Happy Bastille Day! Or, depending on your viewpoint, shiver at the excesses of the French Revolution. Some of the most polarizing events in American history take place far from our shores. It’s happening now. It has happened before.

On July 14, 1789, just weeks after Washington became U.S. president, the Bastille prison in Paris fell to a furious French mob. Chaos, violence, and European wars ensued. Responses among Americans heightened divisions in our young Republic. When Washington warned against factions and foreign entanglements, it was already too late. John Adams and his Federalists, who favored a strong central government, sympathized with British fear of radicalism so close to home. Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans, advocates of decentralization and individual liberty, sided with the French.

By summer 1798, Adams was president and the Federalists held power. In the name of national security, they passed four Alien and Sedition Acts to clamp down on immigration (most new immigrants voted Democratic-Republican) and dissent:

1. Naturalization Act: Gaining citizenship would take fourteen years instead of five.
2. Alien Friends Act: The president could deport foreigners he deemed dangerous to peace and safety.
3. Alien Enemies Act: The president could arrest, imprison, and deport subjects of enemy nations.
4. Sedition Act: To oppose any law or presidential act, or to print anything negative about the president or Congress, was a crime.

Jefferson called the last of these “so palpably in the teeth of the Constitution as to show they mean to pay no respect to it.” The Supreme Court did not take up the case. Angry voters elected Jefferson as their third president. He pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act, and Congress repaid their fines.

It feels like déjà vu all over again.

Image: The Storming of the Bastille. Anonymous. Museum of French History, Versailles.

More than eight hundred years ago, under pressure from his barons, King John of England sealed a charter that would profoundly influence the Founders of the later United States. The Magna Carta (Great Charter) guaranteed traditional rights of free Englishmen. Much of its detail has no more relevance today than details of our Declaration of Independence, but its basic principles helped shape our foundational national documents.

The Magna Carta established that no one is above the law, not even a king. The American Revolution found justification in this centuries-old precept.

The Magna Carta also guaranteed due process and the right to a fair trial: No freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his free tenement or of his liberties or free customs, or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go against such a man or send against him save by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.

​These guarantees were repeated in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. May they long remain the law of the land.

Wisps of cloud crept over the forested hilltops last week. Green fields glistened in the intermittent rain. Southwest Wisconsin’s beautiful Driftless area, never flattened by glaciers, gets its name from the lack of glacial drift or sediment. Maps from the Vernon County Historical Society guided us over rugged, narrow country roads to find the county’s nine surviving round barns. 

Without much thought, I’d assumed round barns were an old cultural tradition from some obscure corner of Scandinavia, brought by immigrants too recent to have adopted the more common rectangular shape. Wrong. The round barns of Vernon County were a modern innovation to meet the needs of the area’s growing dairy industry. Fifteen were constructed after World War I by farmer/carpenter Algie Shivers, son of a former slave who had moved to Wisconsin on the underground railroad.

Most round barns were built in the Midwest between 1890 and 1930. Agricultural colleges promoted the circular shape as the barn of the future, a model of efficiency. Cows stood like spokes of a wheel, narrow head toward a central feeding trough and silo, broader hind end toward the outer wall with space for a milking stool. Round barns were  wind resistant and saved on building material.

Though round barns were never a majority, Wisconsin once had more than two hundred. Electricity and mechanization made them obsolete. Linear milking pipelines, machine-made square hay bales, and prefabricated flat building materials were all better suited to rectangles. Luckily for us, some owners have preserved the outmoded round structures for other uses such as storage. The one-time barn of the future is rapidly fading into the past.

Our first summer in this house, eight years ago, our perennial garden brought surprise after surprise. Among my favorites were the delicate, bright red petals of poppies in June. Two poppy plants returned the next couple of years, then died out. My attempt to plant new ones failed. Then last year, a poppy volunteer cropped up in a totally different part of the garden. My only role was to weed around this unexpected gift to help it thrive.

I’ve blogged about weeding before and probably will again. It’s a metaphor for so much in my life: editing, scheduling, options, immediate gratification. This season I’m thinking about invasives, the species that spread so thick and fast they can choke out everything else.

Some plants and life events are always unwelcome. Others bring delight wherever they appear, like poppies. Most complex, for me at least, are the mildly invasive beauties that bring joy in their place but will overrun the garden if given a chance. Elsewhere in life it might be screen time, or social activity, or chocolates.

National news this season brings little joy, but I don’t want to weed it out altogether. To know what’s happening and yet leave room to savor life’s delights is a balancing act. Where to draw the line varies from person to person, and from one week to the next. Heading back out to the garden reminds me this day still holds enchantment for the hours I can set invasive worries aside.

One summer day long ago, I walked from a cluster of museums near Chicago’s South Loop southward toward McCormick Place. It’s a stretch of Lake Michigan waterfront I hadn’t previously explored on foot. Imagine my surprise to happen on the oldest outdoor artifact in the city. As best I could decipher the Italian inscription, the 2,000-year-old stone column was a gift to Chicago from Benito Mussolini. Had we and Fascist Italy once been friendly enough for gifts?

Apparently so. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, celebrating technological advances of the city’s first “Century of Progress,” gave Mussolini a chance to bring modern Italy out of the shadows. The futuristic Italian pavilion held hundreds of exhibits to showcase Italian technology and medicine. In July 1933, more than 100,000 spectators cheered the arrival of twenty-four seaplanes from Rome, under the command of Italian air force minister Italo Balbo. Americans welcomed the pilots as heroes.

Mussolini’s public relations coup linked modern Italy to Rome’s ancient history as the mightiest empire of its time. Chicago might boast a hundred years of progress; Italy could boast two thousand. He adopted the classic Roman fasces, a bundle thin rods tied together around an axe head for strength, as his symbol of power. The ancient column of the Balbo Monument, Mussolini’s gift to Chicago in honor of Balbo's squadron, was taken from the erstwhile port city of Ostia outside Rome.

