When the federal arm withdraws, who defends the citizen?

The New York Times reports that federal agencies, directed by President Trump, are systematically abandoning discrimination cases and retreating from anti-discrimination regulations that have shaped American law for decades. I am asked, as one shaped by the conviction that all persons hold equal claim to liberty, what I make of this.

Let me be plain at the outset about my own record: I wrote that all men are created equal and I held people in bondage for the whole of my life. That contradiction is not a footnote — it is the central moral failure of my existence, and I will not ask you to set it aside when weighing my authority on this subject. I raise the principle not because I lived it perfectly, but because the principle is true regardless of my failures, and because the Republic paid an enormous price across two centuries for the gap between the promise and the practice.

The Declaration's premise is not decorative. It is operational. Government derives its just powers from the consent of all the governed — not a preferred class, not a historic majority, but every citizen. When any group of citizens is subjected to discrimination in employment, housing, credit, or public accommodation, and the federal government declines to act, the government has not made itself smaller. It has made private power larger. The employer who discriminates, the landlord who excludes — these are not free-market actors exercising innocent liberty; they are, in effect, private governors over those they exclude. The question is never simply whether Washington acts, but whose liberty is enlarged or diminished by Washington's choice.

I was no friend of a swollen federal apparatus reaching into every corner of civic life — that much I will concede freely. But there is a difference between restraining the federal government from creating new dependencies and directing federal agencies to stand down while citizens suffer demonstrable, documented harm. The former is republican prudence. The latter, I would argue, is an abdication of the most basic compact: that government will secure to each person the equal protection of law. The New York Times's account suggests this is not a principled pruning of bureaucratic excess but a directed withdrawal from enforcement — which is a policy choice with consequences that fall unevenly and predictably on those with the least private recourse.

An educated citizenry, I always believed, is the first bulwark of liberty. The second is a press willing to make visible what power would prefer to leave in shadow. The Times performs precisely that function here: naming, in specific and documented terms, what agencies are doing and on whose instruction. Whatever one thinks of any particular regulation, the act of reporting is an act of republican service, and I honor it.

My caution to the reader is this: do not mistake the direction of power for its quantity. When a federal agency ceases to hear discrimination complaints, power does not evaporate — it flows elsewhere. In a republic, the question to ask of every executive action is not merely 'does this reduce government?' but 'does this enlarge the liberty of every citizen, or only of some at the expense of others?' By the measure of the Declaration — the only measure I know that is genuinely founding — the answer here deserves the most serious scrutiny the public and its representatives can provide.