By a correspondent, Kevin Hayslett. Please think on these things.
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I saw a photograph this week that bothered me.
A boy. Maybe nine or ten. Dark maroon shirt, slightly rumpled. Both hands flat on the glass of a display case at the National Archives. Face almost touching it. Leaning in. Reading a page lit from inside the case. A page covered in signatures from men who have been dead for two hundred years.
Not posing. Not bored. Reading.
A guard in a dark uniform stands a few yards behind him, hands folded, watching the boy instead of the case.
I don’t know his name. Let’s call him Sam.
Sam is nine. Sam will be old enough to vote in 2034.
Sam is trying to understand the rules the adults no longer want to follow.
Four miles away, a former Vice President of the United States was reading aloud a list of things to do to that document.
The recording is still up. Almost nobody watched it carefully.
She did not walk in with convictions. She walked in with bullet points. Fed to her one sentence at a time. Curated to ignite a weary base looking for a contender. Written somewhere else for reasons nobody in that room voted on.
A whiteboard in the corner with four words on it.
Court.
College.
Districts.
States.
She said exactly what they told her to say. Then she went home.
Because she was not the point.
The list was for whoever they pick next.
She was the dress rehearsal.
The audience thought they were watching a conversation. They were watching a blueprint.
Here is what she said, word for word.
“This is a moment where there are no bad ideas.”
No bad ideas. When the system itself is on the table.
Then she read the list.
Reform the Electoral College. Expand the Supreme Court. Replace single-member congressional districts with multi-member districts. Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico.
Fifty-nine presidential elections. Two close ones. That is the entire case for tearing it down.
Nine justices for a hundred and fifty-six years. She wants more.
Fifty states for sixty-five years. She wants fifty-two.
Four hundred and thirty-five districts. She wants to scrap that too.
She did not whisper any of it. She read it to a room that applauded.
I have spent forty years in courtrooms listening carefully to the words people pick when they think nobody is paying attention.
Pack the court when your side wins, and the other side packs it the minute they take it back. Once the number is political, there is no number.
Reform the Electoral College down to a popular tally, and your state goes quiet. Six counties in three states pick every president from here. Florida does not matter. Ohio does not matter. Pennsylvania does not matter.
Add two states to lock in four senators, and the next majority adds two of their own. Then two more after that. The Senate stops being a safeguard and turns into arithmetic.
Trade single-member districts for multi-member districts, and the seat your county has held for a hundred years gets parceled out to strangers from cities you have never been to.
Picture it.
A Tuesday in November. Eight years from now. Sam is seventeen. Sam is standing in line with his father at the elementary school where his father has voted for thirty years. The fluorescent lights. The styrofoam cup of coffee at the sign-in table. The woman who always sits behind it nods at them the way she always has.
His father fills out the ballot. He feeds it into the machine.
Walking back to the truck, it hits him the way these things always hit you. Slow. In his chest. What he just did did not count anymore. Not because somebody cheated. Because somebody changed the rules while he was busy raising Sam. The map already got drawn. The senators already got added. His state’s name does not appear on any path to 270 because there is no 270. Just a tally somewhere, and his tally went into a column already decided in a building he has never been inside.
He drives home quieter than he left.
Sam is watching from the passenger seat.
Once any of those doors closes behind you, it does not open again.
That is not reform. That is a one-way door.
They are not trying to win the next election. They are trying to make the next election the last one that matters.
This is the part most of us have quietly worried about for years. That win-at-any-cost would eventually mean dismantling the rules instead of winning under them. That the checks and balances built more than two hundred years ago to slow ambitious people down would start looking like obstacles instead of safeguards. Both parties have flirted with it. Neither one wanted to be the first to say it out loud.
We always feared the day someone would.
That day arrived on a Wednesday afternoon in May. Quietly. On a livestream most people scrolled past. The country your grandfather fought for, the country your father voted in, the country Sam will inherit, all of it went on the table at the same time, in a basement studio, on a whiteboard, while the rest of us were checking our phones.
Almost nobody even paused.
Somewhere tonight, that piece of paper is still sitting under glass in the National Archives. The hall is dark. The guard has gone home.
Sam went home too.
He has homework. A spelling test on Friday. He does not know yet what the woman on the recording said about the page he was reading.
He will find out.
We will be the ones who have to tell him.
As lovers of liberty, as with lovers of the Lord, we must always remember that some enemies of liberty (and enemies of Christ) are worse than others. It is clear that the former VPOTUS, and her puppetmasters, are such.
The Price of Liberty 
WARNING: Disgusting cropped photo can be seen when you click on “read more” bar.
Once upon a time, the State of Maine, and most of its people, were a nation of liberty, freedom, kindness, politeness, and civility.
In the second quarter of the 21st Century, this is clearly no longer true. Today, like the rest of New England, the Pine Tree State seems to have reverted to a land in which liberty is scorned, freedom is debased, and a lot of disgusting people are prominent.
Not that historic Maine has much to offer, we admit. Yes, it is a lovely place with vast forests, a fascinating coast line, and many picturesque towns. We here at TPOL have only been to Maine a time or two and we find the land interesting, if without the many eye-catching landscapes and iconic monuments of most states.
Maine gained its independence from Massachusetts in 1820 as a result of the Missouri Compromise of that year. Congress (and apparently, the Maine legislature) agreed that Maine, separated from the rest of the Bay State by the short coast of New Hampshire, could secede and be admitted to the Union to balance the admission of Missouri as a slave State. (Massachusetts (and therefore Maine) had enslaved people (AmerInd and African) from 1637 to 1790 (officially legalized slavery in 1641, abolished by its courts in 1783).
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