Local opinion: American independence birthed in a courtroom

and analysis of the writer:

'Tis the season. Massive resistance against the king is in the air. Iconic journalist Bill Moyers advised us that “when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” When the resistance air we breathe becomes a tempest and finds the right spark, resistance becomes a flame — a movement or even outright rebellion.

While King Donald and his anointed co-autocrat, billionaire Elon Musk, are accessing the private data of all who reside in America and are randomly invading the homes of residents, the federal courts yet may be a forum for resistance — just as the colonial courts were forums for resistance against similar invasions of rights of privacy by the British king almost 265 years ago.

Resistance can be suppressed when the king knows who to target and what to suppress, or resistance can grow and accelerate when sufficiently ignited by accelerated injustice. “Spontaneity” is both the life’s blood of resistance against tyranny and the protective shield against suppression of protest and other forms of resistance.

There is no autocratic GPS to anticipate and find spontaneous rage against injustice, nor are there autocratic tools to anticipate the sparks that ignite movements or outright rebellion against tyranny. That is why the American Revolution did not actually begin in April of 1775. It began in a courtroom in 1761, a decade and a half before the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was charged with enumerating the colonial grievances against the autocratic power of the king who violated the unwritten constitutional rights (the “natural rights”) of his subjects.

In 1761, Thomas Jefferson was a teenager. John Adams and George Washington were ages 26 and 29, respectively. John Adams was a young lawyer in the courtroom when a firebrand of a lawyer, James Otis, delivered before the Superior Court of Massachusetts what Adams called a “fiery” defense of natural rights against an arbitrary invasion of homes and private property. Adams said: “Then and there, the child of independence was born.”

James Otis’s argument so thoroughly persuaded John Adams that he later put the prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures into the Massachusetts state Constitution, which in turn became part of the U.S. Constitution’s 4th Amendment when James Madison succeeded in getting a Bill of Rights added in 1791.

‘Tis the season to begin to mark and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution that we will all acknowledge and celebrate. The battles of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 mark the formal beginning of the Great War, which launched the American colonies on their path to independence from England and its monarch, King George III.

The spark, the ignition, was a spontaneous courtroom battle over the king’s invasion of the colonists’ privacy to be secure in their homes. King George II, prior to his death in 1760, authorized the use of “fishing-expedition” general search and seizure warrants known as Writs of Assistance.

‘Twas the season in the 1760s that resistance against the British king was in the air and accelerated into war by 1775. Among the colonial grievances against the king, none were more repugnant than the crown-authorized invasions of personal privacy — the dreaded midnight knock on the door of a home.

Today ICE agents, without having to provide proof of illegal status, are yanking people out of their homes and deporting them — in “facial” violation of human rights guaranteed by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The issue, now being fought out in the federal courts, is whether America’s newly proclaimed “king” can evade these rights with claims that presidential powers to protect national security “trump” these human rights.

These “natural rights” of people to be safe in their homes, free from government invasion without proof of “probable cause” of criminal activity were previously fought over in that colonial courtroom in 1761 – the claim being that the unwritten British Constitution guaranteed these rights to be “superior” to the prerogatives and power of the king’s conduct of British foreign affairs. Superior to the king’s “writs of assistance.”

“Writs of Assistance” (general warrants for arrest and seizure) authorized spontaneous searches of homes without any “probable cause” that evidence of illegal activity would be found. The ICE officials at the time were customs agents looking for smuggled goods, especially tea, taxed so severely by the Crown that the colonists resorted to smuggling. Tea then, like fentanyl and immigrants today, was in high demand.

Might it be that current American spontaneous protests occurring all over the country on a daily basis are resistance in search of the necessary spark that ignites a movement or even a coherent rebellion against King Donald’s arbitrary violations of norms, precedents, laws, the Constitution, and the “natural rights” (human rights) of all people who reside within the borders of America?

Now, in America, human beings are being rousted out of their homes, places of worship, and places of work and shipped to a private prison in El Salvador. So little is known about them that they have joined the ranks of “the disappeared” — people removed by other autocrats, never to be heard from again. All of this under color of law and claimed legitimate presidential power to do so without any limitation whatsoever. This is unprecedented in America, even colonial America under multiple British kings.

King Donald has abused “legitimacy” and “legality” — surpassing even the abuses and claimed prerogatives of the British monarchs. In the 1760s in America, there was no assault on the legitimacy of the courts, the common law itself, the lawyers, or the judges. And, unlike King Donald now, in the 1760s the courts at least authorized “general warrants” (writs of assistance), even if the search and seizure warrants were not based upon “probable cause” facts that criminal activity had occurred. Now, Trump’s ICE agents have seized people without any warrants at all and without any procedural due process at all — as required by the 4th and 5th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

What kind of irony might it be that in this American time and place, the land of immigrants, that the natural rights of immigrants as human beings will rescue Constitutional Rights for all of us? Don’t give up on the courts just yet. James Otis didn’t in 1761 and became the voice that launched the American resistance to the tyranny of kings.

‘Tis the season for resistance. Godspeed to the lawyers, the judges, the courts and the people. Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas)