A Republic, If You Can Keep It

As we head into the new year, we’ll have a returned President, a new Congress, and a new State Legislature. We’ll do well to remember the principles on which our nation was founded and why. The expressed will of the voters, through the power vested in the people, is paramount in our republic and cannot be limited except by the Constitution itself.

When our Founders completed the final draft of the U.S. Constitution and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia convened on September 17th, 1787, Elizabeth Powel, wife of the Mayor of Philadelphia, was said to have asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Though the story may be apocryphal, there’s an awful lot to unpack in that brief exchange. Let’s start with…

A Republic

First, Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, which I highly recommend as a historical reference as near to the drafting of the Constitution as possible, gives us this definition of a republic: “A commonwealth; a state in which the exercise of the sovereign power is lodged in representatives elected by the people. In modern usage, it differs from a democracy or democratic state, in which the people exercise the powers of sovereignty in person. Yet the democracies of Greece are often called republics.”

The 1828 Dictionary defines a monarchy as: “A state or government in which the supreme power is lodged in the hands of a single person.” This is what we, today, would call a dictatorship.

Side note: despite what you hear on television around election time, we don’t have a direct democracy, which our Founding Fathers rightly feared almost as much as a monarchy. It’s a slightly more civilized form of mob rule.

Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution guarantees “every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” The Texas Constitution echoes this in Article I, Section 2: “The faith of the people of Texas stands pledged to the preservation of a republican form of government.”

We are very thoughtfully and purposefully a republic, and it’s one of the main things which has preserved us thus far as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. A republic requires responsibility by two groups: elected officials and we the people.

The Duty of Elected Officials

When I first ran for Plano City Council in 2019 I said, “Candidates for office are supposed to, but often don’t, tell the people very clearly and unequivocally what their positions, principles, and values are, and let the voters make the decision.” I made my positions, objectives, and values abundantly clear, and the people of Plano elected me on that basis.

Then, the next year, 2020 unleashed unforeseen events and issues that nobody had campaigned on. The pandemic and riots were brand new issues, and how they were handled mattered greatly. A dichotomy emerged which I wrote about in May of 2020 in what I consider to be one of the most important pieces I’ve ever written: Twilight or Dawn.

As fear swept across the country faster than the virus, I was inundated by calls, texts, emails, and social media commentary demanding that I shut down businesses, impose mask mandates, and, later, force vaccination. Guided by my core principles and values,I stood firm and never voted for any of those measures. However, the more I resisted imposing such orders, the calls grew louder demanding that I do so.

These panicked calls often had something in common: they said that I, as an elected official, was “supposed to do what we want.” This notion struck me and manifested in an emergency Plano City Council meeting where an ordinance was considered to force businesses to force masking by employees and customers.

The meeting was called with the barest notice allowed by law, and someone had organized an campaign for residents to email members of the City Council calling for us to pass the ordinance and impose a mask mandate. During the meeting, some argued numerous times that “more than 90 percent” of the people of Plano wanted the mask mandate. But that wasn’t true. In truth, more than 90 percent of the people who emailed us wanted the mandate. Not counted were everyone who didn’t email, let alone those who didn’t even know about the proposed ordinance or the meeting. Those seeking a mask mandate asked us to listen only to the loudest voices, not all citizens of Plano.

However, even if everyone in the city emailed us, if the idea is for elected officials to vote on any given matter in accordance with the majority of the people who contact us, what purpose do we, as elected representatives, serve other than pushing the corresponding voting button? Why not just send all legislation and resolutions out to the public on Survey Monkey and cut out the middle-man? The answer, of course, is because that would be a democracy, “in which the people exercise the powers of legislation.” That’s “the mob.”

Our duty as elected officials is to think and act independently, upholding the values and positions we represented when we were elected. We answer to the Constitution, and the voters–not to any other elected official, let alone to a PAC or political party. As a Plano City Councilman, I have a duty to the people of Plano. As Chairman of the Collin County Republican Party, I have a duty to the welfare of the county party and to all Republican voters. In each position, I am answerable only to the voters, to my oaths, and ultimately to God.

I have an absolute duty to the voters to uphold the values and principles that I ran on, and I make myself accessible and responsive. I’ve always had a 100% meeting policy, make my personal cell phone number public, and try to respond to everyone. I have a duty to listen, understand, and make decisions based on everything I’ve represented to the public who have entrusted me to serve them. An elected official who does otherwise has abrogated what our republic is meant to be.

The Duty of We the People

Note whom Ben Franklin charged with keeping the new republic. He didn’t say, “A republic, if I can keep it,” or “if General Washington can keep it,” (he wasn’t President yet), or even “if the states can keep it.” He said, “if you can keep it.” You, Mrs. Powel, or any other citizen. The first words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution are “We the People” for a reason, and that’s who ultimately bears the responsibility for maintaining our republic and everything it stands for.

This is reinforced by the Texas Constitution in Article I, Section 2, which states that, “All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their benefit.”

I hear from certain political activists who assert that “we’re better informed” than the average voter and should therefore be making the decisions on behalf of those voters. But that’s the responsibility of elected officials, and why those average voters’ right to vote is protected.

The concept of the Super-Delegate in the Democrat Party illustrates the notion that party elites “know better” than the average voter, and should therefore exercise greater authority and have the ability to override the will of those average voters, whom they call “low-information” or even more disparagingly “low-IQ.”

This dangerous idea was borne out in extreme technocratic fashion when “those who know better,” such as Anthony Fauci, were given extraordinary control over the rest of us mere commoners.

It’s true that political junkies are better informed (at least about politics) than non-political junkies. It’s also true that our Founding Fathers were much better informed and educated than the average voter of their day–more so than political “elites” now are versus the average voter of our day–and they still recognized the dangers of “those who know better” imparting on themselves greater authority, and held sacred the power of We the People to vote for their elected representatives, and for those representatives to be solely and exclusively responsible to the Constitution and their constituents.

That’s why I, as a Republican, find concepts such as Super-Delegates or technocratic rule anathema to everything our nation was founded on. I’ve run in three elections, won three times, and have taken three oaths to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitutions of the United States and of Texas, and I meant it every time. That fundamental right of citizens to vote is paramount in our republic, and can never be usurped or overridden by technocrats, political parties, or authoritarian elected officials who also took an oath to uphold the Constitution.

It’s always been up to We the People to preserve our republic. We must respect that and honor it, even (especially) when it doesn’t go our way, and can never look to other humans, elected or not, to save us from ourselves.