Once upon a time in America, there was a tyrant. And Congress rejected him totally.

The tyrant, of course, was King George III, the target of the Declaration of Independence. We take it for granted now, but the Declaration was an enormous political innovation -- in it, the country that became the United States of America laid claim to certain “unalienable” rights, rights that took precedence over any king or crown.

To protect those rights, our Founders declared that the People were allowed to “alter” or “abolish” the government — in this case, British rule over the American colonies.

The point of the famous preamble to the Declaration — “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” — is that the government should exist to protect our rights, a radical proposition in an era when governments mostly existed on the basis that one guy was descended from another guy. Over time, the idea that “the People” have “unalienable rights” became so standard that it slipped into cliche, the stuff of car commercials. But this was not a throwaway line. These rights are repeated throughout the founding documents of the United States. Life and liberty aren’t just there for decoration — they are essential to the spec. They are the reason why the entire American system has been designed the way it has.

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