GOVERNMENTS WORK FOR THE PEOPLE.

Virginia senator and failed vice-presidential hopeful Tim Kaine got himself nominated for the Golden Moutza award for sort of suggesting it's the other way around.

Kaine, a self-professed Catholic who supports abortion, shocked Americans a few days ago when he declared it “extremely troubling” to say rights come from God rather than the government.

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, they come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine said Sept. 3 during a Senate hearing. “So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”

It’s extremely troubling to me that a Malaka can be a Senator. You fool Kaine. Ever hear of the Democrat from Virginia Thomas Jefferson? He wrote the Declaration of Independence explicitly stating that our rights come from God.

My Chicago Boyz colleague Mike calls out "The Malignant Idiocy of Tim Kaine."  The idiocy is even deeper, as the senator elaborated on his Iranian remark this way.  "It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator."  Put another way, the mullahs base their rule on a corollary to the Divine Right of Kings.  "The 'endowed by their Creator' passage vesting rights in individuals is a rebuttal to the divine right of kings: it was not the Hand of God that made the Stuart Tudor Hanover Battenberg Windsor family Defenders of the Faith, Emperors of India, and sovereigns over British North America."  Writing to a slightly different situation, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed explains that passage in the Declaration thus:  "There may be hierarchical roles for various reasons, but the people occupying those roles are just people. They have the same human flaws as everybody else. And the power they’re granted is both a grant—that is, removable—and for a limited purpose. It is not license. Nobody is entitled to abuse anyone else, and nobody deserves abuse."

Put simply, the senator got it wrong.  Iran's theocrats, in their role as Defenders of Their Faith, claim that license to rule over Iranians, whether of the approved Shia faith, or of the unfavored everybody else, as Ordained by Allah the Most Powerful.  But removable and limited powers don't go down well with Democrats.

The senator's statement is not well posed.

Rights inhere in the individuals. There's a sacred and a secular basis for that claim.

Individuals establish governments to secure those rights. The senator would prefer to put the government first.

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) September 5, 2025

It's not as simple as some people would like it.  The possibility of Permanent Government by Wise Experts has a long pedigree.

Dress it up with Erudite-Speak and rationalize it as the Postmodern Will to Power, and off you go!  "Of course, today’s 'critical theorists' often sound just as unnatural to ordinary people, perhaps because the ability to write in such an obscure way, comprehensible only to initiates, demonstrates membership in a perspicacious elite."

That idea appears deep into Mr Morson's essay as "There is nothing surprising about high-minded support of totalitarianism. On the contrary, it is idealists who are most likely to shut out counterevidence."  And yes, that sure sounds like Bolshevik or Maoist vanguardism or the Weather Underground or their nonbinary fans of the intifada.  But that's also the Jacobin tradition in France, before Marx, and it might be an element of the American Revolution.  Harvard historian Jill Lepore's These Truths suggests it's implicit in "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal."  Rights inhere in individuals by virtue of their existence.  Is that because they are so endowed by God, in which case "high-minded support" of Clerical Authority follows relatively easily.  Or is that a truth arrived at by reason and introspection, in which case "high minded support" of Philosopher Kings might follow.

Senator Kaine has reservations about Clerical Authority.  Philosopher Kings, not so much.  But he might be caught in a conundrum that goes back to the Founding.  Mike explains.

During the debate in 1787-1788 over the ratification of the Constitution, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists argued over the wisdom of including a Bill of Rights. The Federalists were dead set against it, understanding that the Bill of Rights would find its main effect in teaching, but they were convinced that it would teach the wrong lessons.

As Hadley Arkes argues, the Bill of Rights has two flaws in this respect.

First, it imparts the idea or logic of a contract, which implies two equal bodies, between people and the government as opposed to powers of the people secured and executed by their representatives. The social contract lies not between the people and government, but rather among the people alone to create a government to secure those rights.

Second, it would narrow our understanding of the rights that government was meant to protect, and it would mislead the American people about the foundation of their rights. If the Bill of Rights represented a certain reservation of natural rights to the people, the inference would quickly arise that the government may exercise all of those powers which had not been explicitly withheld (the Ninth Amendment notwithstanding).

That is, our understanding of our natural rights would degrade to a positivist interpretation, one based solely on the wording of amendment and law. This was antithetical to both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists as such positivist language is susceptible to “hacking” by the wily deeds of lawyers and politicians.

Or, the more subtle hacking of the Philosopher Kings under the rubric of the Administrative State, which is sort of how things have come to pass, with usurpations of local and state governments by the national, never mind what the Ninth and Tenth Amendments might say, often by bundling federal money with compliance with a federal mandate, such as the 55 mph speed limit or the corona shots.  That way lies trouble, as Rich Lowry reminds us.

[I]n a conflict between our rights and laws impinging on them, the laws must give way.

Kaine’s view that rights come from the government implies that the state gets to decide whether or not and to what extent we have rights.

The American project, though, is based on the belief that it is duty of government to respect pre-existing rights, and if a government tramples on them, it has failed and is illegitimate.

The abolitionists used this view to great effect in the 19th century. Even though the government had decided that it was permissible for one class of people to enslave another, the abolitionists believed that this was an offense against God.

Enslaved people had a natural right to liberty that couldn’t be erased.

Whether that right is understood by faith or by reason or introspection might not have mattered in the arguments and battles leading to Abolition.  The people held in bondage had not consented to being held, and thus that was not a just power of government.

Yes, Minnesota bishop Robert Barron made a strong case in support of "created equal."

I’d like to respond to a disturbing contention from Senator Tim Kaine, during a recent confirmation hearing. pic.twitter.com/hvaYlQQybi

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) September 4, 2025

His point that objective rights come from outside of government, "If the government creates our rights, it can take them away. If the government is responsible for our rights, well, then it can change them," though, is equally valid whether those rights are endowed by a Creator or arrived at by introspection: nobody deserves abuse, and the power Senator Kaine or any other public official enjoys is a removable grant of power for a limited purpose.

Governments work for the people.