Below is my column in The Hill on the controversial remarks of Sen. Tim Kaine (D. Va.) denouncing a nominee who believed in natural law and the concept of God-given rights. By the end of the hearing, Kaine effectively lumped Alexander Hamilton with Ayatollah Khomeini in his statement at the committee hearing.
Here is the column:
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) this week warned the American people that a Trump nominee for a State Department position was an extremist, cut from the same cloth as the Iranian mullahs and religious extremists.
Riley Barnes, nominated to serve as assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor, revealed his dangerous proclivities to Kaine in his opening statement when he said that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”
It was a line that should be familiar to any citizen — virtually ripped from the Declaration of Independence, our founding document that is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary.
Yet Kaine offered a very surprising response in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”
In my forthcoming book celebrating the 250th anniversary, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I detail how the Declaration of Independence (and our nation as a whole) was founded on a deep belief in natural laws coming from our Creator, not government.
That view is captured in the Declaration, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Kaine represents Virginia, the state that played such a critical role in those very principles that he now associates with religious fanatics and terrorists.
In fact, Kaine’s view did exist at the founding — and it was rejected. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
Although the Framers were clear, Kaine seemed hopelessly confused. He later insisted that “I’m a strong believer in natural rights, but I have a feeling if we were to have a debate about natural rights in the room and put people around the table with different religious traditions, there would be some significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights.”
This country was founded on core, shared principles of natural law, including a deep commitment to individual rights against the government. The government was not the source but the scourge of individual rights.
This belief in preexisting rights was based on such Enlightenment philosophers as John Locke who believed that, even at the beginning when no society existed, there was law, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one,” he wrote. “And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind.”
Note that a natural law can also be based on a view of the inherent rights of human beings — a view of those rights needed to be fully human. Like divinely ordained rights, these are rights (such as free speech) that belong to all humans, regardless of the whim or want of a given government. They are still not “rights [that] come from our laws or our governments.”
The danger of legal positivism is that what government giveth, government can take away. Our prized unalienable rights become entirely alienable if they are merely the product of legislatures and courts.
It also means that constitutional protections or even the constitutional system itself is discardable, like out-of-fashion tricorn hats. As discussed in the book, a new generation of Jacobins is rising on the American left, challenging our constitutional traditions. Commentator Jennifer Szalai has denounced what she called “Constitution worship” and argued that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”
That chorus includes establishment figures such as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley Law School and author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
Other law professors, such as Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale, have called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
That “reclamation” is easier if our rights are based not in natural law, but rather in the evolving priorities of lawmakers like Kaine. Protections then become not the manifestations of human rights, but of rights invented by humans.
Kaine’s view — that advocates of natural law are no different from mullahs applying Sharia law — is not just ill-informed but would have been considered by the founders as constitutionally blasphemous.
He is, regrettably, the embodiment of a new crisis of faith in the foundations of our republic on the very eve of its 250th anniversary. This is a crisis of faith not just in our Constitution, but in each other as human beings “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a best-selling author whose forthcoming“Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution” explores the foundations and the future of American democracy.
Jefferson had it right except that as a deist he had not the slightest idea about the nature of god other than his opinion that the creation was the result of a force far beyond his and human comprehension, certainly not the Biblical god and the process described in Genesis in which about 50% of the adult population of the USA who self-identify as Christian no longer believes due to Christianity’s (and all of the world’s religions’) delusional irrationality and denial of reason, logic, scientific evidence, probability theory, and common sense. When we add to that the immigration of non-Christians to the USA and Europe from the Middle East and Asia, the percentage of non-believers is about 75%. Western civilization is well into a post-Christian Era that is not going to be reversed by Pope Leo and our younger born-again X-Y-Z generation of evangelists. Let’s accept reality and move on.
Upchuck Farmer, you don’t care when Putin kills thousands of Ukrainians, so why do you care all of a sudden when a big black man kills a Ukrainian?
Rabble:
I’m unsure what Upstate comment you are referring to, Gigi, but the biggest difference is that this happened to someone in the USA, by a man who had been brought in by police no less than 14 times (that we know of), in a seemingly random act of extreme sheer violence. If Putin contracted this psycho to kill that woman, then we may have a different story. But, as it stands now, this is a random act of homicide.
Rabble:
Also, I was unaware that Putin is a supersoldier, capable of singly-handedly murdering thousands in the span of a couple years
His soldiers are following his orders.
Rabble:
You already said your truth, that Putin is killing thousands. Don’t go moving your own goalposts now. How can one man single-handedly murder thousands a day? He must be Omni-man, or something else pop culture.
