By a correspondent, Kevin Hayslett. Please think on these things.
————
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 
Casualties of war
Yesterday, we commemorated those men and women of the United States who lost their lives prematurely in the various wars fought by and in the United States of America. But it is important to remember, and commemorate (mourn) those other than the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines – and their civilian support forces – who died.
There is no war, whether declared or not, whether internal or external, that does not have many more casualties. And almost always, in external wars, it is the enemy who suffers the greater number of dead. And the civilians, not the support forces, but the ordinary civilians.
Let us also pause to remember those, of whatever nation, with whatever stake in the outcome of the war or whatever the conflict is called.
Let us remember, not just this week but every week, those other casualties of war. Consider again, the words that Mark Twain ascribed to a messenger of God in his short story, The War Prayer:
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle-be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause)
“Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”
Think not just of those who died in war, but of those who suffered because those men (and some women) died. Remember that war is a default setting of human society, but that peace is still to be sought and (as much as possible) achieved. True liberty from the evil men and women who control almost all governments, at all levels, is a way of limiting war and extending peace.
“Peace on earth, good will towards men” is exactly the opposite of what human governments accomplish.