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Snowden's Response To Thomas Jefferson

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Two hundred and forty years ago, Thomas Jefferson stood before a great many people and issued a declaration that echoed across the world: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This proclamation was the culmination of revolutionary sentiment and egalitarianism-catalyzed subversion. Colonists had been evading the taxes levied on them to pay for British wars, harassing British soldiers, tarring and feathering loyalists, and destroying property. All of these actions were illegal and chaotic, but none of them touched what the declaration incited: treason. Our Founding Fathers’ first step in creating this great nation, a beacon for freedom and equality, was to betray their original country. Why? Because the common virtues of the free …show more content…

The case against Edward Snowden is strong. He acted with recklessness and possible self-serving convenience; even so, by shedding light on the invasive government actions taken to deal with terrorism, Snowden did his country a service, demanding accountability from a branch of the government that has been given free reign because of our post-9/11 fears. Still the fear persists that a society that accepts challenges to laws also insights anarchy (Leibman). This argument quickly falls flat: civil disobedience is action taken to fulfill a worthy higher principle, not just a means to benefit oneself. The intricacies of this were exposed when the acting Attorney General refused to allow the Justice Department to defend President Trump’s travel ban until its constitutionality could be affirmed. Sally Yates’s actions emboldened other branches of government and assured the nation that there were still those in the government who would solidly stand for the principles of the Constitution, no matter the political

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