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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America A Top 10 Apple Philosophy Podcast Author: Joel K. Douglas
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The Indomitable Maggie Chase Smith and the Tyranny of Reasonable Men
Monday, 2 February, 2026
The Founders knew about the Leviathan.They had read their Bibles. Job. Isaiah. Ezekiel. The beast that cannot be bargained with. Cannot be tamed. Cannot be killed. They had lived under a king. They knew what unchecked power looked like when it wore a crown.They did not fear a British king. They had beaten him already.They feared an American one.So they built a cage. Three branches. Separate powers. Ambition made to counter ambition. No single branch could grow so powerful that it swallowed the others.The cage was made of parchment. Ink and argument. Parchment doesn’t hold beasts.Only an oath could do that.Prologue: The Weight of OathsAn oath is an ancient thing.In the old world, to swear was to stake your life on your word. You called God to witness. To lie was to invite destruction from the Almighty I AM.The Hebrews understood this. When God gave Moses the commandments on Mount Sinai, He gave ten. The first: I AM. You will have no other gods before me. And right after: do not swear an oath in my name in vain. The order is striking. Right after idolatry. Before murder. Before theft. Before adultery. Most people think that the commandment means not to curse using God’s name. It does not. It means: do not swear an oath in God’s name and then break it. Do not call the Almighty to witness your word and then make Him witness to a lie. God cared about this enough to put it near the top of the list. Above killing. Above stealing. A man who swears falsely in God’s name profanes the relationship between humanity and the divine. He makes God complicit in his lie.That is an oath sworn in the name of the I AM. Not a formality. A covenant, sworn at the foot of the throne of God.The American oath didn’t start that way. In 1789, the First Congress kept it simple. It was only: I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States.That was it. There were plenty of Founders who did not believe, and they left the Almighty out of it. No enemies. No mental reservations. No “so help me God.” The Founders trusted that men who swore would mean it. They had just fought a revolution alongside each other. They knew who they were.Then came the Civil War.In 1861, Southern officers resigned their commissions. Southern senators walked out of the chamber to join the Confederacy. They had sworn the short, simple oath and broken it before the ink was dry.Abraham Lincoln watched the government tear itself apart from within. He had administered the oath to men who treated it like a formality. A ceremony. Words you say because the occasion requires it, not because you mean them.So, in 1862, Congress rewrote the oath.They added “enemies foreign and domestic” because Lincoln had learned what domestic enemies look like. They look like colleagues. Friends. Men who sit beside you, debate policy, and then choose to burn the country down.They added “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” because Lincoln had watched men parse their words, keep their options open, swear with their fingers crossed behind their backs.They added “so help me God” because they wanted everyone who spoke the words to remember who was listening. The oath became:I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.Lincoln’s oath. Forged in betrayal. Designed to smoke out traitors. To make a man say, out loud, that he had no secret loyalties. That he meant what he said. That the Almighty was watching, and would judge.Every Senator since has spoken these words. Hand raised. Voice steady. The chamber, watching. They can choose to affirm rather than swear on the Almighty, but most choose to swear. The oath is not a contract. A contract binds two parties. Breach it, and there are remedies. Damages one can pay and walk away.The oath is a covenant. You are not making a deal with the Senate, or the people, or the Constitution. You are making a promise to God, and the Republic is the subject of that promise. When you break it, you do not answer to voters or courts. You answer to the Almighty.This oath is the bars of the cage. The cage holds only as long as the oath-keepers keep their word.They stopped keeping it.Act I. The CageCongress gave away the power to declare war.In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stood before Congress and requested a declaration of war against Japan. They voted. That’s how it works. The last time Congress declared war was 1942.Since then, American soldiers in Korea. Vietnam. Grenada. Panama. