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Opinion
Renee Good Died From the Kind of State Violence Our Founders Warned Against
When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
Jan 09, 2026
When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.
As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood”—as in “Do Good”—to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.
When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.
Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough.
Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.
Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.
In "Essay No. 6", in 1722, Dogood wrote:
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.
Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.
Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.
And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.
For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.
James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system—splitting the government into three co-equal parts—that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).
Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that Wednesday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.
To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:
The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital… [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she-Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Donald Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.
This isn’t an uniquely American problem: It’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: When state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.
As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz noted Wednesday, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.
Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.
If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.
Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.
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War-Making Belongs to Congress―and the Oil Belongs to the People of Venezuela
The question is not whether a particular president’s motives are sincere, nor whether a foreign government is flawed. The question is whether the United States will remain governed by law―or by precedent accumulated through silence.
Jan 09, 2026
The recent Senate debate over U.S. military action in Venezuela exposes a fundamental rupture in American constitutional governance: who has the authority to initiate war. The Constitution answers that question plainly. Yet modern practice―and the arguments advanced in defense of it―have drifted dangerously far from that design. Alongside this constitutional crisis stands a second, inseparable issue: whether the United States may lawfully claim control over the natural resources of another sovereign nation, specifically Venezuela’s oil, under the threat of force.
These questions are not abstract. They determine whether the United States remains governed by law or by precedent accumulated through executive action and congressional silence.
At the center of the debate are two sharply opposed views articulated on the Senate floor. One asserts that the President, as Commander in Chief, may unilaterally use military force whenever he deems it necessary to advance national interests, with Congress relegated to the limited roles of funding restriction or impeachment after the fact. The other insists that the power to initiate war belongs exclusively to Congress, not as a technicality, but as a deliberate constitutional safeguard against impulsive, personalized, or imperial war-making.
Constitutional design and deliberate restraint lie at the heart of the Framers’ intent. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress―not the President―the power to declare war. Article II assigns the President the authority to command the armed forces once war is authorized and to repel sudden attacks. This division was not accidental. It reflected deep skepticism, shared across the Founding generation, that executives are structurally inclined toward war. James Madison warned that the executive branch is “most prone to it,” driven by secrecy, ambition, and the temptation of unilateral action.
Bombing a foreign capital, removing a sitting head of state, and threatening prolonged military occupation are acts of war by any ordinary, historical, or legal definition. The Constitution does not permit semantic evasions to substitute for authorization.
The Framers, therefore, made war intentionally difficult to launch. They placed the decision in a deliberative body accountable to the people, requiring public debate, recorded votes, and political responsibility. That Congress has too often failed to exercise this duty does not diminish the Constitution’s command. Repeated violations do not convert usurpation into legality. Historical drift explains how power migrated; it does not justify why it should remain there.
Attempts to rebrand large-scale military operations as “law enforcement,” “arrest warrants,” or “limited actions” do not change their substance. Bombing a foreign capital, removing a sitting head of state, and threatening prolonged military occupation are acts of war by any ordinary, historical, or legal definition. The Constitution does not permit semantic evasions to substitute for authorization.
The War Powers Resolution―and the myth of congressional overreach is often invoked as the supposed villain. Critics claim that the 1973 War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional because it allegedly transforms Congress into “535 commanders-in-chief.” This argument inverts constitutional logic. The Resolution does not empower Congress to command troops; it reasserts Congress’s authority to decide whether hostilities initiated by the executive may lawfully continue. It exists precisely because Congress had been sidelined, not because it had seized power.
The statute’s reporting requirements and time limits are accountability mechanisms, not vetoes of military command. Congress’s true failure has not been excessive interference but persistent abdication―avoiding the political responsibility of authorizing war while permitting presidents to act first and justify later. That abdication corrodes checks and balances and transfers the gravest decision a democracy can make into the hands of one person.
