Reichley Column: Jefferson's Declaration, protest of Va.

As we celebrate the 234th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from Great Briton, we are once again focused on the document justifying the act of rebellion, written by the famous Virginian Thomas Jefferson as part of the independence committee which included Ben Franklin and John Adams.

This year we learned that in a draft of the Declaration, Jefferson describe the colonists using the word "subjects," only to replace it with the word "citizens." A seemingly small change in a sentence later removed altogether, it reminds us we do not exist to serve government, but government exists as a tool to secure our liberties and freedoms.

Surely, we as individuals are called to serve one another. But Jefferson knew the new government was not, and would certainly fail as, the instrument of that calling. The power of the United States was strictly limited lest it overwhelm those whom it was designed to serve, making them instead subjects, forced against their will to perform whatever tasks government willed. As Virginia pursues a lawsuit to defend our freedom against overreaching government intrusion, it is good to consider the writings of Thomas Jefferson.

Virginians Jefferson, George Wythe, brothers Richard and Lightfoot Lee, Thomas Nelson and Carter Braxton signed that document which declared clearly the harms a distant tyrannical government could inflict on free people. We all know the line about our right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but most of the Declaration is a list of grievances against the king, for actions supposedly taken for the communal well-being, acts against his subjects because he knew better than they did how they should live.

Our founders won the war, and wrote our Constitution, spelling out limits for our new union which left most government power with the people to exercise within their own states as they saw fit. But it took little time for the new government to grow a lust for power beyond what it was granted.

Virginians like Jefferson stood against this tide. One of his last writings concerned a federal law claiming the right to build roads and canals within the states. Most of us would accept this without question. Jefferson's opposition shows how far we have fallen from the vision of the founders.

In his 1825 Draft Declaration and Protest of Virginia, Jefferson, writing for Virginia's legislature, rejects the argument that the "general well-being" clause of the constitution "has given them thereby a power to do whatever they may think, or pretend, would promote the general welfare." He explains that the states were intended to play a primary role through which the people pursued "the full improvement of their condition, and reserved to themselves all the faculties of multiplying their own blessings."

Virginia accepted the idea of federal roads, but urged a constitutional amendment to grant that right. They also provided state authorization to "those acts of the federal branch of our government which we have declared to be usurpations, and against which, in point of right, we do protest as null and void, and never to be quoted as precedents of right."

Today some object to our state reserving for its citizens the right to choose their own medical care, against a federal mandate to purchase government-dictated insurance. But our founding legislators considered it a duty to oppose the unconstitutional overreach of the feds, even when they agreed with the underlying actions.

On this anniversary of our independence, the limited government envisioned by our ancestors has become like a vine entangling our liberties, choking our freedom, and seeking to rule us as subjects, for "our own good." Our government dictates what cars we can own, what light bulbs we can use, what insurance we have to buy. Our latest Supreme Court nominee believes government has the right to tell us what food to eat. We have elected leaders who "protect us" from ourselves, by running our lives for us. King George did little worse.

Joe Biden explained his concept of the collective will of government in his Iraq Fourth of July speech, saying our independence was about "the willingness to subordinate your individual interest to the communal good." But Virginia's founders rejected the notion of sacrificing liberty for security. Indeed, it is our individual liberty, protected by a limited government, which ensures the communal good. Even if government was capable of making things "good," which the past three years have certainly proven false, the price of subjection to such an abuse of authority is too high.

Charles Reichley has been a Prince William County resident since 1981. He can be reached at criticallythinking@msn.com.