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Syria. Yemen. January 3, 2026, Venezuela. Congress watched. Congress complained. Congress did not vote.They gave the president permission to do what he wanted so they wouldn’t have to answer for it. Authorization, not declaration. Authorization. A word designed to provide cover. To let them say, if it goes badly, we didn’t decide this. And if it goes well, we supported it all along.The Constitution says Congress declares war because the Founders knew what kings do with armies. They wanted the people’s representatives to look a mother in the eye and say: I voted to send your son. Here is why.Congress doesn’t want to look anyone in the eye.They handed the first key to the president and pretended the cage was still locked.Congress gave away the power of the purse.In 1976, they passed the National Emergencies Act. The idea was simple: a president could declare an emergency, but Congress would review it every six months. Congress would decide if the emergency was real. Congress would hold the purse strings.Now we live under around fifty active national emergencies. Some date back decades. Congress can force the question. Congress rarely does.One of them is from 1979. It’s older than most of the staffers who work in the Capitol. It’s been renewed, automatically, ninety times. Somewhere, a family’s assets are frozen under an emergency declared before their children were born. Congress has reviewed none of them.They discovered that complaining about the president was easier than stopping him. Complaining gets you on television. Stopping him gets you a primary challenger. So they complain. They hold hearings. They write letters. And the emergencies compound, year after year, while the wars keep grinding on under authorizations no one remembers voting for.Another key, handed over. The cage door, rattling.Congress gave away the power to tax.We fought a revolution over this. Taxation without representation. The words are carved into the American memory. The Founders put the taxing power in Congress because they understood: the people who pay should choose the people who decide.In 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Economists blame it for deepening the Great Depression. So Congress decided the problem wasn’t the policy. The problem was having to vote on it. They delegated tariff authority to the president.Ninety-five years later, one man sets tariff rates by tweet. A soybean farmer in Iowa watches the price of his crop collapse overnight. He didn’t vote for tariffs. He voted for a congressman who pretended it wasn’t his problem.Tariffs are taxes on the American people. Every economist knows this. Every member of Congress knows this. And every one of them has decided that fighting the president is harder than letting him do what he wants.A third key. The cage, standing open.Three surrenders. War. Emergencies. Taxes.Not one of them taken by force. Not one of them seized by a tyrant. Congress voted for each surrender. They held hearings, made speeches, and handed over the keys because keeping them meant taking responsibility, and responsibility is heavy, and elections are soon.The Founders built the cage to hold the Leviathan. They knew the beast couldn’t be killed. They gave Congress the power to contain it because they believed the people’s representatives would guard that power jealously.They could not imagine legislators who would volunteer to surrender. Who would unlock the cage because the beast inside might help them win their next election. Who would swear a covenant before God and then act as if God wasn’t watching.The chamber is quiet now. Papers shuffle. No one meets anyone’s eyes. They are all waiting for someone else to speak first. Someone with more seniority. More cover. Someone whose seat is safer.The silence isn’t empty. It’s full of reasonable men, calculating the cost of courage and deciding that today isn’t the day.The cage is open.Beast walks free.And every one of them swore a covenant. On occasion, one might take it seriously.Act II. The Oath KeeperJune 1, 1950.Margaret Chase Smith sat at her desk in the United States Senate, fifteen pages in her hand. She had typed them herself, late at night, in her office, with no staff and no consultation.She was fifty-two years old. Had been a Senator for sixteen months. The only woman in the chamber. Her colleagues reminded her of this in small ways every day. The cloakroom went quiet when she entered. Jokes and laughter when she left. Committee assignments went to men with half her experience.Twenty feet away sat Joseph McCarthy.Four months earlier, McCarthy had stood before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and held up a piece of paper. A list, he said. Two hundred and five Communists in the State Department. The next day, the number was fifty-seven. The day after, it was “a lot.” The number didn’t matter. The fear did.McCarthy had discovered something simple: you don’t need evidence. You need volume. Repetition. Accusation. Men who are too afraid to call you a liar because they’re afraid you’ll call them a Communist.The Senate responded to McCarthy the way some men respond to a grease fire. Everyone waiting for someone else to grab the extinguisher. The Democrats thought he’d burn himself out. The Republicans thought he was useful. The senior statesmen thought someone would stop him. Someone with more standing. More protection.Reasonable men, all of them. Calculating.That morning, McCarthy had approached Smith on the Senate tram. “Margaret,” he said, “you look serious. Are you going to make a speech?”