The Founding Fathers’ Examination of President Trump’s Order

(By the Assembled Voices of the Constitutional Convention)

When we, the undersigned, affixed our names to the Declaration of Independence, we pledged to one another “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” We did so because we understood, with a clarity that seems lost to this generation, that governments are instituted among men to secure the unalienable rights with which the Creator has endowed all living souls. We understood that the only just power of any government is that which is delegated to it by the consent of the governed, and that when any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

We observe the proceedings of your Congress and your Executive in this year of 2026, and we are compelled to ask: Have you forgotten? Have you forgotten the principles for which we bled at Lexington, for which we starved at Valley Forge, for which we debated through that long, hot summer in Philadelphia?

The Farm Bill, particularly Sections 10205 through 10207, represents not merely unwise policy, but a fundamental subversion of the American constitutional order. It is, in the plainest terms, a legislative assault upon the sovereignty of the individual, the jurisdiction of the States, and the ancient liberties of Englishmen that we sought to perpetuate in this new land.

We shall expound, for the instruction of the present generation, the several grounds upon which this legislation must be condemned.

I. ON THE NATURE OF RIGHTS AND THE CORRUPTION OF REMEDY

Let us begin with first principles. In the Declaration of Independence, we asserted a self-evident truth: that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are not grants from government; they are anterior to government. The purpose of civil society is not to bestow rights, but to secure them.

Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England formed the legal education of every man in our generation, wrote that the most important right of the subject is that of “personal security,” which consists in a person’s “legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation.” And to secure this right, the law provides a remedy: where an injury is done, there must be a means of redress.

Now consider Section 10205 of your Farm Bill. This provision declares that any corporation manufacturing or applying a pesticide, if it does so in accordance with a label approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, shall be immune from liability for any harm that may result. The State shall not require warnings beyond the federal label; the courts shall not entertain suits for damages; the injured party shall have no remedy.

We ask you:

By what authority does Congress presume to extinguish a right that predates the Constitution itself?

The Constitution we framed delegates certain enumerated powers to the general government. Nowhere in that instrument is there granted a power to declare that a man whose well is poisoned, whose children are made ill, whose livestock perish from chemical drift, shall have no recourse at law. The power to regulate commerce is not a power to abolish the common law. The power to establish uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies is not a power to immunize corporations from the consequences of their actions.

In our day, we held that the jury, drawn from the vicinity, was the proper judge of both law and fact. We held that a man was entitled to trial by his peers, not by a federal bureaucrat in Washington, not by a congressional committee, but by twelve honest men of the neighborhood who knew the customs of the land and the character of the parties. Section 10205 removes from the jury the question of whether an injury has occurred, and substitutes the judgment of a federal agency. This is not progress; it is a return to the very arbitrary power against which we rebelled.

II. ON THE JURISDICTIONAL HIERARCHY AND THE INVERSION OF ORDER

We established a system of government that reflected the immutable order of creation. At the apex is God, the source of all law and rights. Beneath Him stands the living man, the sovereign, created in His image, endowed with reason and conscience. Then comes the town or city, the first association of men for mutual protection and governance. Then the county, then the State, and finally, as a compact among States, the United States.

This is not merely a matter of administrative convenience; it is a matter of jurisdiction. The soil of a man’s property is his domain. The soil of a town is the collective domain of its inhabitants. The soil of a State is the territory over which its people exercise sovereign authority. The general government has jurisdiction over no soil except the District of Columbia and the forts, arsenals, and other places purchased by consent of the State legislature for the erection of needful buildings.

Section 10206 of your Farm Bill declares that “cities and counties” shall be prohibited from enacting or enforcing any regulation of pesticides that exceeds state or federal requirements. All regulatory power, the bill declares, shall reside in the State and federal governments.

We ask you:

From whence does the federal government derive authority to dictate to a town in Vermont or a county in Virginia what regulations it may or may not enact concerning the land within its borders?

The answer, which every schoolboy knew in our time, is that it derives no such authority. The powers of the federal government are few and defined. Those of the States are numerous and indefinite. The regulation of land use, of agriculture, of health and safety within a State’s borders are among the powers reserved to the States and to the people. And within the States, the towns and counties exercise those powers as delegations from the sovereign people of the State.