Sovereignty, coercion, and Venezuela’s oil bring the constitutional crisis into sharp international focus. The claim that the United States may seize, sell, or administer Venezuelan oil for “mutual benefit” or reconstruction collapses under legal scrutiny. As reaffirmed by the United Nations Secretary-General, Venezuela’s oil belongs to the Venezuelan people. This is not rhetoric; it is a cornerstone principle of international law grounded in state sovereignty and permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
Any alleged “agreement” cited by the Trump administration with a Venezuelan interim authority cannot be credibly described as a genuine agreement at all. Consent extracted under duress is not consent. When a population faces a clear and present threat of escalating military force―further ground operations, hundreds more civilian deaths, and a highly probable invasion―what follows is not agreement but coerced acquiescence. Allowing foreign control of national resources under the shadow of overwhelming military power is not voluntary cooperation; it is survival under threat.
The decision to go to war is not merely strategic. It is moral, constitutional, and irrevocable.
International law does not recognize resource transfers imposed by force or intimidation as legitimate. To do so would resurrect a doctrine of conquest the modern international order was built to reject. If oil may be seized in Venezuela today because military pressure makes resistance impossible, it may be seized anywhere tomorrow by any power willing to invoke its own version of “national interest.”
Such actions erode not only international norms but the United States’ own legal and moral standing. They convert foreign policy from diplomacy into extraction and military power from defense into appropriation.
Democratic accountability and the cost of war demand a return to constitutional first principles. The decision to go to war is not merely strategic. It is moral, constitutional, and irrevocable. It places citizens in harm’s way, reshapes international relations, and unleashes consequences that last generations. That is precisely why the Constitution assigns the initiation of war to Congress.
Congressional authorization does not weaken national security; it strengthens it by conferring legitimacy, public consent, and strategic clarity. History shows that when the United States has truly been attacked, Congress has acted swiftly and decisively. What the Framers sought to prevent was not defense, but adventurism―wars launched without deliberation, accountability, or consent.
Allowing one individual to initiate war, seize foreign leaders, and appropriate another nation’s resources without congressional approval collapses the separation of powers and invites abuse. It replaces law with discretion, deliberation with impulse, and sovereignty with force.
In the end, the question is not whether a particular president’s motives are sincere, nor whether a foreign government is flawed. The question is whether the United States will remain governed by law―or by precedent accumulated through silence. On that question, the Constitution is unambiguous.
War begins with Congress.
And Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuelans.
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Trump Wants $6 Trillion Tax Hike to Fund $600 Billion in New War Spending
It’s good to see an old man suffering from dementia enjoying himself, but there are much cheaper and less deadly ways to entertain such a person.
Jan 09, 2026
President Donald Trump is now apparently planning to request a $600 billion increase in annual military spending starting in October, financed by another huge jump in import taxes, aka tariffs. I said “apparently” since it’s not clear that he thinks he has to request authority for this spending increase or massive tax hike from Congress.
Under the Constitution there is no ambiguity on these issues. Congress has the power to tax and authorize spending. However, Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have not shown much respect for the Constitution in Trump’s second term and it’s not clear the Supreme Court has any greater level of respect. So, who knows if there actually will be requests for Congress to vote on, or whether he will just do it with no legal authority.
Anyhow, apart from the mechanism employed, this would be a massive increase in spending, coming to just under 2% of GDP. It would also amount to a massive tax increase if Trump actually offsets the spending, as he claimed he would, rather than just increasing the deficit.
Taken over a decade, a $600 billion increase in annual taxes would come to $6 trillion, roughly $45,000 per household. It is real money. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to raise this much money through tariffs.
That doesn’t sound like much of an affordability agenda, but Trump was never really into that word anyhow.
Our imports currently come to just to over $3.2 trillion annually. A straight calculation would imply that an across-the-board tariff increase of 19 percentage points could cover the cost of Trump’s military buildup. But the increase in the tariff rate on most items would end up being considerably higher for two reasons.
First imports would fall sharply in response to a tariff of this size. Let’s say they fall by 15%, this would put imports at $2.7 trillion, which would mean a tariff increase of 22 percentage points would be needed to get to Trump’s $600 billion.