Orders to kill Ukrainians. Not Americans.
The social contract – the justification for the existance of govenrment. requires that the government of Ukraine – not the govenrment of the US protect Ukrainians.
The US is not obligate to protect Ukrainians, or Uighurs, or nigerians or any other group in the world that is being attacked by another.
We have chosen to provide Ukrain arms. Nearly all of us support that – though we are not in agreement regarding the limits.
We have NOT chosen to provide Ukraine with the blood of our children.
That is THEIR govenrments job.
Was it wrong to liberate France from the Germans?
The US govenrment is not the policemen of the world.
It is however the policemen of the US.
The social contract REQUIRES our government to protect OUR rights – not those of every person anywhere in the world
Your views are wrong because there is a precedent for it already happening. The invasion of Normandy.
Your precedent holds no water.
Germany declared war on the US.
Germany was ally of Japan, who engaged in all out war against us.
Germany was sinking US shipping with U-boats and killing Americans.
France was a strategic ally.
Russia has not. Ukraine is not.
Get a grip on your idiocy.
Annony moron, it happened here in America. The man has been arrested 14 times, released and then went on to commit murder. Now, and only now will he be put some place where he will not be a danger to society. The difference between you and I, had I been on that train, I would of done something to stop and help that young woman. You would of expected someone else, like me, to do it for you.
And you are wrong as usual. I care that there are people dying on both sides. But I do not see where it is in our best interest to get involved, possibly starting WWIII and a nuclear exchange ending all life on earth. And if you really wanted to assign blame for all those deaths, you should be blaming Biden the Butcher, who sent Boris Johnson to squash the tentative peace deal in Istanbul in 2022. Had it not been for Biden the Butcher, all that death and destruction would of never happened.
What is the vocal range of this growing chorus?
It depends. Is it a gay chorus?
I agree “That ‘reclamation’ is easier if our rights are based not in natural law, but rather in the evolving priorities of lawmakers like….” (insert a name).
Also this statement “This country was founded on core, shared principles of natural law, including a deep commitment to individual rights against the government. The government was not the source but the scourge of individual rights.”
But despite the rhetoric, we can only discern right from wrong by following our own good conscious, hopefully led by honorable principles. Philosophers aside, inquiry into motives is fair on both ends.
How can the government be trusted to protect our rights when government trends toward tyranny?
It’s an oxymoron.
Why would all tryants want to be against God by violating the rights that God gave us?
It’s suicidal to be against God.
Leave it to Kaine (Harvard Law) to equate Thomas Jefferson with the Ayatollahs of Iran.
Some days the likes of Kaine, Chimerinsky, Doerfler, Moyn and the Clintons make me almost ashamed to be a lawyer.
-g
He was Hillary Clinton’s life insurance policy. That says it all…
https://www.senate.gov/isvp/?auto_play=false&comm=foreign&filename=foreign090325&poster=https://www.foreign.senate.gov/assets/images/video-poster.png&stt=0
Around the 1:42 mark.
Kaine says he is a “strong believer in natural rights.”
He is responding DIRECTLY to the ridiculous statement from Barnes that none of our rights come from law and government. That is what he finds “extremely troubling.”
His position is the same as James Madison – who understood that the essence of the Lockean social compact is that we relinquish certain of our natural rights and we receive, in return, more effectual protection for certain of our rights, plus the enjoyment of positive rights, that is, rights created by the action of political society.
For example, we surrender a certain portion of our natural liberty to be American citizens. To enjoy the protection of a fire department, we must surrender a portion of our income as taxes. This is the social compact in a nutshell.
Barnes doesn’t think that any of our rights are created by law or government.
But Madison clarified at the First Congress that a bill of rights would specify two types of rights: those “which are are retained when particular powers are given up to be exercised by the Legislature” and “positive rights” like trial by jury “which cannot be considered as a natural right, but a right resulting from a social compact.”
Natural rights are rights human beings possess in a state of nature – principally ownership of one’s own body and the product of one’s labors, and the right to use violence against others to punish violations of the law of nature. Importantly these natural rights do not necessarily survive into civil society; some are “retained” and others are “surrendered” in an exchange for greater security in those that are retained. “Positive rights” are rights not enjoyed in the state of nature. “Retained rights” comprise only a subset of natural rights, which survive the social compact.
Kaine understands this – because, as he notes in his testimony – what everyone in the room deems their “natural rights” may differ – it is laws and government, which memorialize the subset of natural rights which are RETAINED natural rights in the social compact that is America. Without laws and government, there is no way to know memorialize the surviving natural rights that exist in our social compact.