The message was clear. Mussolini and his National Fascist Party rose up to Make Italy Great Again.

Image: Balbo Monument, Burnham Park, Chicago. Chicago Park District.

On a recent phone chat with family in California, an unknown voice told us this call was being recorded. What? Slightly spooked, we hung up and took a few minutes online to find out more. To record a call, we learned, a few states require consent from all parties. Most states, and federal law, require consent from only one party to the call. In some, being told you’re being recorded implies consent. Some require consent only in a situation with a reasonable expectation of privacy, like a personal call from home.

A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy: What a great title for a novel! The plot centers on an elected leader who wants to become a dictator while appearing to follow the law. He empowers an unelected, unconfirmed official to silence the opposition. The scheme has two prongs. One is to stir panic by firing thousands of workers in the name of eliminating waste and fraud. Positions abolished include those of watchdogs to guard against illegal or unethical action.

The other prong is to monitor personal data and communication to identify “enemies” who criticize the leader or his agenda. As monitoring grows more and more intrusive, the public is too frightened of retribution to object. By the end of the novel, when the two schemers part company, “a reasonable expectation of privacy” has lost all meaning. No reasonable person still expects any privacy whatever.

Of course, this plotline is only fiction. At least, I hope so. These days you never know.

Image: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.

My one college semester of constitutional law didn’t earn my highest grade. I didn’t realize we were supposed to know Supreme Court cases as well as the Constitution itself. For the judicial branch in particular, the Constitution says remarkably little. Judicial power extends to cases arising under the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties. Specifics lie mostly in cases and precedents.

The Supreme Court avoids taking sides in issues of foreign policy. It refuses some cases on technical grounds, such as who brought the case or where. On birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, for now the Court will rule only on whether a judge trying one  case can issue a nationwide injunction. If not, apparently every newborn must bring a separate lawsuit while the earlier case proceeds.

​What happens when a president disobeys a judicial order? The Supreme Court can issue injunctions, sanction officials, declare them in contempt, and impose fines or even arrest. But enforcement depends on federal marshals, who serve under the president. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, the judiciary holds neither the purse nor the sword. Its power lies entirely in an abiding respect for the rule of law, by nearly all Americans regardless of party. It’s up to us, the public, to insist our elected representatives uphold that respect.

As we all learned in high school, Congress makes laws and the president puts them into effect. The constitutional boundary between enact and implement is hazy, just as the Framers intended. They had lived under George III and didn’t want another king. They had seen the flaws of the Articles of Confederation, which created a weak Congress and no executive or judiciary at all.

The new Constitution they drafted included checks and balances among three separate branches to prevent tyranny. Congress’s power to tax and spend, by implication, allows it oversight over practically everything. In foreign affairs, the Constitution empowers Congress to declare war, regulate foreign commerce, levy tariffs, and raise, support, and regulate an army and navy.

Over the past century, power has shifted from Congress to the president. Congress hasn’t declared war since World War II; instead, it authorizes presidents to use military force against particular threats. Formal treaties have largely been replaced by executive agreements that don’t require the Senate’s advice and consent. Since the 1930s, Congress has given the president ever-growing power to set and negotiate tariffs.

Has Congress abdicated its role of oversight, checks, and balances? It repeatedly delegates authority to the executive. It leaves executive orders unchallenged. It confirms partisan nominees to head independent agencies. Congress has the means to reclaim some of the power it has ceded. Maybe someday it will have the will. 

Nearly ninety years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the president is “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations,” wielding an exclusive power “which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress but which, of course, like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution.” (United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 1936).

It unnerves me to think I could be detained and deported any time someone in the executive branch, unfettered in foreign affairs, decides one of my blog posts threatens current U.S. international policy. It’s unlikely to happen soon. I am a white, straight, cis, native-English-speaking, American-born daughter of two naturalized immigrants. Still, if it can happen to one U.S. citizen or legal resident, it can happen to any of us. More likely, first I’ll lose access to email and social media on the grounds that my words endanger national security.

Under the Constitution, the president is commander in chief. It authorizes him to make treaties and appoint ambassadors, with advice and consent of the Senate. Congress may delegate other powers to him, but according to Curtiss-Wright, in international affairs he can act without delegation from Congress. The only guardrails appear to be those in the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution. May those guardrails be strong enough to save us from crashing off the cliff.

On Inauguration Day in 2025, the new president signed an executive order to suspend refugee admissions to the U.S. It allowed for exceptions by the secretaries of State and Homeland Security “so long as they determine that the entry of such aliens as refugees is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”

Two-and-a-half weeks later, the White House cut off aid to South Africa to protest its land reform law and its disagreement with U.S. foreign policy. That order also stated, “the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”

Afrikaners are descended from early Boer (Dutch for “farmer”) settlers of Cape Colony in southern Africa, founded by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. “Trekboers” migrated inland with their herds. Conflict among Afrikaners, British colonists, and the indigenous Zulu—especially after the discovery of diamonds and gold—led to creation of the apartheid Union of South Africa and eventually to democratic elections. White South Africans, the majority of whom are Afrikaners, make up 7.3 percent of the population and own three-fourths of the privately held land. More than four out of five South Africans are black.

Afrikaners don’t much threaten American security or welfare. Nor do Afghans trying to escape Taliban reprisal for helping the U.S. military, nor families from Honduras or El Salvador threatened by gang violence and extortion. What measures the national interest? Given the administration’s vehement rejection of “racial preferences,” its preference for Afrikaners over desperate fugitives fleeing for their lives is hard to explain.

Image: Trekboers making camp, aquatint by Samuel Daniell, c. 1804.