EMERGENCY POWER IS TYRANNY.
🚨 "Emergency" power is tyranny.
— TenthAmendmentCenter (@TenthAmendment) April 28, 2025
If power is unauthorized, it is lawless.
If it is lawless, it is tyranny.
And if it is tyranny, it must be resisted.
Not tomorrow.
Not later.
Right. Now. pic.twitter.com/jtg5eFc8nM
Resist the first approaches of tyranny. Mercy Otis Warren with that line wasn't just giving us a suggestion, she was giving us a rule for survival. If you want Liberty to exist, you have to follow that approach. You can't wait until it feels like tyranny and you can't wait until it's obviously tyranny, because by then you've probably already lost. If power is not authorized under the Constitution, if power is not delegated, it's arbitrary power, and that's the kind of system that the founders and old revolutionaries well they fought a long bloody war to secede from it. Not one step beyond the Constitution. Not one exception. Not one emergency power because all arbitrary power is usurpation, and all usurpation is tyranny, no matter who is exercising that power. And no matter why it's being exercised, it must be rejected, not next year, not next month, not next week. Today, not tomorrow. Right now.
from "Why Mercy Otis Warren Belongs in the Pantheon of America's Founders," Gary Galles, FEE, August 3, 2020,
"After all, she has been called “The Conscience of the American Revolution,” both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams called her a genius, and Elizabeth Ellet described her as “the most remarkable woman who lived in the days of the American Revolution.”
A short essay by Mercy Warren Otis, "Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions," Mercy Warren Otis, 1788.
