These Days Before the Vote: ‘He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good’

Whitewater, Wis. — It's sunny here in this small college town. Today‘s entry continues These Days Before the Vote, a series addressing each day before the November election a principle or position on which the liberal democratic tradition rests.

There is a debate, as one would expect, about when America, as a nation, truly began. It’s not a debate I’ll enter today. Instead, this libertarian blogger will turn to the Declaration to review the Founders grievances against George III from the perspective of our own grievances against Donald J. Trump these two and a half centuries later.

By my count, the Second Continental Congress’s enumerated accusations against the British king amounted to twenty-nine.

The first of those accusations against the crown, that “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” is as true of today’s would-be monarch as it was of yesteryear’s genuine one. Earlier this week, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Impoundment Control Act did not permit withholding the funds past expiration without congressional action. See U.S. Gov’t Accountability Off., Impoundment Control Act of 1974: Review of President’s Special Message of September 25, 2026, B-338788 (Sept. 29, 2026).

This is a pattern with Trump, expressed in the terms that he would use: there is no government under Trump except Trump. Discussions about the constitutionally enumerated powers of Articles I, II, and III mean little to a man who will not count past one.

We might have thought the United States had a Congress and a Supreme Court, however disappointing their majorities, established under law. Trump challenges our rightful understanding with his wrongful action: he acts, daring Americans to oppose him. He hopes that self-doubt and diffidence will stay our hands.

On the contrary, we are, as we were centuries ago, a people of certainty and confidence.

Trump wrongfully abrogates laws for the public good, refusing to enforce lawfully what he rejects personally.