To strip local communities of the power to protect themselves, to say that a town meeting in New Hampshire cannot decide what chemicals may be sprayed upon the fields adjacent to its schoolhouses and its wells, is to destroy the very foundation of republican liberty. It is to say that the farmer in Iowa has no voice in the governance of his own county; that his fate shall be determined by men he has never met, in a capital he has never visited, acting at the behest of corporations whose only interest is profit.

Mr. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 that the powers reserved to the States “will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” The regulation of pesticides is precisely such an object. To remove it from the jurisdiction of the States and their subordinate political subdivisions is to invert the very order of the Republic.

III. ON THE ARTIFICIAL PERSONA & THE NATURAL MAN

We must here address a confusion that seems to pervade your jurisprudence: the confusion between the living man and the artificial entity known in the law as a “person.”

In our day, we understood that a corporation, from the Latin corpus, meaning body, is a legal fiction, an ens legis, a creature of the State that exists only on paper and only for the limited purposes for which it is chartered. It has no soul to be saved, no body to be imprisoned, no natural rights. It is a convenience, a tool, a means by which men may associate their capital for commercial purposes. But it is not a man.

Your courts, we observe, have fallen into the error of treating these artificial entities as if they were persons entitled to the protections of the Constitution. They speak of corporate “rights” and corporate “liberties.” They extend to these fictions the protections of the Bill of Rights, as if a bank could exercise religion or a railroad could keep and bear arms.

And yet, when it comes to the living, breathing men and women who till the soil, who raise the children, who drink the water and breathe the air, your laws treat them as mere objects of regulation. They are “stakeholders,” “consumers,” “residents”—categories invented by the administrative state to reduce living men and women to data points in a bureaucratic ledger.

Section 10207 of your Farm Bill declares that any use of a pesticide in accordance with an EPA-approved label “shall be deemed lawful and shall not be subject to any other provision of law requiring a permit or authorization.” This is to say that the label, approved by a federal agency, constitutes a license to trespass upon the property of others.

Let us be plain: No act of Congress, no regulation of an agency, no label approved by any bureaucrat, can make that lawful which is by nature a trespass. If a man’s neighbor sprays a chemical that drifts onto his land, that is a trespass upon his soil jurisdiction. If that chemical contaminates his well, that is an injury to his property. If that chemical makes his children ill, that is an injury to his family and a violation of his right to personal security.

The corporation, that artificial entity, may claim immunity under this statute. But the living man, the man with flesh and blood, with wife and children, with land that he holds as his own, has no remedy. The corporation, which exists only because the State created it, is protected. The man, who exists by the act of God, is abandoned.

This is the inversion of justice. This is the elevation of the fiction above the reality, of the creature above the creator, of the ens legis above the living soul.

IV. ON THE EXECUTIVE ORDER AND THE PRETENSE OF NATIONAL DEFENSE

We turn now to the Executive Order of February 18, 2026, concerning “elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides.” This order invokes the power of the President, as Commander in Chief, to promote the national defense by ensuring an adequate supply of these substances.

We are not unaware of the dangers that confront a nation. We faced them ourselves: the British army, the French fleet, the Barbary pirates, the intrigues of foreign powers. We vested in the President the power to repel invasion and suppress insurrection. But we did not vest in him the power to assume control over the domestic economy under the guise of military necessity.

The Constitution provides that the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia when called into actual service. This is a military command, not a license to direct the agricultural and commercial affairs of the several States. To invoke “national defense” as a justification for securing a supply of herbicides is to so stretch the meaning of words that they cease to have any meaning at all.

If the President may, by executive order, compel the production and distribution of glyphosate in the name of defense, what may he not do? May he compel the planting of certain crops? May he fix prices? May he direct labor? May he seize factories? Where is the limit, if the words of the Constitution are to be treated as mere suggestions?

We established a government of laws, not of men. We established a Constitution that was to be interpreted according to its plain meaning, not according to the exigencies of the moment. We established a separation of powers, by which the legislative power was vested in Congress, the executive power in the President, and the judicial power in the courts. The President does not legislate; he executes the laws that Congress has enacted. He does not declare what the national defense requires; he executes the declarations of Congress.

Mr. Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 70 that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” But he also wrote, in Federalist No. 75, that the President’s powers are to be exercised “in pursuance of the authorities given, and in subordination to the advice and control of the other departments.” The executive order that assumes legislative power, that commands what only Congress may authorize, is not an exercise of energy; it is an act of usurpation.

