Consequential Actions Podcast

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9i

A Justice Wrote a Warning Into His Own Ruling. Alabama Ignored It.

In October of 2023, in a small town on the Alabama–Florida line, a newspaper publisher and one of her reporters were arrested and charged with felonies over a story about how federal COVID relief money had been spent at the local school system. Four centuries after the fight this week is about, the limit is written down. The arrest happened anyway.

Brendan Kirby is an investigative reporter with FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama. He has covered courts and government for three decades, including fifteen years at the Mobile Press-Register and AL.com, and is the author of Wicked Mobile, a history of the rogues and scoundrels of the Port City’s three hundred years. His beat straddles two states with nearly identical open records statutes and completely different habits about obeying them.

We talk about what it actually costs to put something on the record, and the objection the Levellers’ opponents never answered: once you write the limit down, somebody has to say what the words mean. Along the way: why criminal defendants almost never testify, why he believes juries get it right more often than the public assumes, what was lost when the economics of local reporting collapsed, the Atmore case in federal court, and Justice Scalia’s 2011 argument that the Soviet Union’s bill of rights read better than ours on paper. Brendan does not endorse candidates or advocate policy; what is under examination is a mechanism, not a team.

Recorded 08/02/2026. The federal litigation discussed is active and may have moved since.

The question we put to everything we examine: did this leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 — Introduction: Arrested for Publishing a Story

0:00:27 — Episode Overview: Interview with Brendan Kirby

0:03:55 — Interview Begins: Thirty Years of Investigative Journalism

0:06:56 — The Courtroom Experience and the Value of Juries

0:11:37 — Cameras in the Courtroom: Florida vs. Alabama

0:14:29 — John Lilburne and the Right Against Self-Incrimination

0:16:13 — Public Perception of the Fifth Amendment and Testifying

0:22:11 — The Permanent Record and the Cost of Journalism

0:25:50 — The Broken Economic Model of the Press

0:31:25 — The Atmore Arrests: Press Freedom vs. Grand Jury Secrecy

0:39:28 — Interpreting Written Laws and Open Records

0:44:00 — The Alabama Supreme Court on Police Body Camera Footage

0:48:47 — The Overreach of Grand Jury Secrecy

0:51:16 — Antonin Scalia on the Structure of a Free Government

0:55:35 — Advice for Citizens: How to Stay Informed Locally

1:01:14 — Post-Interview Reflection: The Mechanism of Transparency

1:02:46 — The Liberty Test: When the Law Works Against Openness

1:05:15 — Conclusion and Preview of Next Week

📚 Companion article: “The Levellers — The Lost Constitution,” Article 9 of Self-Evident. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution

🔗 Brendan’s reporting: fox10tv.com. His book, Wicked Mobile, is available from The History Press and wherever books are sold.

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9B

The Pardon Meant to Shield Fauci Is Why He Faces Contempt

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. On August 6, the committee voted 8 to 5 along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress, and Chairman Rand Paul sent the referral to the Justice Department. This episode is not an argument about whether Anthony Fauci deserves any of that. I have been one of his harshest critics for years. It is an argument about the machinery — where the right to remain silent came from, who it was actually built to protect, and what happens when the same body asks the questions, rules on the objection to its own questions, and then votes to set the criminal process in motion against a witness for disagreeing.

The trail runs back to 1637 and John Lilburne, who was handed the ex officio oath and given three doors, each with a punishment behind it. He refused, and was whipped two miles through London for the refusal alone. The maxim he stood on — no man is bound to accuse himself — passed through the common law, into colonial charters, and in 1791 into eleven words in the Fifth Amendment. Then the part almost nobody believes until they hear the cases. In Ohio v. Reiner the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that a babysitter forfeited the privilege by claiming she was innocent, and it did so unanimously. The protection was not written for the mob boss. It was written for the honest person standing inside ambiguous circumstances, whose truthful answers become the government’s evidence — a woman charged over what she said about a stock sale that was never charged, a general convicted over an interview about conversations that were never a crime.

