The Restoration Papers

The founders warned that the spirit of party would set citizens against one another and hand power to whoever promised safety from the other side. The numbers say the warning has come due. Here is where the friction lives, and how to relieve it.

Every generation of founders argued about public debt, and every side of that argument agreed on one thing: a debt must have a purpose and a plan to pay it. Twenty years of borrowing under both parties has dropped the plan. Here is where the friction lives, and how to relieve it.

The Constitution put the decision to go to war in the hands of the people's representatives, and kept for the President the power to repel an attack. Twenty years of strikes, campaigns and stretched authorizations, under Presidents of both parties, have turned that design upside down. Here is where the friction lives, and how to relieve it.

The founders gave the President energy and gave Congress the law, and they wrote no general emergency power into the Constitution at all. Fifty years of standby statutes, and twenty years of Presidents of both parties governing by declaration and order, have made the emergency an ordinary tool of government. Here is where the friction lives, and how to relieve it.

Money and influence in American elections

Surveillance and the people's privacy

The power of the purse and impoundment

The framers gave the House a power to remove a President and the Senate the duty to judge him, and they warned that party would try to turn the remedy into a weapon. Across two eras and both parties, it has. Here is how the remedy jammed, and how to free it.

The First Amendment forbids Congress to abridge speech by law. It says nothing about a phone call, a meeting or a hint from a regulator. Officials of both parties have learned to work in that silence. Here is what the founders feared, how it came back, and how to close the gap without silencing anyone.

An election ends twice: once when the votes are counted, and again when the losers accept the count. The second ending is failing. Both parties have contested certified results, and both have bent the record to fit a story. Here is what the founders built to settle elections, why it is jamming, and how to put the record back in charge.

The founders built Congress to be the strongest branch and feared it would grab too much. They never imagined it would give its power away. Over a century it has, to agencies, to Presidents and to courts, under both parties. Here is how the surrender works, and how to reverse it.

Eleven papers traced the failures of officials. Every one of them ends at the same desk: the citizen's. The founders said plainly that no design survives a people who will not govern themselves. This closing paper is about that office, and about the two oldest tools for holding it: gathering, and writing back.