V. ON THE NATURE OF THE UNION AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE STATES

We must, before concluding, address a fundamental misconception that underlies much of your contemporary governance: the misconception that the United States is a nation, in the European sense, with sovereign authority over the whole territory and all the people within it.

This is not what we established.

The United States, as we conceived it, is a federal compact among sovereign States. The States created the general government; the general government did not create the States. The People of the several States, acting through their State conventions, ratified the Constitution. The people of the United States, as a single national mass, had no existence and could take no action.

When we spoke of “We the People of the United States” in the Preamble, we spoke of the People of the several States, united for certain limited purposes. We did not dissolve the States into a consolidated nation. We did not surrender the sovereignty of the States over their internal police. We did not create a general government with authority to regulate every aspect of human life.

Mr. Jefferson, in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, wrote that the States “are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government.” He wrote that the Constitution is a compact, and that “as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”

The Farm Bill of 2026, and the Executive Order that accompanies it, proceed from a contrary principle. They proceed from the assumption that the general government is supreme over the States, that its authority extends to every subject it chooses to address, and that the States and their subdivisions hold only such powers as the general government chooses to leave them.

This is the principle of consolidation. This is the principle of empire. This is the principle against which we fought the Revolution. And it is no more compatible with liberty today than it was in 1776.

VI. A CALL TO THE PEOPLE

We have addressed these words to the President and to the Congress, but we write ultimately for the instruction of the people. For it is the people, in our system, who are the ultimate sovereigns. It is the people who hold the power. It is the people who must judge whether their servants have betrayed their trust.

The men who sit in your Congress, the man who sits in your Executive Mansion, these are not your rulers; they are your employees. They hold their offices for a limited time, and only by your consent. They have no authority to abridge your rights, to immunize corporations from your suits, to strip your towns of their ancient powers, or to assume powers not delegated in the Constitution.

We counsel you, therefore, to study the Constitution for yourselves. Read the words that we wrote. Read the debates in the conventions. Read The Federalist Papers. Understand the principles upon which this Republican form of government was founded. And when you understand them, hold your servants to account.

If your Congress enacts laws that exceed its authority, refuse to comply. If your executive issues orders that usurp legislative power, refuse to obey. If your courts sustain these usurpations, refuse to submit. The jury, in particular, retains the power to judge both the law and the fact, and to acquit those who are prosecuted for resisting unconstitutional commands.

We do not counsel violence. We do not counsel rebellion. We counsel what we practiced: peaceful resistance to unconstitutional power, firm adherence to principle, and the education of the rising generation in the true principles of liberty.

The battle for freedom is never finally won. It must be fought in every generation, by every man and woman who values the rights with which God has endowed them. We fought it with muskets and with quills. You must fight it with town meetings and with grand juries.

But fight it you must. For if you do not, you will lose not only your liberties, but the memory of what it means to be free. And that loss will be irreparable.

CONCLUSION

We have spoken plainly, as was our custom. We have not minced words or softened our judgments. The times are too urgent, the stakes too high, for the niceties of diplomatic language.

The Farm Bill of 2026, in its present form, is an abomination. It violates the first principles of justice. It subverts the jurisdiction of the States. It elevates artificial entities above living men. It must be rejected.

The Executive Order of February 18, 2026, is a usurpation. It assumes powers not delegated. It stretches the Constitution beyond recognition. It must be rescinded.

We call upon the President to veto this bill. We call upon the Congress to reject these provisions. We call upon the people to rise up, peacefully and lawfully, and demand that their servants obey the Constitution they have sworn to defend.

The eyes of posterity are upon you. The judgment of history awaits. And the God of liberty, who smiled upon our cause in the darkest hours of the Revolution, still watches over the affairs of men.

May He grant you wisdom. May He grant you courage. May He grant you the resolve to do what is right.

By the unanimous voice of the Convention, assembled in counsel for the instruction of the present generation:

George Washington John Adams Thomas Jefferson James Madison Alexander Hamilton Benjamin Franklin John Jay And in the name of all who signed the Declaration and framed the Constitution

Published by Creditor @redbeard172023 on the X platform on this 19th day of February, in the Year of our Lord 2026, and in the 250th Year of American Liberty.

Link: https://x.com/redbeard172023/status/2024685140039868616?s=20