This hour defends a man I hold responsible for real harm, it criticizes Senator Rand Paul, who is on most days the best friend the Bill of Rights has in the Senate. That is the point. The test this series always comes back to: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction: George Burdick and the Unwanted Pardon

03:04 Episode Overview: Episode 9, Part B — No Man is Bound to Accuse Himself

03:27 Disclaimers: A Non-Partisan Look at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Fifth Amendment Rights

06:18 John Lilburne, the Star Chamber, and the Ex Officio Oath

08:29 The Evolution of the Fifth Amendment and Miranda Rights

10:46 The Danger of “If You Have Nothing to Hide” (Ohio v. Reiner)

13:38 Case Study 1: Martha Stewart and the False Statements Trap

15:33 Case Study 2: General Michael Flynn and Section 1001

17:40 Case Study 3: Anthony Fauci’s Blanket Invocation of the Fifth

19:01 The “My Cousin Vinny” Example: The Perils of Compelled Testimony

22:12 The Doctrine of Waiver and the 2013 Lois Lerner Precedent

25:06 Senator Rand Paul’s Contempt Resolution vs. Constitutional Protections

27:33 The Pardon Argument: Does Immunity Erase the Right to Silence?

29:25 The Legal Exceptions: Perjury and Cross-Sovereign State Prosecutions

34:30 The History and Controversy of Preemptive Presidential Pardons

39:44 The Conundrum: How Biden’s Pardon Fueled the Contempt Charge

41:28 The July 2026 Senate Hearing and Partisan Contempt Vote

46:50 Modern Echoes of the Star Chamber

49:00 The Reckoning: Personal Bias, Hypocrisy, and the Need for Immunity Grants

54:32 The Skeptic’s Case: Three Objections to Defending Fauci

57:15 Answering the Objections: The Principle Outweighs the Man

01:01:16 The Liberty Test: Can a Committee Rightfully Compel Speech?

01:04:33 Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode with Brendan Kirby

Read the companion article, “The Levellers: The Lost Constitution,” for the full account of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, the Agreement of the People and its clause binding every person alike, the Putney Debates, and Burford:

https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution

The Pardon Meant to Shield Fauci Is Why He Faces Contempt

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times. On August 6, the committee voted 8 to 5 along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress, and Chairman Rand Paul sent the referral to the Justice Department. This episode is not an argument about whether Anthony Fauci deserves any of that. I have been one of his harshest critics for years and I say so in the first five minutes. It is an argument about the machinery — where the right to remain silent came from, who it was actually built to protect, and what happens when the same body asks the questions, rules on the objection to its own questions, and then votes to set the criminal process in motion against a witness for disagreeing.

The trail runs back to 1637 and John Lilburne, who was handed the ex officio oath and given three doors, each with a punishment behind it. He refused, and was whipped two miles through London for the refusal alone. The maxim he stood on — no man is bound to accuse himself — passed through the common law, into colonial charters, and in 1791 into eleven words in the Fifth Amendment. Then the part almost nobody believes until they hear the cases. In Ohio v. Reiner the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that a babysitter forfeited the privilege by claiming she was innocent, and it did so unanimously. The protection was not written for the mob boss. It was written for the honest person standing inside ambiguous circumstances, whose truthful answers become the government’s evidence — a woman charged over what she said about a stock sale that was never charged, a general convicted over an interview about conversations that were never a crime.

The legal machinery is the second half. Waiver, and what actually counts as opening the subject. The Lois Lerner precedent from 2013, where a committee voted that an opening statement forfeited a constitutional privilege — and where a Democratic administration’s own United States Attorney, Ronald Machen, wrote in March 2015 that the theory was wrong as a matter of law and declined to bring it. The same theory is now being run on the same statute by the same party against an official of the other one. Then Brown v. Walker, Murphy v. Waterfront Commission, and the pardon itself, issued in January 2025 and covering conduct from 2014 through January 19, 2025 — a document that removed the federal jeopardy, and in removing it handed the committee its strongest argument for ordering him to answer. The instrument issued to protect him is the reason he is in front of a prosecutor today.

