WE DECLARE
THESE CAUSES.
When in the course of a nation's life it becomes necessary for its people to examine whether the government instituted among them still serves the ends for which it was created, and to determine whether its constitutional order and its guards remain sufficient to secure its conferred rights or if it has been so broken in practice that its restoration requires not merely new officeholders but renewed foundations, a reverence to the interests of the public to which its designs concern centrally and to our founders who rightly sought to preserve a conscience of posterity requires that any seeking to alter its course must declare the causes which impel them to seek that remedy, and the principles by which they mean to pursue it.
Title I.
We hold these truths, as the founders of this republic held them, to be self-evident: that all people are created equal; that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be altered for light and transient causes. Accordingly, what we propose is not to overthrow, but to affirm the foundational project of our republic.
Our nation was born of compromises, noble and low. At the moment of its highest self-declaration, when the founders proclaimed the equality of all and the unalienable character of human rights, they also accommodated the absolute denial of those rights. Jefferson penned in his original draft that the Crown had "waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." Then the congressional delegation struck the passage. The declaration that announced the rights of all entered the world with the rights of millions annulled by private compact.
The choice — not only in words but in deeds — was a founding wound. Not because one man's hypocrisy can be blamed for the nation's course, but because the contradiction was known, named in draft, and deliberately ignored. Generations that followed did not fail to grasp that the existence of human servitude made a lie of their principles. They saw it, and they promulgated the lie. And the generations that came after — that allowed the deprivations to harden into caste and the abandonment to calcify into custom, extended the pattern to every community whose labor or land or loyalty the republic found useful to claim and easy to forget — each made the same choice: to accommodate these contradictions rather than resolve them.
We call those who have borne the cost of this long accommodation the disinherited. The Virginia Declaration of Rights established that the people cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity of their inherent rights. The inheritance of equal citizenship was to pass from generation to generation, entire and undiminished. For too many it has not arrived. These are not wards of the state. They are not objects of charity. They are citizens from whom the republic took or never gave what it promised: the full and equal possession of natural rights, uniform standing under the law, and material conditions without which liberty is an empty word and equality a bitter jest.
The present crisis is not, therefore, without precedent. It is the return, in new form, of the oldest failure of the republic — a government that proclaims the universal rights of the people while systematically abandoning them out of convenience and factionalism.
Our future is in the remedy of this present state.
Title II.
The history of the current Executive is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all tending toward the same design: to concentrate power beyond lawful restraint, to render accountability contingent upon partisan lines, and to reduce the constitutional order from a system of binding limits to a set of suggestions the powerful may observe or may disregard at will for their friends and for their enemies.
To prove this, let these facts be submitted to a candid world:
He has endavored to make the law selective where it should be impartial, shielding those who serve his interest from the consequences that fall upon those who do not.
He has made judges, inspectors, and officers of public accountability dependent upon his will alone — dismissing those who investigate, punishing those who testify, and instructing every officer under his chain of command that executive interests are to be the sole interests of the state.
He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing to execute the laws faithfully, by defying the orders of courts, and by treating judicial independence not as a constitutional principle but as an obstacle to be overcome.
He has enlarged the ranks of paramilitaries and sent their officers to harass the people, to surveil their conduct, and to impoverish them by directing the machinery of government against any disfavored populations.
He has tolerated and enabled cruelty where the law demands restraint — in the treatment of those seeking refuge, in the deployment of federal forces against civilian populations, and in the deliberate infliction of suffering as an instrument of policy. The founders numbered among their grievances that the Crown had protected its agents, by mock trial, from punishment for murders committed against the inhabitants of the colonies. The grievance has found new ground.
He has endeavored to prevent the free exercise of the franchise — obstructing access to the ballot, having his agents draw the lines of representation to nullify the will of the governed, using investigations to punish those who oppose him, and ensuring that the mechanisms of a once liberal democracy now turn to produce illiberal outcomes increasingly severed from the consent of the governed it is supposed to embody.
He has abandoned entire communities to managed decline, allowing deprivation to become permanent subordination, treating the disinherited not as citizens with legitimate claims to their republican birthright but as populations to be contained, and ensuring that the conditions of equal citizenship remain the possession of some and the aspiration of others.
He has moved to resurrect the republic's oldest contradiction and preserve with it its consequences in every institution in order to reinforce and reproduce the exclusion and abandonment — absolving the nation of its progress.
He has weakened the public faith that its constitutional forms are able to protect the people from despotism — not by one single dramatic stroke, but by the slow and cumulative tax of lawlessness and corruption, until the violation of these restraints has ceased to provoke the outrage that once served as a check on its bounds.
The prolonged habit of failures to hold such usurpations to account gives the public the false appearance that such conditions are to be considered natural and quotidian. Each violation, once unpunished, becomes the basis by which the pathological becomes the normal. What once shocked the conscience becomes standard. What was disputed becomes familiar. And soon it ceases to be named at all. The danger before us is not merely that law has been broken. It is that the breaking has been absorbed into our structures of governance, until the line between lawful authority and its abuse has been rendered invisible.
At every stage of these injuries we have petitioned and acted towards redress in those ways afforded us. We have sought redress through the ballot. We have sought redress through the courts. We have sought redress through assembly. These repeated petitions and actions have been answered only by further injuries. An executive whose character is thus marked by the same acts which define a tyrant is unfit to govern a free people and has forefited their authority to do so with legitimacy.