I Believe

The Founders knew about the Leviathan. They had read their Bibles. Job. Isaiah. Ezekiel. The beast that cannot be bargained with. Cannot be tamed. Cannot be killed. They had lived under a king. They knew what unchecked power looked like when it wore a crown. They did not fear a British king. They had beaten him already. They feared an American one. So they built a cage. Three branches. Separate powers. Ambition made to counter ambition. No single branch could grow so powerful that it swallowed the others. The cage was made of parchment. Ink and argument. Parchment doesn’t hold beasts. Only an oath could do that. Prologue: The Weight of Oaths An oath is an ancient thing. In the old world, to swear was to stake your life on your word. You called God to witness. To lie was to invite destruction from the Almighty I AM. The Hebrews understood this. When God gave Moses the commandments on Mount Sinai, He gave ten. The first: I AM. You will have no other gods before me. And right after: do not swear an oath in my name in vain. The order is striking. Right after idolatry. Before murder. Before theft. Before adultery. Most people think that the commandment means not to curse using God’s name. It does not. It means: do not swear an oath in God’s name and then break it. Do not call the Almighty to witness your word and then make Him witness to a lie. God cared about this enough to put it near the top of the list. Above killing. Above stealing. A man who swears falsely in God’s name profanes the relationship between humanity and the divine. He makes God complicit in his lie. That is an oath sworn in the name of the I AM. Not a formality. A covenant, sworn at the foot of the throne of God. The American oath didn’t start that way. In 1789, the First Congress kept it simple. It was only: I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States. That was it. There were plenty of Founders who did not believe, and they left the Almighty out of it. No enemies. No mental reservations. No “so help me God.” The Founders trusted that men who swore would mean it. They had just fought a revolution alongside each other. They knew who they were. Then came the Civil War. In 1861, Southern officers resigned their commissions. Southern senators walked out of the chamber to join the Confederacy. They had sworn the short, simple oath and broken it before the ink was dry. Abraham Lincoln watched the government tear itself apart from within. He had administered the oath to men who treated it like a formality. A ceremony. Words you say because the occasion requires it, not because you mean them. So, in 1862, Congress rewrote the oath. They added “enemies foreign and domestic” because Lincoln had learned what domestic enemies look like. They look like colleagues. Friends. Men who sit beside you, debate policy, and then choose to burn the country down. They added “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” because Lincoln had watched men parse their words, keep their options open, swear with their fingers crossed behind their backs. They added “so help me God” because they wanted everyone who spoke the words to remember who was listening. The oath became: I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. Lincoln’s oath. Forged in betrayal. Designed to smoke out traitors. To make a man say, out loud, that he had no secret loyalties. That he meant what he said. That the Almighty was watching, and would judge. Every Senator since has spoken these words. Hand raised. Voice steady. The chamber, watching. They can choose to affirm rather than swear on the Almighty, but most choose to swear. The oath is not a contract. A contract binds two parties. Breach it, and there are remedies. Damages one can pay and walk away. The oath is a covenant. You are not making a deal with the Senate, or the people, or the Constitution. You are making a promise to God, and the Republic is the subject of that promise. When you break it, you do not answer to voters or courts. You answer to the Almighty. This oath is the bars of the cage. The cage holds only as long as the oath-keepers keep their word. They stopped keeping it. Act I. The Cage Congress gave away the power to declare war. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stood before Congress and requested a declaration of war against Japan. They voted. That’s how it works. The last time Congress declared war was 1942. Since then, American soldiers in Korea. Vietnam. Grenada. Panama. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. Yemen. January 3, 2026, Venezuela. Congress watched. Congress complained. Congress did not vote. They gave the president permission to do what he wanted so they wouldn’t have to answer for it. Authorization, not declaration. Authorization. A word designed to provide cover. To let them say, if it goes badly, we didn’t decide this. And if it goes well, we supported it all along. The Constitution says Congress declares war because the Founders knew what kings do with armies. They wanted the people’s representatives to look a mother in the eye and say: I voted to send your son. Here is why. Congress doesn’t want to look anyone in the eye. They handed the first key to the president and pretended the cage was still locked. Congress gave away the power of the purse. In 1976, they passed the National Emergencies Act. The idea was simple: a president could declare an emergency, but Congress would review it every six months. Congress would decide if the emergency was real. Congress would hold the purse strings. Now we live under around fifty active national emergencies. Some date back decades. Congress can force the question. Congress rarely does. One of them is from 1979. It’s older than most of the staffers who work in the Capitol. It’s been renewed, automatically, ninety times. Somewhere, a family’s assets are frozen under an emergency declared before their children were born. Congress has reviewed none of them. They discovered that complaining about the president was easier than stopping him. Complaining gets you on television. Stopping him gets you a primary challenger. So they complain. They hold hearings. They write letters. And the emergencies compound, year after year, while the wars keep grinding on under authorizations no one remembers voting for. Another key, handed over. The cage door, rattling. Congress gave away the power to tax. We fought a revolution over this. Taxation without representation. The words are carved into the American memory. The Founders put the taxing power in Congress because they understood: the people who pay should choose the people who decide. In 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Economists blame it for deepening the Great Depression. So Congress decided the problem wasn’t the policy. The problem was having to vote on it. They delegated tariff authority to the president. Ninety-five years later, one man sets tariff rates by tweet. A soybean farmer in Iowa watches the price of his crop collapse overnight. He didn’t vote for tariffs. He voted for a congressman who pretended it wasn’t his problem. Tariffs are taxes on the American people. Every economist knows this. Every member of Congress knows this. And every one of them has decided that fighting the president is harder than letting him do what he wants. A third key. The cage, standing open. Three surrenders. War. Emergencies. Taxes. Not one of them taken by force. Not one of them seized by a tyrant. Congress voted for each surrender. They held hearings, made speeches, and handed over the keys because keeping them meant taking responsibility, and responsibility is heavy, and elections are soon. The Founders built the cage to hold the Leviathan. They knew the beast couldn’t be killed. They gave Congress the power to contain it because they believed the people’s representatives would guard that power jealously. They could not imagine legislators who would volunteer to surrender. Who would unlock the cage because the beast inside might help them win their next election. Who would swear a covenant before God and then act as if God wasn’t watching. The chamber is quiet now. Papers shuffle. No one meets anyone’s eyes. They are all waiting for someone else to speak first. Someone with more seniority. More cover. Someone whose seat is safer. The silence isn’t empty. It’s full of reasonable men, calculating the cost of courage and deciding that today isn’t the day. The cage is open. Beast walks free. And every one of them swore a covenant. On occasion, one might take it seriously. Act II. The Oath Keeper June 1, 1950. Margaret Chase Smith sat at her desk in the United States Senate, fifteen pages in her hand. She had typed them herself, late at night, in her office, with no staff and no consultation. She was fifty-two years old. Had been a Senator for sixteen months. The only woman in the chamber. Her colleagues reminded her of this in small ways every day. The cloakroom went quiet when she entered. Jokes and laughter when she left. Committee assignments went to men with half her experience. Twenty feet away sat Joseph McCarthy. Four months earlier, McCarthy had stood before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and held up a piece of paper. A list, he said. Two hundred and five Communists in the State Department. The next day, the number was fifty-seven. The day after, it was “a lot.” The number didn’t matter. The fear did. McCarthy had discovered something simple: you don’t need evidence. You need volume. Repetition. Accusation. Men who are too afraid to call you a liar becau