This hour costs something. It defends a man I hold responsible for real harm, it criticizes Senator Rand Paul, who is on most days the best friend the Bill of Rights has in the Senate, and it turns on the movement and on me before it turns anywhere else. That is the point. The test this series always comes back to: did this leave us more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

* 00:00 Introduction: George Burdick and the Unwanted Pardon

* 03:04 Episode Overview: Episode 9, Part B — No Man is Bound to Accuse Himself

* 03:27 Disclaimers: A Non-Partisan Look at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Fifth Amendment Rights

* 06:18 John Lilburne, the Star Chamber, and the Ex Officio Oath

* 08:29 The Evolution of the Fifth Amendment and Miranda Rights

* 10:46 The Danger of “If You Have Nothing to Hide” (Ohio v. Reiner)

* 13:38 Case Study 1: Martha Stewart and the False Statements Trap

* 15:33 Case Study 2: General Michael Flynn and Section 1001

* 17:40 Case Study 3: Anthony Fauci’s Blanket Invocation of the Fifth

* 19:01 The “My Cousin Vinny” Example: The Perils of Compelled Testimony

* 22:12 The Doctrine of Waiver and the 2013 Lois Lerner Precedent

* 25:06 Senator Rand Paul’s Contempt Resolution vs. Constitutional Protections

* 27:33 The Pardon Argument: Does Immunity Erase the Right to Silence?

* 29:25 The Legal Exceptions: Perjury and Cross-Sovereign State Prosecutions

* 34:30 The History and Controversy of Preemptive Presidential Pardons

* 39:44 The Conundrum: How Biden’s Pardon Fueled the Contempt Charge

* 41:28 The July 2026 Senate Hearing and Partisan Contempt Vote

* 46:50 Modern Echoes of the Star Chamber

* 49:00 The Reckoning: Personal Bias, Hypocrisy, and the Need for Immunity Grants

* 54:32 The Skeptic’s Case: Three Objections to Defending Fauci

* 57:15 Answering the Objections: The Principle Outweighs the Man

* 01:01:16 The Liberty Test: Can a Committee Rightfully Compel Speech?

* 01:04:33 Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode with Brendan Kirby

📚 Read the companion article, “The Levellers: The Lost Constitution,” for the full account of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, the Agreement of the People and its clause binding every person alike, the Putney Debates, and Burford:https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9B, “No Man Is Bound to Accuse Himself.” The contemporary application companion to Episode 9. On Thursday, investigative reporter Brendan Kirby of FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama, joins me for the third voice of the week.

#fauci #fifthamendment #randpaul #contemptofcongress #civilliberties #constitution #libertarian #johnlilburne #levellers #selfevident

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Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9

The Constitution England Wrote in 1647 — and Never Adopted

In April of 1638 a twenty-three-year-old named John Lilburne was tied to the back of an ox cart and whipped two miles through London, then locked in a pillory at Westminster. He had been convicted of no crime. His offense was refusing to swear an oath that would have bound him to answer whatever the King’s court chose to ask him, including questions designed to draw a confession out of his own mouth. He told them no man was bound to accuse himself. Nine years later, he and the men around him were arguing that every government in England — court, Parliament, and crown alike — held its authority on nothing more and nothing less than the consent of the people who had to live under it.

The Levellers, London radicals and army agitators, took Sir Edward Coke’s defense of English liberty and moved its foundation out from under it. Coke had argued that English rights were safe because they were ancient. The Levellers argued they were true. Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn set down in the Agreement of the People a government of granted and limited powers with rights reserved above the ordinary legislature, and at Putney Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Ireton argued over whether a man’s voice rested in the man himself or in a permanent fixed stake in the country. The Agreement was not the first written political covenant — Plymouth in 1620 came earlier — but ordinary Englishmen wrote down the form a free constitution would take more than a century before it became familiar.

Their franchise excluded servants, alms-takers, and women, and the Leveller women who carried a petition to the House of Commons were told to go home and mind their housewifery. The movement ended in the churchyard at Burford on the seventeenth of May, 1649, where three New Model Army soldiers were shot against a wall — and on the lead lining of the font inside, where a prisoner named Anthony Sedley scratched his name. It is still there.

The question we put to every episode: did this leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — The Whipping of John Lilburn and the Star Chamber

4:00 — Introduction: Episode 9 — The Levelers

5:11 — The New Model Army and the Collapse of Censorship

8:40 — Who Were the Levelers?

10:14 — John Lilburn: "Freeborn John" and the Right Against Self-Incrimination

13:23 — Richard Overton: Self-Ownership and Natural Rights

17:11 — William Walwyn: Religious Toleration and Equality Before the Law

19:49 — Unionizing an Army: Agitators and the Solemn Engagement

22:42 — An Agreement of the People: Reserving Rights Above the Legislature

28:06 — The Putney Debates: Rainsborough vs. Ireton on Voting Rights

33:51 — The Franchise Gap: Excluded Classes and Leveler Women

40:19 — Three Objections: Defeat, American Influence, and Democracy

47:49 — The Burford Mutiny: The End of the Levelers

50:40 — The Liberty Test: Does a Written Constitution Constrain or Protect?

