A Misreading of Thomas Jefferson

Last week, I wrote a Corner post against Daily Wire host Michael Knowles’s assertion that civil leaders can, at their discretion, suspend rights and circumvent the law during self-declared emergencies. Even though Knowles opposed New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s decision to (temporarily) suspend the legal rights of her constituents, I warned that his endorsement of the underlying principle only encourages further incursions of the law by those eager to elevate their policy agenda over legal mechanisms. 

On the platform formerly known as Twitter, Knowles raised a single concern: that my article did not address his citation of Thomas Jefferson as support for his position. 

To this, my response is simple: Challenge accepted.

On Knowles’s show last week, he cited three distinct Jefferson letter excerpts justifying his position:

“On great occasions, every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line of law, when the public preservation requires it; his motives will be a justification” (Jefferson writing to William C. C. Claiborne in 1807).

“There are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation, and where the universal resource is a dictator or martial law” (Jefferson writing to Samuel Brown in 1808). 

“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means . . . 

“The line of discrimination between cases may be difficult; but the good officer is bound to draw it at his own peril, and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives” (Jefferson writing to John B. Colvin in 1810). 

It is true, as these excerpts depict, that Jefferson did not always favor strict adherence to the written law. After all, he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, a document that flagrantly violated British law to such an extent that, if he were caught, would have seen him placed on the gallows. The American Revolution itself was a repudiation of the British regime, as the colonies sought to — unlawfully — detach themselves from the British government. 

However, Jefferson did not provide a broad endorsement for leaders to disregard the law whenever they saw fit. In fact, the three letters by Jefferson that Knowles references all center around the context of military arrests in New Orleans by General James Wilkinson, made in response to an alleged conspiracy to establish an independent state in that territory. 

Jefferson wrote several times about his concern with the government operating beyond its legal limits, expressing great disdain for the willful trouncing of the law, even when offenders justified their actions by necessity.

“Whenever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force,” Jefferson wrote in 1798, in opposition to John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts (Knowles uses the example of the Alien and Seditions Acts, which he describes as “a strong curtailing or limiting of the First Amendment,” as further support for his position). 

Or, as Jefferson wrote earlier in Notes on the State of Virginia:

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

Or, when detailing his opposition to the creation of a National Bank on constitutional grounds, Jefferson wrote, “To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.” Knowles repeats a much different line: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

In his book How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, Knowles’s Daily Wire colleague Ben Shapiro emphasizes the necessity for government to operate within the powers delegated to it. When describing what Shapiro terms “The Disintegrationist Philosophy of American Institutions,” he writes:

If the government is us, there is no necessity for any set rules on how government ought to operate. The rules should—and must—change for the sake of “getting things done.” Indeed, that is precisely the argument made by Disintegrationists, who make no commitment to any structural consistency in government . . .

. . . if government must be free to effect change regardless of “consent of the governed,” without reference to any “just powers,” then government itself must be ah hoc, pragmatist in orientation.

In practice, this means that Disintegrationists despise the constitutional order, which often requires honest men and women to recognize that their primary policy preferences may not meet with the requirements of the constitutional process. We all live by the same rules—and that is the purpose of having rules. 

Shapiro correctly notes that, while rules restrict political power, that is a fundamental purpose of such rules — not a flaw. While this surely can be inconvenient at times, it’s a necessary limiting principle on political power.  

Endorsing the mechanism of which civil leaders can arbitrarily circumvent the rules simply emboldens them to do so and places a hefty gamble that their intentions are good. Jefferson, writing in 1801, warned of such a gamble:

I sincerely wish with you we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles.

Knowles can argue that his argument is grounded in the words of Thomas Jefferson, but only the select words of Jefferson. Knowles’s approach to government and rights contrasts starkly with Jefferson’s. Whereas Knowles contends that rights “do little more than make us feel good and righteous all the way to the Gulag,” Jefferson held the opposite view: “It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.”