The other reason that the tariff on most items would likely be higher is that Trump will presumably exempt some items other for policy reasons or in response to payoffs at Mar-a-Lago. In the first category, much of what we import are intermediate goods used in manufacturing finished products like cars or planes. High tariffs on these inputs will hurt industries that Trump is ostensibly trying to foster.
The other part of the story is that we have seen many executives make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, most notably Apple CEO Tim Cook, and walk away tariff exemptions on items they import. This trek will be more widely traveled when CEOs are looking at tariffs two or three times their current levels.
That means the import tax on many products will have to increase in the neighborhood of 30 percentage points to hit Trump’s revenue targets. That will be a big hit to many households’ budgets, as we know that the bulk of tariff revenue gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. That doesn’t sound like much of an affordability agenda, but Trump was never really into that word anyhow.
The other side of the story is that this massive increase in military spending will mean a huge diversion of resources from productive uses. Scientists who might have been developing better computers or software for civilian uses will instead be working for military contractors. The same is true for researchers developing new drugs or medical equipment.
This will also be the case with millions of less-highly educated or narrowly trained workers. Instead of working as teachers or in various areas of healthcare, such as physical therapists or home healthcare assistants, they will be employed in the sort of jobs needed by military contractors. That’s a huge drain for the economy and corresponds to the reduction in purchasing power as a result of Trump’s massive tax increase.
If there was some clear argument as to why we needed such a massive increase in taxes and diversion of resources, as when we confronted the Nazis in World War II, perhaps this hit to the economy could be justified. But no one made such claims, not even Trump in his 2024 campaign, until Trump invaded Venezuela and decided it was fun.
It’s good to see an old man suffering from dementia enjoying himself, but it would be much cheaper and less deadly if we just gave him a good video game.
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The Killing of Renee Good Should Change How We Talk About ICE
Renee Good deserved to live. Her death should not be explained away or absorbed into process language. It requires accountability.
Jan 08, 2026
I want to be clear about what happened in Minneapolis.
This was not an “ICE shooting.”
This was not a “law enforcement incident.”
This was the killing of Renee Good.
Renee Good was killed under a Trump administration that expanded ICE’s authority and encouraged aggressive enforcement nationwide.
Words matter. When we soften them, we make it easier to look away.
Renee Good was killed during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minneapolis, not far from where George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. Many people in this city recognize what happens after state violence occurs. We have seen how language is used to slow things down and move attention elsewhere.
As I write this, ICE activity continues across Minneapolis. American citizens were picked up and detained at a local Target. Less than two miles from where Renee Good was killed, ICE agents detained two staff members at Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis, where I went to school. Shortly after, the school went into lockdown. The library across the street closed. Schools across the city were closed for the rest of the week.
These actions affect far more than the individuals detained. They interrupt schools, workplaces, and daily life. They place entire neighborhoods in a state of fear.
Wednesday night, we went to the vigil for Renee Good. We stood on ice and snow where she had been killed only hours earlier. People came quietly. Many did not know what to say. The weight of what had happened was still there.
The response from authorities has raised serious concerns. Federal agencies have taken control of the investigation and have not allowed the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the Minneapolis Police Department, or the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office to conduct their own independent investigations.
We continue to urge state and local authorities to investigate and to document what happened in pursuit of the (T)ruth. The (T)ruth does not lie. We know what we saw, just as we knew what we saw on May 25, 2020. Communities do not forget what they experience firsthand.
At CAIR-Minnesota, we work with families who adjust their lives to avoid harm. Parents change routines. Workers stay silent about exploitation. Survivors hesitate before calling for help because they are unsure who will respond. This is the reality many people live with when ICE operates without accountability.
Renee Good was killed under a Trump administration that expanded ICE’s authority and encouraged aggressive enforcement nationwide. Across the country, ICE has been doing the unimaginable, often without transparency and with serious consequences for communities.
Renee Good deserved to live. Her death should not be explained away or absorbed into process language. It requires accountability.
We have been here before.
We know what unchecked power looks like.
We will overcome.
We will see to it. As God is our witness.
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