52:56 — Conclusion: The Shift to Natural Rights

55:45 — Preview of Episode 10: Sidney and Locke

📚 Companion article: “The Levellers — The Lost Constitution,” Article 9 of Self-Evident. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8i

His Opponent Ran Unopposed — So He Needed Double the Signatures

A game warden walks onto a Pennsylvania farm. No warrant, no complaint, no reason given. For nineteen years, Pennsylvania’s own Supreme Court held that the Commonwealth’s constitution permitted exactly that. On July 21, 2026, that court reversed itself, unanimously. Brian Peltier, the Libertarian candidate for Pennsylvania’s 60th House District in Armstrong and Westmoreland counties, spent 24 and a half years in the Navy, worked as a regulatory agent at Naval Reactors, and now raises cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and turkeys outside Leechburg. His campaign motto is Protect the Land.

Brian argues a blockade is an act of war, and follows a closed strait to the price of fertilizer, of hay, and of his neighbors’ groceries. He would push Defend the Guard, which withholds a state’s National Guard from federal overseas deployment absent a congressional declaration, among his first bills in Harrisburg. He wants the July open fields ruling broadened. And he gives the Liberty Test its answer before I can ask: he would rather be free than safe.

A major-party candidate for the Pennsylvania House needs 300 signatures. Minor-party candidates must gather 2 percent of the largest vote cast in the district at the last election, and because the District 60 incumbent ran unopposed in 2024, Brian’s threshold came to roughly 615 — more than double. The rule does not measure support. It compounds incumbency.

This conversation was recorded on July 27, ahead of Pennsylvania’s August 3 filing deadline; Brian filed before that deadline, and certification was not complete at the time of recording.

Every episode of this series asks the same question of every consequential action: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed? This week Pennsylvania produced both answers.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — Introduction: The Game Warden and Warrantless Entry

1:18 — Meet Brian Peltier: Candidate for PA District 60

3:22 — Interview Begins: Brian’s Navy Background and Farm

7:06 — Blockades as Acts of War and Supply Chain Impacts

9:16 — How Global Conflicts Affect Local Farmers and Food Prices

11:51 — The War Powers Act and the 60-Day Clock Loophole

14:43 — Defend the Guard Legislation in Pennsylvania

18:27 — The Open Fields Doctrine and the PA Supreme Court Reversal

21:16 — Flock Cameras, Surveillance, and Privacy Concerns

25:00 — The Unfair Hurdles of Ballot Access for Minor Parties

30:11 — Brian’s Platform: Protecting the Land and Freeing Markets

31:37 — The Apollo Nuclear Waste Issue (Shallow Land Disposal Area)

32:59 — The Excessive Costs of a Part-Time Legislature

34:40 — Property Taxes and Holding Government Projects Accountable

37:05 — Where to Find and Support Brian’s Campaign

38:15 — Post-Interview Reflection: The True Cost of Blockades

40:08 — The Liberty Test: The Game Warden vs. Ballot Access Laws

42:38 — Conclusion and Preview of Next Week: The Levellers

📚 Companion article, “The Common Law Will Control — Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart Struggle”:

https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-common-law-will-control-sir-edward-coke-and-the-stuart-struggle

Brian’s campaign: peltierforpa.com

X: https://x.com/jkellick

78 Days, No Warrant — and Every Bit of It Was Legal

A Pennsylvania game warden named Mark Gritzer walked onto 4,400 acres of posted private ground in Clearfield County — signs at the road, purple paint on the boundary trees, locked gates — and fixed a trail camera to a tree. He had no warrant and no probable cause. Developing probable cause was the point of the camera. It stayed there for 78 days. And every bit of it was authorized, in plain words, by two sections of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code that wrote the signs and the paint and the locks out of the law by name.

Along the way: why Pennsylvania is the state where the lazy version of the counter majoritarian objection collapses, since this court stands for partisan statewide election and faces retention votes. Why the open fields doctrine rests on a misread page of Blackstone — Justice Holmes claimed in 1924 that the distinction was as old as the common law, and the pages he cited concern the elements of burglary. And the symmetry that holds the hour together: Coke’s ancient constitution was bad history that built liberty, and Hester was bad history that dismantled it. Same instrument, opposite directions. Hester in 1924, Oliver in 1984, Russo in 2007 — three courts in a row, over 83 years, siding with the government. Judicial power is not a liberty machine. It is a lever.

