Happy No Kings Day!

Today is July 4th, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I had Notebook LM create a podcast discussion of the Declaration. Pretty fun. You can listen to it here.

I had hoped to have a quick writing project done by today, but alas. It is a carefully presented comparison of the history of the United States with this moment. Having missed the deadline, my goal now is the week after next.

But here are excerpts from chapter 19: "No More Kings." The book is 20 chapters and proceeds backward from the present day to America's founding. So this is one of the last chapters. It also has as an appendix the fully compiled sweep of US history that I did on this blog last week.

Here then in celebration of Independence Day are these excerpts from chapter 19.

No More Kings
The Founders didn’t dump tea in a harbor to trade one king for another.

1. When the Founders put ink to parchment in 1776, their clearest grievance was this: too much power in one person’s hands is dangerous. The Declaration of Independence isn’t just a poetic breakup letter to King George III. It’s a catalog of abuses by a monarch who saw no limits on his authority. He made decisions without consent. He dissolved legislative bodies when they disagreed. He stalled laws, delayed justice, and treated opposition as treason.

The American colonists didn’t start out demanding independence. They began by asking for respect. They wanted representation, fairness, and a say in how they were governed. But King George wouldn’t hear it. He ignored petitions, punished dissent, and doubled down with force. In the words of the Declaration, “He has refused his Assent to Laws... He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly..."

It was a pattern: power concentrated, voices silenced, systems sidelined. That’s what “tyranny” looks like. It often expresses itself in cruelty. But it is enabled by the absence of limits... The Founders insisted that power be shared between the President, Congress, and the courts... 

The Founders weren’t perfect. Many of them were deeply flawed. But they understood one thing with clarity: Power must be checked, or it will check us...

2. In the Declaration of Independence, the colonists listed King George III’s obstruction of justice among their most damning accusations. He had, they wrote, “obstructed the Administration of Justice,” and “made Judges dependent on his Will alone.” These were not technicalities. They were seen as fatal to any free society.

The Founders understood: If you cannot count on impartial justice, you are not free. If legal outcomes are determined by political allegiance rather than law, then you are not a citizen. You are a subject...

A government of laws, not of men, requires more than slogans. It requires limits. It requires courts that can operate without fear. It requires leaders who serve the law, not the other way around.

The colonists knew what it meant to live under a king who saw courts as tools. That’s why they rebelled. That’s why they listed judicial interference right alongside taxation without representation. Because they understood that once the legal system serves only one man, the republic is already gone. Justice must be impartial. It must be independent. It must have the power to say no – even to the president. In fact, especially to the president...

3. One of the most striking grievances in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III punished those who challenged his authority. He dissolved local legislatures. He revoked colonial charters. He quartered troops among civilians not as a defense strategy, but as a warning. Rule wasn’t based on consent. It was enforced through fear. Obedience was demanded. Dissent was punished...

One of the clearest complaints in the Declaration of Independence was the colonists’ outrage over being governed without their consent. They were taxed without representation, subjected to laws they had no voice in shaping, and forced to live under decrees imposed from afar. For them, legitimate government was not about power. It was about permission. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed”...

The Declaration of Independence was not just a break from Britain. It was a break from monarchy. It was a break from the idea that one man should have unchecked power over millions. The Founders weren’t perfect, but they understood one crucial truth: freedom demands limits on power. That’s why they created a government of checks and balances, with coequal branches designed to restrain tyranny in all its forms.

That’s why we don’t have a king.