President Donald Trump recently nominated Riley Barnes to serve as the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which is dedicated to helping "advance individual liberty and democratic freedoms around the world."
At his confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Barnes delivered a brilliant opening statement.
He started by quoting a speech given by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "In his first remarks to State Department employees," said Barnes, "Secretary Rubio emphasized that, 'We are a nation founded on a powerful principle, and that powerful principle is that all men are created equal, because our rights come from God our Creator — not from our laws, not from our governments.'"
"They are the historic, natural rights that we have as individuals, pursuing life, liberty, and happiness in this world," said Barnes.
"For rights to be untethered from this core principle is to make them mere sentiments, easily manipulated by authoritarians and bad actors. Natural rights are a blessing and an immutable reality."
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., ridiculed Barnes for embracing Rubio's statement that "our rights come from God our Creator — not from our laws, not from our governments."
"I find that very, very troubling," Kaine said at the hearing.
"I am a devout person. I was a missionary in Honduras. We've got other devout folks in this room, Christian, Jewish, Muslim American.
"The notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the Creator, that's what the Iranian government believes.
"It is a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha'is, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities; and they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator.
"So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling," said Kaine.
In fact, what's extremely troubling is the mindset of this senator.
Cicero, the Roman senator assassinated in 43 B.C., explained the source of just laws and human rights more than 2,000 years ago.
He would have agreed with Barnes.
"There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil," wrote Cicero.
"This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice.
"It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable."
"God himself is its author — its promulgator — its enforcer," said Cicero.
"He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man."
There is no doubt Cicero served as a philosophical role model for this nation's founders.
John Adams and Benjamin Rush both signed the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
In 1805, Adams wrote a letter to Rush in which he said he had just re-read a biography of Cicero that he had first read almost a half century earlier.
Cicero, said Adams, had "the most constant as well as the wisest and most persevering Attachment to the Republick."
As this column has noted before, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Henry Lee in 1825 in which he specifically cited Cicero as an inspiration for the Declaration.
"(A)ll it's authority," he said, "rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversations, in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc."
While unjustly held in a Birmingham jail in 1963 — because he had peacefully protested that city's evil segregation laws — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. explained the difference between just and unjust laws.
"I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all,'" he wrote in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."
"A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God," he said. "An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
"Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here," said King. "We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands."
At his confirmation hearing, Barnes expressed the same understanding of human rights that has been held by the greatest defenders of freedom from Cicero to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
And Sen. Kaine found this "troubling."
Speaking at the Museum of the Bible on Monday, President Trump responded: "It's this Declaration of Independence that proclaims we're endowed by our Creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The senator from Virginia should be ashamed of himself."
Terence P. Jeffrey began as editor in chief of CNSNews.com. Prior to that, he served for more than a decade as editor of Human Events, where he’s now an editor at large. From 1987-91, he was an editorial writer for The Washington Times. In 1992, he served as issues and research director for Pat Buchanan’s first Republican presidential campaign. In 1993-94, he served as executive director of The American Cause, an educational foundation. In 1995-96, he was national campaign manager for Pat Buchanan’s second Republican presidential campaign. Buchanan that year won the Alaska, Louisiana and Missouri caucuses, placed second in the Iowa caucuses and won the New Hampshire primary.