Then a correction I owe you in public. Episode 4B closed on the line “No one ever voted for this,” applied to the surveillance apparatus. That line was incomplete. On July 14, the Huntington, West Virginia, city council sat through a meeting that ran more than eight hours, heard more than fifty residents speak almost entirely in opposition, and voted six to four for a citywide Flock contract anyway. On July 28, Harrisonburg, Virginia, voted four to nothing to terminate its own. In Franklin County, Pennsylvania, the cameras are up. They voted. Township supervisors, borough councils, county commissioners — the most reachable government in American life. So the objection was never really that nobody voted for it. The larger and harder thing is that some powers are not the vote’s to give.

This is Episode 8B of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the Tuesday contemporary-application episode of Week 8, following Saturday’s Episode 8, “The Common Law Will Control,” on Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart struggle. Every episode of this series asks the same question of every consequential action: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 The Clearfield County Hunting Club vs. The Game Warden

03:38 Introduction: Episode 8, Part B — The Golden Metwand

05:09 Sir Edward Coke's Claim: The Law Above the King

07:34 The "Unelected Judges" Objection and Pennsylvania's Elected Court

09:25 The Golden Metwand vs. The Crooked Cord of Discretion

10:26 Justice Brobson's Reasoning: "Possessions" and the PA Constitution

13:27 The Flawed Origins of the Open Fields Doctrine

18:50 Contemporary Surveillance: Flock Cameras and Local Town Votes

23:22 The Limits of Majority Rule and Delegated Authority

26:36 The Reckoning: A Partial Victory and the Courts as a Tool

29:23 Objections: Rule by Judges and Public Road Surveillance

31:18 Answering the Skeptic: The Double-Edged Sword of the Judiciary

34:38 The Liberty Test: The Power to Build a Surveillance Dossier

38:56 Preview of Thursday's Interview with Ryan Peltier

40:14 Conclusion and Call to Action

📚 Read the companion article, “The Common Law Will Control — Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart Struggle,”

https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-common-law-will-control-sir-edward-coke-and-the-stuart-struggle

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8B, “The Golden Metwand” | Consequential Actions Podcast | Host: Jeff Kellick

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8

Sir Edward Coke Explained: The Common Law, Bonham’s Case & the Petition of Right | Self-Evident Ep. 8

Sometime around 1608, in a chamber at Whitehall, the King of England lost his temper with a judge. James the First held that his judges were merely his delegates — that he, the sovereign, possessed reason enough to pull any case into his own hands and decide it himself. The Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir Edward Coke, did not deny the king’s intelligence. He denied that natural reason was enough. The law, he said, was an artificial reason, a craft mastered only over long years — and His Majesty was not learned in the laws of England. When James answered that to place the king under the law was treason, Coke reached back four centuries to a maxim of the jurist Bracton: that the king ought to be under no man, but under God and the law.

Coke did more than any single man to forge the idea that the law stands above the crown. The common law was a law its own practitioners claimed no one had made, found rather than commanded, and it rested on the magnificent, and very largely false, myth of the “ancient constitution” that did enormous good anyway. The great cases were each narrow in holding and vast in implication: Prohibitions, Proclamations, Semayne’s Case and the home as a man’s castle, and Bonham’s Case, whose single most disputed sentence four centuries of brilliant readers have been unable to agree on. At the top stands the Petition of Right of 1628, and a seventy-five-year-old man’s fight over a single saving clause that would have undone all of it.

The Honest Reckoning stops the ascent cold. The history Coke championed was false, and before he was the great defender of English liberty, he was one of the most ferocious prosecutors the crown ever employed — the man who abused Walter Raleigh at trial. The principle still crossed the ocean: a young Thomas Jefferson cursing “old Coke” by candlelight, and John Adams turning Coke’s own weapons against a Parliament.

This week’s standing question runs underneath all of it: when we place a right beyond the reach of present power, does that leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — Introduction: King James I vs. Sir Edward Coke

3:54 — Episode Overview: The Common Law Will Control

6:54 — Understanding the English Common Law

10:35 — The Concept of "Artificial Reason"

12:47 — The Myth of the Ancient Constitution

15:58 — James I and the Divine Right of Kings

19:20 — Landmark Cases: Prohibitions and Proclamations

23:13 — Semayne's Case: A Man's Home is His Castle

26:57 — Dr. Bonham's Case: Can Common Law Control Parliament?

