If your favorite sports team was really awful, and you knew that they’d likely lose a vast majority of their games, would you be disappointed at the end of the season to learn that they did just what you expected them to do?

No, of course not.

Unfortunately, however, when it comes to the federal government, a lot of people seem to do the opposite. Even though the Founders told us to not rely on “parchment barriers” to enforce themselves, and they repeatedly told us that governments shouldn’t be trusted to limit their own power – we hear disappointment from these people every time we share news of states using the Founders’ tools to stop the feds.

This comment is an extremely common example:

Sure, you can still be sad when your team is awful, even if you expect them to lose all the time. But the regularity of this type of comment – or variations, like “why do we need a bill, they should just follow the Constitution” – leads me to believe that these people have unrealistic expectations for the federal government.

If they believed, like the Founders did, that the federal government should never be trusted to limit itself – and that the states and people should be using bills and other actions locally to reject federal overreach and bad policy – they wouldn’t be wondering at all. They’d be cheering on every effort to resist federal power and working to get more done.

As TJ Martinell put it,

“Governments do not restrain themselves. Governments do not keep people free. The people must restrain their governments. The people must preserve their freedoms.”

UPDATE, Jan 5 09:45am: Just saw another, “there’s no need” post and thought I’d share. It’s very common, and we’ve obviously got our work cut out for us.

Michael Boldin

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