Colin’s Blog

Sacred Coercion: “Ordained by God” is Not a Constitutional Justification. by Colin Smith Attorney • Politician The United States is not a confessional state. The Constitution presupposes a plural citizenry: people with different metaphysical commitments, different moral authorities, and different accounts of ultimate meaning. Within that framework, the legitimacy of government coercion depends on something basic: public justification . When a public official advocates a policy that imposes material penalties—detention, exclusion, deportation, denial of status, denial of access—the official bears a burden of justification that is not discharged by appeals to sectarian authority. This is not a demand that officials abandon religious belief. It is a constraint on the grounds upon which coercion is publicly defended in a plural polity. Recent remarks attributed to House Speaker Mike Johnson present an unusually clear test of that principle. Johnson reportedly argued that the biblica...

From Plantations to Denied Applications: Slavery’s Engineered Afterlife by Colin Smith Attorney 𑇐 Politician As we move into the final days of Black History Month, it’s worth naming a truth that is uncomfortable precisely because it clarifies: slavery didn’t merely end. It changed forms. Think of slavery as the ultimate American pressure field —a system that uses coercion, constraint, and narrative to capture agency and normalize unequal outcomes. Its most instructive feature isn’t only its brutality. It’s its durability. When a particular mechanism becomes legally or morally indefensible, the pressure field does what pressure fields do: it migrates. The nouns change. The functions persist. Emancipation ended one explicit technology for capturing human beings as property. It did not automatically end the deeper logic of containment: restricting mobility, rigging access to capital, controlling labor, and then telling a story in which predictable outcomes are blamed on the people who we...

Pluralism vs. Birthright Politics By Colin D. Smith Attorney • Politician   If you want to know where a society is headed, listen to what it says it is defending. At the recent Munich Security Conference held on February 14, 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered Europe reassurance: America and Europe “belong together.” But he didn’t ground that bond primarily in mutual interests or shared constitutional commitments. He grounded it in inheritance. America and Europe, he said, are “part of one civilization—Western civilization,” bound by “centuries of shared history,” “Christian faith,” “culture,” “heritage,” “language,” and “ancestry,” a “sacred inheritance” carried from the old world to the new. (Full transcript here:) U.S. State Department transcript of Rubio’s Munich speech That is not merely a story about origins. It’s a theory of membership. And because Rubio describes mass migration as an “urgent threat” to “the survival of our civilization itself”—a danger to “...

A County’s Conscience: Why Westchester’s Immigrant Protection Act Still Matters By Colin Smith Attorney • Politician We are living through a period in which the sharpest edges of immigration enforcement have become unavoidable: families separated in real time, heavily publicized raids, and rhetoric so supercharged that “undocumented” is treated not as a legal category, but as a moral stain. And that matters—because “undocumented” is, in the first instance, a legal claim about paperwork and status, not a moral verdict about a human being’s worth. In moments like this, it’s important that we remind ourselves what government is—and what it is not. It is not only a sword. It is also a shield. Not only a cudgel, but a salve. Not only a machine that can compel, but an institution that must protect human rights—and, where necessary, the human conscience from becoming numb to suffering labeled “necessary.” That is the frame through which I support Westchester County’s Immigrant Prote...