31:14 — Charles I, Habeas Corpus, and the Petition of Right

36:24 — The Reckoning: False History and a Prosecutor's Past

40:40 — Addressing Objections to Coke's Legacy

47:09 — The Liberty Test: Fundamental Law vs. Democratic Majorities

50:02 — Coke's Transmission to the American Colonies

56:53 — Conclusion and Preview: The Levellers

📚 Companion article — Article 8, “The Common Law Will Control”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-common-law-will-control-sir-edward-coke-and-the-stuart-struggle

🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 8 | Consequential Actions

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Companion Episode

How a Crown That Could Not Tax Became a Parliament That Could Tax Without Limit

A teaching companion, whiteboard and all. Articles 8 through 15 each follow a mind: a lawyer insisting the common law bounds the king, a regiment debating the vote in a church at Putney, a philosopher justifying revolution, a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires. None of those hours stops to keep account of who held the throne while that mind was at work. When Sir Edward Coke told his king that the common law would control the acts of the crown, who was that king, what had he claimed, and what had he done?

The account runs from the accession of Henry VIII in 1509 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, with a short coda to the Treaty of Paris in 1783 — thirteen reigns and one stretch with no monarch at all. Three threads run through it: which monarch sits behind which article, from James I and Charles I behind Coke to the Hanoverians behind the Scots and Continentals; how the powers of the crown were assembled and then taken apart, one statute and one reported case at a time; and, most consequential, why a Parliament that had spent a century binding its kings then claimed a power over the colonies that no king had ever held — the authority, in the words of the Declaratory Act of 1766, to bind them “in all cases whatsoever.” That claim is where the American argument begins. Four points where the historians genuinely disagree come last, laid out as disputes rather than settled facts.

The thirteen reigns carry no argument of their own — they are the ground the rest of the series stands on. The standing question, did this leave people more free or more governed, is the one the next eight weeks will ask.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — Introduction: A Teaching Companion Episode

2:27 — The Four Main Topics of this Episode

3:42 — Overview of the Thirteen Reigns

5:17 — Henry VIII (1509–1547): The English Reformation

8:55 — Edward VI (1547–1553): Councils and the King's Minority

10:04 — Mary I (1553–1558): Persecution and Early Resistance Theory

11:58 — Elizabeth I (1558–1603): The Supreme Governor

16:15 — James I (1603–1625): Divine Right vs. Prerogative Revenue

18:18 — Charles I (1625–1649): Personal Rule to the Civil War

23:21 — The Kingless Years (1649–1660): The Commonwealth and Cromwell

26:35 — Charles II (1660–1685): The Restoration

31:21 — James II (1685–1688): The Dispensing Power and a Quick End

33:56 — William III and Mary II (1689–1702): The Glorious Revolution

36:30 — Anne (1702–1714): Acts of Union and the Last Royal Veto

37:57 — The Hanoverian Regime: George I, George II, and Ministerial Government

42:03 — Court vs. Country: The Transmission of the Constitutional Argument

46:49 — George III (1760–1783): The King in Parliament and the Declaration

51:27 — Four Disputes Among Historians

54:54 — Conclusion and Outro

📚 Companion to Articles 8–15, “The Crown and the Kingdom”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-crown-and-the-kingdom-a-series-companion-to-self-evident-articles-8-15

🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Companion Episode: The Crown in the Kingdom | Consequential Actions

𝕏: https://x.com/jkellick

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7i

A Mile of Signatures by Hand — Just to Get on the Ballot

This is the Thursday interview closing Week 7 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the week we traced the Dutch Republic, the first modern commercial republic, which grew prosperous not by concentrating power but by refusing to. All week the argument was that liberty and prosperity travel together, and that power held far from the people tends to be power misused. This conversation puts a living face on it: a candidate standing in the middle of the machinery, who can tell you what it actually costs to try to build a piece of that refusal today.

Jamie Frost Remmey is the Libertarian nominee for the United States House in Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District, in Bucks and Montgomery counties, challenging five-term incumbent Republican Brian Fitzpatrick and Democrat Bob Harvie. She is not a career politician and does not pretend to be one — she is funding the race out of her own pocket and those of friends and family, working two jobs while she does it, and gathering by hand the more than 5,000 valid signatures Pennsylvania demands before it will print a third-party name on the ballot at all.

