I find myself thinking these days about the American revolutionaries, especially Thomas Paine.

Paine immigrated from England to the American colonies in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Less than two years later, he wrote “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that gave the American Revolution its moral authority.

Crisp and passionately written, “Common Sense” explained to the American colonists that King George III and the British Empire had left them no middle ground. Their choice was between independence and monarchy.

“In America the law is king,” wrote Paine. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The concept was revolutionary, and “Common Sense” became a colonial bestseller.

Paine would tell us that, almost 100 days into Trump’s second term, we similarly face a stark choice. It is either to stand up to a president increasingly untethered from the Constitution, or to surrender. If a galvanizing act of the American Revolution was the “shot heard ’round the world” at the battle of Lexington and Concord, the........

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