Puzzling It Out

 

If we had a picture of what “America First” would look like, how might we envision that?

·       Protected borders.

·       Trade deals that are to our overall advantage.

·       Trade deals that prevent our enemies from controlling the supply and transport of goods we want to buy and sell.

·       Regional protection, to further secure our borders.

·       Alliances that are equally beneficial to us and our allies, rather than mainly costs and burdens to us while protecting the allies.

·       Domestic peace, law, and order to protect life, liberty, and property.

·       Equal protection of our rights as citizens.

·       Prioritization of citizens over legal non-citizens, and no acceptance of illegal non-citizens.

·       Better election infrastructure and laws to ensure election integrity.

·       More transparency and truth, to allow for clearer decisionmaking.

·       I’m sure there might be a few other things we could list. But let’s just point out that the America First picture goes beyond the boundaries of the United States, necessarily.

Similarly, if you were thinking “My Home First,” you would want your home protected and in good shape for those living in it with you, but you would also benefit from a healthy, thriving, safe neighborhood, within a healthy, thriving, and safe community, city, county, state, region, etc. It’s not that you’re trying to control all those larger circles; it’s that you know you and all your neighbors near and distant will benefit from the things that benefit your home, so interest in those things is mutual.

There have been a fair number of beyond-our-boundaries locations President Trump has acted on since coming into office in 2025. Some of them were more than a little surprising.

I think President Trump spent those four additional waiting years looking at the table with puzzle pieces spread all over—while looking at the picture on the box that the rest of us don’t see.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Lawmaking: Celebrating the Semiquincentennial, Part III

The US Constitution consists of three articles—one for each branch of government—plus four more articles with general rules about citizenship and money and such things, and then come the amendments, which are numbered, and of which the first ten are considered the Bill of Rights.

So this month we’re going to talk about the legislative branch, and lawmaking, which is the task of the legislative branch.

But first, a couple of other semi-relevant celebrations. This week, March 4, marks 15 years since I started the Spherical Model blog. Hurray!

And also this week, March 2, we mark the Independence of Texas, from Mexico, in 1836.

As with the US separation from Great Britain, all avenues of diplomacy aimed at having our rights respected had failed, leaving separation—even if by war—as the only alternative for a people who would live free.

In the case of Texas, Stephen F. Austin had traveled to the Mexican capital to express the territory’s grievances and require the Mexican nation to abide by its constitution. In answer, he was placed in an underground dungeon, in which he could not stand, for 18 months. He never fully recovered his health from that ordeal and died a few short years later. Austin came home and declared that the only alternative left to them was to fight. And while the siege at the Alamo was ongoing, the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos (newly re-opened museum info here). Within a few weeks, Sam Houston’s army surprised Mexico’s Santa Anna, the dictator, at San Jacinto, captured him alive, and forced him to recognize their independence and end the war. (By the way, because the Texians won, that place is pronounced Say-ann Juh-SIN-toe.)

As the US Declaration of Independence reminds us, we humans are born to be free. Governments are established to protect our lives, our liberty, and our property. But government, like fire, needs to be carefully circumscribed, so it doesn’t get out of control.

As Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense,

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

For this reason, when the founders wrote the Constitution, they limited government to certain enumerated powers—and nothing else, without specific amendments passed by the majority of the United States.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.