The article contends that Americans have subordinated independent judgment and constitutional limits to partisan loyalty, defending free speech, due process, and restraints on power only when they favor their own side.

It criticizes the Trump administration’s demands that California remove alleged noncitizen voters, threats of prosecution against election officials, and charges against 28 lawful permanent residents, while noting that studies such as the Brennan Center’s 2016 review found only about 30 suspected noncitizen votes among more than 23.5 million ballots.

The author argues that each administration inherits and expands executive powers, and that citizens who excuse abuses by preferred leaders establish precedents that will later be used against them, urging allegiance to the Constitution over party or personality.

There was a time when thinking for yourself was considered a virtue.

These days, it can make you a political outcast.

Question the Democrats, and you’re accused of being a Republican. Question the Republicans, and you’re branded a Democrat. Criticize Donald Trump, and you’re dismissed as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Criticize his opponents, and you’re accused of enabling authoritarianism.

Somewhere along the way, Americans seem to have forgotten that independent thought is not an act of political betrayal. Neither is holding government officials accountable to the Constitution.

Yet we have become so accustomed to viewing every political controversy through the narrow lens of party loyalty that the most important question is often the last one we ask: is what the government is doing actually constitutional?

It shouldn’t matter whether the president is a Republican or Democrat, whether the policy is popular or unpopular, or whether the people being targeted are citizens or immigrants, conservatives or liberals, political allies or sworn enemies.

The Constitution is not supposed to change depending on who occupies the White House.

Neither should our commitment to defending it.

And yet, with another national election approaching, Americans are once again being asked to choose sides in a political battle in which accusations of treason, threats of prosecution, allegations of voter fraud and competing claims of patriotism threaten to drown out the principles that make constitutional self-government possible in the first place.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this political circus is not merely the conduct of those in power, but the willingness of so many Americans to excuse, rationalize or even celebrate abuses of power when they are committed in the name of a political cause they support.

This is how constitutional government begins to lose its meaning: not necessarily through a single dramatic overthrow, but through the gradual abandonment of principles that were supposed to apply to everyone.

Free speech becomes a right worth defending only when the speaker agrees with us. Due process becomes a technicality when the accused belongs to a group we distrust. Government surveillance becomes acceptable when it targets our political opponents. Executive overreach becomes decisive leadership when exercised by our preferred president.

And the Constitution, rather than serving as a restraint on government power, becomes just another weapon in the partisan arsenal.

The irony is that Americans who would never willingly surrender their own freedoms can become remarkably indifferent when those same........

© Eurasia Review