Idiot
Please find anywhere in the constitution or the works of our founders ANYTHING about govenrment protection of “positive right”.
That is bunk. Rights are inherently negative – or atleast the relationship of government to them is.
That shalt NOT.
The bill of rights is written as Government SHALL NOT INFRINGE.
Government can grant privileges. It can’t grant rights. It can only safeguard them or suppress them.
I have listened to parts of the Bari Weiss interview of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and it is upbeat, free-flowing and captivating. A devout Catholic Justice, with 7 children (2 adopted minorities), was interviewed by a married lesbian Jew, and the Left will have none of it. They are once again hurling their vomitus. What really angers them is that Justice Barrett commands respect and attention by Americans at large, while the DEI Biden nominated Justice who is not a biologist, can’t define “woman”, and not grounded to the US Constitution nor case law, can’t seem to muster the interest of Americans.
winning!
Amy Coney Barrett Told Bari Weiss She’s a “Huge Fan” of The Free Press
What is known is that the Supreme Court justice, who replaced the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg within days of the 2020 election, really, really likes The Free Press. “I’m a huge fan,” she told Weiss, its editor and founder, near the start of their conversation before a sold-out crowd that included other federal judges, scholars, and Charlie Rose.
Corporate ownership of media organizations can be a tricky subject for judges and Supreme Court justices, especially if one of these conglomerates comes before them in a future case. Can you truly be impartial if you’re a fan of a subsidiary of the parent company?
Weiss, while introducing Barrett, took her own veiled swipes at the same “legacy press,” where she once worked, for its apparent inability to make up its mind about the woman sitting across from her.
Vanity Fair
I do not always agree with Weiss, But she is one of manyt absolutely fantastic journalists who prove that the collapse of the MSM will not harm us in the slightest.
That real journalism continues to exist.
Estovir,
Thank you for pointing that out. I find it interesting how The Free Press can have regular interviews with people like Barrett, while MSM cannot.
Kaine is a Harvard Law grad and a summa cum laude University of Missouri grad . Says a lot about the decline in American higher education standards
I can see it now. C-Span footage of Senator Kaine making that statement placed all over the airwaves at midterms by the RNC with the message “Democrats finally say the quiet part out loud”.
In my view, our rights come from our nature as human beings and the fact that freedom and individual rights are crucial for human life. The very serious problem with Kaine’s views is the idea that we get rights only with government approval and/or the passing of a law allowing us our rights. This is an ugly error which can lead directly to dictatorship and Kaine should be held in contempt for even voicing it.
How can we separate church and state if the rights our government protects with the Constitution emanate from God?
Many of our founders were Deists. They believed in God, but no certain God. Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian. You are confused and conflating God with organized religion.
That is why they separated church and state. So the state couldn’t dictate a certain religion and oppress people that had a different religion. It was not to deny a god. Now Jefferson though not s Christian supported Christian morals. Don’t confuse the two, a belief there is a god and an organizatied religion.
Separation of Church and State is simple! The State gives no money to the Church and passes no laws specifically for an established religion. And the Church gives no money to the government or any of its representatives!
“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself and God does not take care to support so that it’s professors are are obliged to call for help “tis a sign, I apprehend of its being a bad one.” Benjamin Franklin letter to Richard Price October 9 1798
You’re all stupid and God should destroy you.
Anon shrink. Show me on the doll where everyone hurt you.
God does destroy us all in death
Believers believe he will save us that believe in an afterlife.
Classic Kaine – he misquotes the Declaration so he can make his argument, so it fits with his agenda: “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from ‘THE’ Creator.” As a law maker, he is practicing what he preaches – rewriting the constitution because it is only him and his perspectives that matters.
The actual line: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by ‘THEIR’ Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As accurately written, each individual decides who created them, some deity, their parents, the wicked witch of the west, luck or magic of birth … or as Kaine might say, he created himself.
It’s the left’s overwhelming belief that Americans need to be told how to live and be under government control. The Constitution serves as a roadblock to their totalitarian objectives, and they continue to undermine the courts in efforts override it. How can these pukes detest the freedoms and liberties of others?
“How can these pukes detest the freedoms and liberties of others?”
That’s easy. They detest themselves, first of all, project that detestation on the rest of us, and question how anyone as evil and corrupt as they are can be entrusted with freedom and liberty. I do understand the inherent conflict there, but that sort of logic has no foothold within their sickness.
MAGA detests the freedoms and liberties of Ukrainians, other members of mankind whose rights are sacred.
