive rights. Positive rights are things you’re entitled to that someone (the government) MUST provide. Negative rights are things the government cannot impose limits on.
The “rights” to food, healthcare, housing, etc., are rightfully framed in the same “negative rights” terms: government cannot arbitrarily or artificially limit your access, but they aren’t required to provide it for you.
Negative vs a positive view of rights.
Negative rights are what the government is NOT allowed to do TO you.
positive rights are what the government MUST do FOR you; the fact they must extract them (by force) from others first to give them to you is the quiet part the socialists don’t like to talk about in the early stages, beyond making “the rich” pay their “fair share.”
Yes, this is not made clear in most history texts and curriculums, from what I’ve seen, so it’s deliberate.
Most of the people in the world have the “positive rights” view, and the immigration process doesn’t require they ascribe to the other. This is also deliberate.
Saying that someone has a right to any of those things means someone must provide them. In other words, slavery. Taxes just reduce slavery from the complete ownership of another and their labor to partial ownership- sort of like the time share of slavery.
“Taxes are nothing more than time-share slavery”!
Sound bite of the day, for sure!
I had a park ranger at Independence Hall describe the Declaration as a “Statement of Legislative Intent.” I had to think about that for a while.
In and of itself, it said nothing except that the 55 signers were traitors to the Crown.
Nation-building came later, and took a couple of tries, but was successful beyond their wildest dreams (at least it was).
I would describe it as a diplomatic statement. A few days ago I heard it said that one of the reasons for adopting it is to induce other countries (such as France) to support the Revolution. A statement declaring the US to be an independent sovereign country is a prerequisite for that to happen. “…full Power … to contract Alliances … and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of Right do.”
*cough* Jury Trial *cough*
( I don’t disagree in principle. )
Great point.
Thanks.
There are exceptionally few things that the Constitution lays on the individual citizen as a positive duty.
Another is to be compelled to give testimony under penalty of perjury, bounded by the right to not incriminate oneself (or one’s spouse).
In order to get the right to trial by jury or to compel testimony in your favor, it has to be provided by someone, and it is reasonable to lay that duty on other citizens or the witnesses to the fact. The Founders considered it important enough to provide those Positive Rights with Individual Duty.
You can think of that as prohibiting the government from just charging and trying you any old way they think they can win, so it’s still a limitation on what the gov’t can do to you.
But yeah, it’s a pretty narrow sort of thing that most pro-negative-rights people don’t have a lot of problem with.
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The Declaration IS a legal document. It was a legal Complaint; a class action suit; setting for the Plaintiffs’ claims. It was authorized by the Continental Congress. It was filed in the Court of World Opinion. The Complaint was litigated over seven years culminatring at Yorktown. The settlement agreement of the suit was the Treaty of Paris.
A right is a power; to compel another to refrain (negative) or to act (positive). For every right there is a correlative duty.
Rights are not something given. Rights are restrictions on government.
One thing that has become obviously in need of sorting out is NGO’s doing the bidding of the state and getting away with it.
Ayn Rand defined a political right decades ago: a freedom to act.
That’s it. Apply it to all the enumerated rights in the Constitution and, voila, hey, it works. Wow. You have the ability to exercise the right without anyone’s (including the government) permission. No one else has to provide anything for you to exercise your right.
That’s why it doesn’t work with “right to housing”, “right to education”, “right to medical care.” As the title sums up, if someone else has to provide it, then it’s not a right. Simple, eh?
Relatedly, if someone else has to provide it, that “someone else” has the right to place conditions on it.
Right to food? Sure, but we get to decide what “food” we’ll pay for.
Right to housing? Sure, but we get to decide where you can live and “how much housing” you “need.” (You don’t get to build equity for yourself on the public dime, so we won’t help you pay a mortgage; get ready to move into a rental that we pick for you — based on our expert-approved formula, which says you need two fewer bedrooms and one fewer bathroom than you think you need.)
Right to healthcare? Sure, but we get to determine which doctor you can visit and what procedures and medications you can get; our purpose is “keep you alive,” not “help you thrive.” (IOW, no, you don’t necessarily get to keep your doctor — Obama was incorrect — or your preferred medication if a generic is available.)
However, also in practice — particularly in housing and healthcare — the same people who claim they have the “right” to “free” things also get angry at people who exercise their rights on their own dime and get more — and more choice — than what the government-backed “right” offers. They seem to think that if something is available (at some cost), they should have it for “free”, and refuse to acknowledge that the person with the bigger house and more comprehensive healthcare has them precisely because they’re willing to foot their own bills (or are required to, because they earn too much income to qualify for the government-backed “right”).
If “Universal Basic Income” (UBI) becomes a thing, I give it one month — at the outside — before some people forget what the ‘B’ stands for and demand professional-level six-digit salaries to do nothing, because “UBI is a ‘right.'”
When I was a younger man, I had a history teacher who was quite wise. When explaining the founding documents (Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), he said the documents are the instruction manual for this new nation. The Constitution is the How, and the Declaration is the Why. Many people forget that before the Constitution, there were the Articles of Confederation. They were in effect during the war years. As I recall the Articles didn’t work out so well and the Founders got together in Philadelphia to hash this out. The Congress of state representatives sat down together in a room without AC in the summer of 1787 and produced a document the states were able to agree to. Then that document was placed before each state governing body for ratification.
The issue that has been lost to all is the purpose of the Constitution. I have read the document and I came away with the understanding that the founders truly did not trust governments. They looked back to history and found only monarchs and tyrants emboldened by unrestrained power.
The current government has broken free of the restraints a little over 100 years ago. the monster has slowly grown and usurped the liberties of citizens almost to the point of object despotism.
It is past time to remind our elected officials just whom they actually work for. We THE PEOPLE are America. It is WE THE PEOPLE who must stand up and restore the UNION by using the most powerful weapon bestowed upon the CITIZENS of this nation. The BALLOT box.
DO it now before all is lost.
The ballot box is currently worthless. Until a large number of people are hung or imprisoned, (maybe both?) for voting irregularities, voting here in the US is meaningless. Voting must be accomplished in ONE DAY. No mailing, or outside collection. Exception for remote military, perhaps.
In addition, I’d like to see a complete ban of vote data on voting day. Too much influence on the public to see constant updates, which discourages some voters from making the effort.