Two threads run through the conversation, and they are the same thread seen from two distances. The first is close to home: what it takes for a third-party candidate to reach a Pennsylvania ballot, and what that machinery reveals about who the system is built to serve. The second reaches back to the week’s history — the Dutch insight that decentralized power keeps people free — and forward to the war power: to Grotius and the free sea, to who may send Americans into combat, and to Defend the Guard, the state-level reform that would bar a governor from releasing his state’s National Guard into overseas combat unless Congress has done its one constitutional job and voted to declare war. The last time Congress did that was 1941.

This week’s standing question runs through all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — Introduction: The Dutch Act of Abjuration

0:37 — Episode Overview: Interview with Jamie Frost Remmey

3:32 — Interview Begins: Challenging the Duopoly

5:44 — The Influence of Dark Money in Politics

8:43 — Building Support for Third Parties

13:18 — The Unfair Hurdles of Ballot Access in PA

18:02 — Decentralization and Reclaiming Congressional Power

21:20 — The Defend the Guard Movement

26:49 — Executive Overreach and the War Powers Act

28:16 — Policy Differences with the Incumbent

29:34 — Where to Find and Support the Campaign

30:51 — Post-Interview Reflection: The Cost of Liberty

31:48 — Defend the Guard as the Dutch Design Rediscovered

34:03 — Conclusion and Preview of Next Week

📚 Companion article — Article 7, “The Dutch Experiment,” on the improvised republic and the free-sea principle behind this week: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-dutch-experiment-a-republic-born-from-resistance

🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7, Interview | Consequential Actions

𝕏: https://x.com/jkellick

Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7B

Who Decides When America Goes to War? The Constitution Has a Plain Answer

In a single month this summer, two of the narrow seas on which the world’s commerce depends were choked by force from two directions — the Strait of Hormuz nearly silenced, and the Bab al-Mandab under a declared embargo. Four hundred years ago, a young Dutch lawyer wrote down the principle those blockades strain against, not as a preference but as a law of nature: the sea belongs to no one. His name was Hugo Grotius, and in Mare Liberum (1609) he called the freedom to cross and trade across the open sea a first axiom of the law of nations — a phrase his 1916 English translator would render as “self-evident and immutable.”

When the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution begins with a plain answer: Article I, Section 8 gives the power to declare war to Congress, not the President. Episode 6B argued that Congress handed away the power to make law. Congress has also surrendered the power to make war — reduced, in a July 2026 war-powers notification, to receiving a letter about a war it never declared.

Neutrality on whether that war is wise, or on any party’s conduct, is deliberate: the target is the structural question of who decides, a question that binds presidents of both parties in exactly the same way. The Honest Reckoning turns that same standard on Grotius himself — a paid advocate for a ruthless trading company — and on American conduct at the straits.

This week’s standing question runs underneath all of it: did this leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 — The Closing of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al Mandab

1:41 — Hugo Grotius and the Principle of the Free Sea

2:52 — Introduction: Episode 7, Part B — The Sea Belongs to No One

4:00 — Political Transparency and the Episode’s True Target

6:11 — The Santa Catarina and the Birth of Mare Liberum

10:08 — The 2026 Hormuz Conflict and the U.S. Response

12:25 — The Houthi Blockade of the Bab al Mandab

14:22 — Article I, Section 8 and the Constitutional Power to Make War

16:15 — War Without Declaration and the 60-Day Clock

18:20 — Congressional Abdication and Non-Binding Votes

22:13 — The Reckoning: Commercial Motives and American Hypocrisy

25:23 — Objection 1: Sea Power and Repelling Sudden Attacks

27:04 — Objection 2: The War Powers Resolution of 1973

28:00 — Refuting the Objections: A Leash Read as a License

32:01 — The Liberty Test: The War Power and the Single Hand

33:42 — The Dutch Warning: The Drift Toward Centralized Power

35:47 — Preview of Thursday’s Interview with Jamie Frost Remmey

37:12 — Closing Thoughts: Political Parties vs. Ideologies

📚 Companion article — Article 7, “The Dutch Experiment”: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-dutch-experiment-a-republic-born-from-resistance

🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 7B, Contemporary Application | Consequential Actions

𝕏: https://x.com/jkellick