By Benard Giroux

“Nothing good could come from a regime that not only refused to protect the rights of individuals but also participated in their persecutions.” —After Dunkirk (Severn River Publishing, 2023)

This statement was found in Lee Jackson’s book, a historical fiction about the development of those groups of French patriots who counteracted the cynical tyranny and terror that Hitler spread throughout France in 1940.

This statement sets the stage for examining and exposing the apparent abuses of power and subsequent political reality that result in the destruction of the historical foundations of government in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by the current lawless, progressive rule of a one-party Democrat legislature with an insurmountable majority, resulting in the suppression of individual freedom, self-determination, and other inalienable rights as defined in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a document drafted by John Adams and used as a model for the U.S. document.

As a preamble, the following excerpt is taken from a speech given by President Calvin Coolidge on July 11, 1926, in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA, on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

While most state constitutions empowered the lower houses of their legislatures to shape policy, the Massachusetts Constitution built up the powers of the other branches of government. It created a powerful Governor — elected directly by the people and equipped with a veto that could check unwise legislation. It created a Senate designed to check the abuses of the more democratic lower house. And it created an independent judiciary. For the Founding generation, the Massachusetts Constitution embodied important constitutional principles like the separation of powers and checks and balances.

However, no provision exists to recall the governor.

Today, the Massachusetts legislature and the sitting governor no longer subscribe to the tenets of either Constitution, nor do they concern themselves with following the procedural rules that require them to obey certain laws and rules of ethics to maintain the democratic, constitutional rule of law within the state. The legislature is enabled to direct its power away from these requirements by the current governor, Maura Healey.

Healey rules the state; she does not govern it. She acts as if we, the people, are her subjects, such that the legislature deliberately considers us as servants of the state who will follow its mandates without question. By giving up our inalienable rights, we submit to a tyrannical abuse of power whereby the governor uses her office to clearly exceed the scope of her authority as governor of the Commonwealth and continues daily with this misuse of political power, without consideration of the costs to the citizens of the Commonwealth.

The governor ignores Coolidge’s phrase: “If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.” Her authority no longer derives from the “consent of the governed” but from her dictates supported by a compliant legislature following her fiats.

Healey has exceeded her authority and negatively impacted the Commonwealth in all areas concerning immigration, housing, energy, and transportation. She continues to use the term “sanctuary state” to describe the Commonwealth, despite the visible evidence that any policy based on that label contradicts the law and violates the U.S. Constitution. Healey exercises her power outside of those boundaries. Healey takes us back to an era of backroom politics with no transparency, a time of ancient, reactionary politics where power is not derived from the consent of the governed but from willfully ignoring the Constitution and its laws.

If we are, as citizens of this Commonwealth, to believe those words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, then we must all agree that we have the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that our government must derive its just powers from the consent of the governed, the people of the Commonwealth, not illegal aliens or backroom politicians.

We must also believe that if this current government is tyrannical and destructive of those ends, it is our right, as citizens of this Commonwealth, to institute a new government to restore the original principles upon which this Commonwealth was founded. Self-determination is one of those rights. Secret and closed meetings of the legislature or its committees without input from the citizens are destructive of those rights and represents a usurpation of the will of the people, without regard to their voice as citizens of this constitutional republic.

These are some of the reasons, based on the writings and concepts within the Declaration, why each citizen of the Commonwealth should demand that their political representatives follow the correct protocols established for governing. Set these supposed representatives on the hot seat and demand transparency, discussion, and accountability for their actions and their treatment of this electorate as subjects and not citizens.