“Yes,” she said. “And you will not like it.”What she didn’t say: he had already made his offer. He controlled Wisconsin’s delegation. The vice-presidency, he told her, wasn’t out of reach. All she had to do was stay silent.Think about what he was offering.A woman in 1950 could not serve on a jury in many states. Could not get a credit card in her own name. Could not sign a lease without a husband or father. The Senate had ninety-six members. She was the only woman. And Joseph McCarthy was offering her the second-highest office in the nation.Legitimacy. Power. A seat at the table she had been denied her whole life.All she had to do was put the pages back in the drawer.She stood. “Mr. President,” she said, and her voice was steady. “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition.”She did not look at McCarthy again.“The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination.”Ninety senators had measured the cost of speaking. Every one of them had decided the cost was too high.“I think it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.”She spoke for fifteen minutes. Did not raise her voice. Did not gesture. She stood in the well of the Senate and said what the reasonable men would not.When she finished, the chamber was silent.McCarthy leaned toward an aide. His voice carried the way he intended. “Snow White,” he said, “and the Six Dwarfs.”Someone laughed. Not many. Enough.They made her pay.From that day forward, McCarthy’s staff called her Moscow Maggie. Her committee assignments dried up. The invitations stopped. The whispering followed her down every corridor for years.She had made an enemy of the most dangerous man in Washington. A man who had destroyed careers with less provocation.She knew this would happen. She stood anyway.They could take her seat. Her reputation. Her future in the party. They could not take her name. They could not make her a liar. They could not undo the words she had spoken.She had sworn a covenant. I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.She had not sworn to the Republican Party. She had not sworn to protect her seniority. She had not sworn to wait for someone more qualified to be brave first.The reasonable men kept their seats. Maggie Smith kept her word.Act III. The SilenceThree years passed.McCarthy kept swinging. He attacked the Army. The State Department. Anyone who questioned him. The reasonable men stayed reasonable.Then a broadcaster named Edward R. Murrow decided he had seen enough.Murrow’s See It Now showed McCarthy for what he was. The bullying. The sneering. The accusations he couldn’t support and didn’t need to, because fear did his work for him. Murrow played McCarthy’s own words back to him and let the country watch.At the end, Murrow spoke to the camera:“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”Maggie Smith had said the same thing three years earlier, when no one else would. She threw the first punch. Murrow followed. The tide turned.In 1954, the Senate censured Joseph McCarthy. His power broke. He died three years later, destroyed by alcohol and his own recklessness.The fever passed.Maggie Chase Smith served in the Senate for twenty-four years.She ran for president in 1964, the first woman to seek a major party’s nomination. She lost, but she did not disappear.At sixty years old, she climbed into an F-100 Super Sabre and broke the sound barrier. They called her Mach-buster Maggie.She returned to Skowhegan, Maine, when her time in Washington was done. Built a library. Taught. Watched the country she had served.She died in 1995. Ninety-seven years old. She had outlived McCarthy by nearly four decades.They tried to take her name. They failed.The Leviathan did not die with McCarthy.The beast is patient. He was here before the Founders and will be here long after we are gone.He does not need to storm the Capitol. He does not need to burn the Constitution. He only needs men and women who want to keep their seats more than they want to keep their word.Today, Congress is silent again.The executive stretches. Issues orders without authorization. Emergencies without review. Tariffs fall like edicts from a throne. Congress holds hearings. Complains. Fundraises off the outrage. Chooses not to act.They have the power to check the Leviathan. They have the duty. They swore an oath.The same silence. The same cage, standing open.Abraham Lincoln would say it plainly.He watched men he trusted walk out of the chamber to make war on the Republic. He rewrote the oath with their faces in his mind. He did not add “enemies foreign and domestic” for rhetorical effect. He added it because he had seen what domestic enemies looked like.They looked like colleagues. Friends. Men who debated policy and then decided their comfort mattered more than their country.He would say that an oath is not a promise to do what is easy. It is a promise to do what is required when doing so costs you everything. Mrs. Smith understood this. The men around her did not.Courage is not rare. It is common. What is rare is the willingness to pay its price.They broke their oaths. They may not have intended treason, but intention matters less than consequence. The cage is open. Beast walks free. And it was not tyrants who opened it. It was reasonable men who decided their comfort mattered more than their word.Fear is human. Failure is human. Swearing before God and then acting as if God were not watching—that is an unforgivable thing.Today, the chamber is quiet.Papers shuffle. No one meets anyone’s eyes. They are waiting for someone else to speak first. Someone with more seniority. More cover. Someone whose seat is safer.The cage is open. Beast walks free.And every one of them swore before the Almighty.MusicArtist: AiyoSong: Long Way Home Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
