You might think I’m being playful here, or even a teensy bit … snarky. But in fact, I speak in cold and deadly earnest, about an upcoming vote in Congress, which the House Freedom Caucus is fighting. 

But before I get to the “news hook,” permit me to beg you. Consider with all the seriousness you can muster for the future of our country what I’m about to lay out here. If it helps, think of your ancestors who served in America’s wars. Imagine that you’re standing in front of one of their tombstones. You’ve been tasked with explaining to them the kind of country you’re handing on to your children.

What’s Exceptional About America?

Ask yourself for a second what distinguished the U.S. in 1783 from every other nation on earth, and virtually in history? It didn’t grow up organically like a tree or a patch of mushrooms, from tribes and warlords and kings. It was built, like a finely crafted Swiss watch, with a very specific intention. It was founded by men obsessed with preventing the rise of tyranny. (Indeed, Progressive and Catholic Integralist totalitarians now sneer in print that our founders were clinical “tyrannophobes.”)

They didn’t build our governmental system to function smoothly and efficiently, like a bulldozer or a Panzer, so it could roll over its citizens. Men like John Adams and James Madison had seen plenty of countries whose governments functioned like that, from pharaonic Egypt to the Russia of the Tsars. Quite the contrary in fact: our founders built our system to resemble what the genius cartoonist Rube Goldberg would later sketch out.

Their goal was to create a functioning country with as many internal centers of potential resistance as possible, to avoid the worst possible outcome aside from total anarchy: the smooth and absolute rule of a dictatorial government.

First, they left most of the power with the states, not the federal government. Then they divided power there among three branches of government. But they went even further, dividing our “parliament” into two separate branches serving different terms in office, and elected in quite different ways. (Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures, which was better, but don’t get me started.) They wrote into the Constitution a right for the people to bear arms, so that in the last emergency they could overthrow the government.

The Power of the Purse

But do you want to know the most important single guarantee for freedom our founders put in place? It’s probably one you don’t think about very often, but they held it dear to their hearts. It was grounded in the real and ugly conflicts that had riven our mother country, England, and sparked its bloody Civil War.

Our founders decreed that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives — the humblest branch of government, whose members serve for only two years, and are closest to the people. No judge with a lifetime tenure, or six-year termed senator, much less a president, can write the bills that actually pay for every bayonet, bullet, and piece of printed paper used by the State.

Our founders remembered that the only thing which restrained the kings of England from ruling like Pharaohs or tsars was the “power of the purse,” held tight by the elected members of Parliament. They knew that kings like Charles I and even Charles II had tried to govern without consulting the legislature — and saw how it worked out in countries (like autocratic France and Spain) where kings got away with that.

That’s why such a seemingly minor piece of procedural machinery as “Who originates the funding bills?” got spelled out in our Constitution itself. The founding fathers knew that this provision was written in the blood of past rebels against tyrants. It had taken centuries to firmly establish this crucial check on monarchs in Britain. They weren’t going to leave such a thing to chance here in America.

Why Presidents Don’t Rule Like Kings

In our history, this power of Congress has played a crucial role in frustrating the power of presidents. In the years before Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was forced to carefully and gradually make the case for involving the U.S. in Europe’s Second World War, because members of congress were (rightly) still bitter over how America had been swindled into the First. Ronald Reagan wanted the U.S. to get involved in funding the Contras in Nicaragua. But Congress said no, and the whole Iran/Contra scandal resulted from Reagan’s officials (for noble reasons, no doubt) trying to … evade the Constitution.

But the rise of “omnibus” funding bills has rendered this crucial power of Congress almost meaningless. Instead of debating individual proposals for federal government action, our congressmen get presented annually with a massive pig in a poke. Vote up or down on this, they’re told. But they always know that they pretty much have to vote “yes” or else they’ll be accused of “shutting down the government.”

If It’s a Tyranny, Then SHUT IT DOWN

That blew up ugly for Newt Gingrich once, and Republicans have been pitiful cowards ever since, wringing their hands and voting “because we have no choice” for one abusive leftist monster program after another. So we vote to fund an FBI which is raiding pro-lifer’s homes, colluding to cover up Hunter Biden’s corruption, and cooking up false treason charges against elected presidents. If we refuse … egads, we might be accused of … “shutting down the government.”

America is not free if we’re not willing to do exactly that. A government that’s applying one set of laws to one group of citizens (Christians, pro-lifers, conservatives) and a different set to others deserves to be shut down. The whole point of founding the United States of America, of fighting the largest empire then on earth, Great Britain, was precisely to make that possible. George Washington and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson risked the hangman’s rope for this very reason.

But Republicans are afraid they’ll be accused of shutting down national parks. I say, “Shut them.” And shutter the FBI, which is far more dangerous to us than the criminals and terrorists it claims to hunt, unless it can be padlocked and fumigated — transformed from the KGB-style political police Obama made it, with help from George W. Bush’s un-American “Patriot Act.”

The Last Stand for Americanism

The House Freedom Caucus, the last bastion of genuine Americanism left in our government, is standing up on its hind legs, showing its teeth. And we should be supporting it. Now, at the end where I’ve buried my lede, I’ll reveal my “news hook.” Breitbart reports:

The House Freedom Caucus released a statement Monday that it opposes any stopgap spending bill that does not have border security measures, address the weaponization of the government, and end the left’s woke policies in the military. …

The group stated:

“We refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats’ bloated COVID-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden Administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities. Any support for a “clean” Continuing Resolution would be an affirmation of the current FY 2023 spending level grossly increased by the lame-duck December 2022 omnibus spending bill that we all vehemently opposed just seven months ago.”

Therefore, the Freedom Caucus said it would oppose any spending measures or a CR that fails to:

• Include the House-passed Secure the Border Act of 2023 that would combat the border crisis, stem the flow of human trafficking, and stop the flow of fentanyl into American communities
• Address the weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI
• End the “cancerous woke policies” in the Pentagon.

This, my fellow Americans, is how democracy’s meant to work. And if it can’t work that way, it’s worth shutting down. This juggernaut aimed at our families and our churches has an emergency brake.

It’s time to use it. And if we can’t do that, we might as well make Joe Biden our King, and his entitled degenerate scion, Hunter, the heir apparent to the throne. At least that will feed our media plenty of juicy scandals for decades to come. The House of Biden already makes the House of Windsor look like a convent full of Mother Teresa’s nuns.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”