..Dear anonymous form the Darkside.. only in your make-believe universe would ‘MAGA ‘detest’ freedoms and liberties. Nice try… but we all know better.. try preaching your rubbish elsewhere….
“They detest . . .”
That is a stunningly astute sentence.
*. Very few people are versed in formal logic. Imperatives, derivatives, posteriori (sp) a priori, categorical and so on. Most can grasp fundamental no murder, no theft, as simply put in religion as codified morals.
Legal positivism is new to me and I doubt I can grasp its nuance.
Laws have become micromanagement of lives. People are confined homes, offices maybe and maybe not. Too many laws, too big government…
Deliver the mail on time. Protect people from robbers and thieves , maimers and murderers, run an economy from the bottom up because if the poor can afford food the tycoon can, too.
If you’re laws are amoral then most likely they’re irrational, too.
Nutjob Breyer is most likely a positivist. Now I must read what I cannot fully understand, legal positivism.
“Legal positivism” was new to me too.
Turley says; “The idea that laws “come from the government” is the basis of what is called “legal positivism,” which holds that the legitimacy and authority of laws are not based on God or natural law but rather legislation and court decisions.”
*.. . and a small army of expensive, highly paid lawyers.
ps. >” run an economy from the bottom up because if the poor can afford food the tycoon can, too.”
I’ve always wanted to eat a tycoon .. . with a little salt and pepper people will eat anything.
They taste like chicken.
Speaking of blasphemy, $83 million dollars to E. Jean Carroll sure seems unusual to me, if not cruel, considering the fact that there was no video, no witnesses, no call to police, no rape kit, and no evidence of a crime—nothing but a grand scheme and tale told by a so-called journalist, author, and advice columnist and a bunch of her clllllosest BFFs who lived lives of fiction in the realm of story-telling.
_____________________________
“A jury in a 2023 civil trial found that Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll but did not find that he raped her as defined under New York law (which requires penetration with the penis).”
“So, to directly answer your question:
“The jury did not find that Trump penetrated E. Jean Carroll with his penis. They found him liable for sexual abuse (which can involve other forms of unwanted sexual contact) and later awarded Carroll millions in damages for defamation.”
– ChatGPT
Trump is a rapist and pedophile. Live with it.
Trump Every Trans groomer is a rapist and a pedophile. Live with it
Everyone knows Trans people are rapists, murderers, nymphomaniacs and groomers, but which one are you, the trans nymphomaniac or the one wishing to be groomed?
That’s not excessive. The appeals court deemed it appropriate. Trump is going to have to cough oup $83 million. He’s already been held liable for sexual abuse. By several courts. I don’t think the Surpreme court will bail him out of this.
Idiot. Two is not several.
And he will never have to pay. You are delusional
Rabble:
How is 83 mil for a civil court case, where the accuser does not have any evidence, who took her plot beat-by-beat from a Law&Order: SVU episode, where the accused was unable to provide their evidence against, anywhere close to “fair and just”?
The rest of the country should boycott New York State until it is deprived of $830 billion dollars in tourist spending as a requite for the abomination of its court system’s treatment of Trump. And send the state government a letter explaining why you are avoiding NYS for a decade or two.
Speaking of constitutional blasphemy, the judicial branch’s usurpation and exercise of executive power is blasphemy.
Every day a judge illicitly strikes down acts of the president, as if it can, and, of course, it can’t.
Every time the judicial branch denies the president the executive power that is vested in him, the judicial branch unconstitutionally usurps and exercises that very executive power.
Some don’t like it, but the executive power, all of the executive power, is vested in a president of the United States, and no other branch or officer.
No legislation and no adjudication may usurp and exercise any degree of executive power.
If the president’s acts are egregious, Congress may impeach him, and the Senate may convict him.
Where the —- is the Supreme Court of the United States, sworn by oath to support the “manifest tenor” of the Constitution?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“…courts…must…declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”
“…men…do…what their powers do not authorize, [and] what [their powers] forbid.”
“[A] limited Constitution … can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing … To deny this would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
– Alexander Hamilton
Sen. Tim Kaine statements are nothing more than a reflection of one mans rejection of Christianity and divine authority. It’s nothing new. Folks have been doing it for a long time. People like him believe they know better than anyone regarding what is right and what is wrong. They believe they are smarter than the founding fathers, smarter than all the citizens of this country put together; and smarter than any deity, God; and especially one called Christ. Who name it, they are smarter. People like him put themselves above everyone else. The believe they alone know everything there is to know on every subject there is to talk about. Sadly, there is one thing that his statements do make crystal clear. That is the wisdom of Romans 1:22. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”