Thomas Jefferson’s Clock Is Ticking Down: America’s Long Overdue Constitutional Restoration Won't Be Can-Kicked Again

"The Second Bill of Rights" will be here for the People to vanquish the swamp hydra

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“Storms in the Physical”

Thomas Jefferson’s famous January 30, 1787 letter to James Madison likened “a little rebellion now and then” to thunderstorms that keep the atmosphere clean. Government, he warned, “requires medicine” lest it turn septic. The prescription implied a cadence: every few generations, We the People must sweep calcified institutions away so liberty can breathe again. Two and a half centuries later the barometer is falling fast, yet the cleansing storm has twice been delayed. The result is our Republic is bloated with debt, entitlement mentality, and bureaucratic inertia—conditions Jefferson would have recognized as pre-hurricane strike stillness. This article traces the resets we took, the ones that didn’t happen, and why a hurricane hit is now inevitable.

History’s Rhythm—Resets Achieved and Resets Postponed

The Founding Reset (1765-1791)

The Revolutionary War era provided our first reboot: Independence, the Articles-to-Constitution pivot, and the Bill of Rights. Madison actually proposed twelve corrective amendments; ten were adopted in 1791, putting 10/12ths of his repair plan in force. His initially unratified Article the Second (today’s 27th Amendment on congressional pay) finally achieved ratification in 1992. Article the First—Madison’s permanent guarantee of small congressional districts—has never passed, but its spirit lives inside Article the Second of The Second Bill of Rights (SBOR), which permanently fixes maximum district population size (and not the number of our Representatives) to shatter the modern incumbent-protection racket we’ve lived under since 1913 and, yet again, the wickedness of Woodrow Wilson.

The Civil War & Reconstruction Reset (1850-1877)

A four-year cataclysm forced abolition, the 13th-15th Amendments, and a briefly muscular federalism designed to secure liberty for the formerly enslaved.

The Progressive/New-Deal Super-Cycle (1914-1945)

Jeffersonian “medicine” was due again by 1914, yet Americans were distracted for thirty years.

• 1914-1918: World War I redirected popular passion back to aristocratic Europe.

• 1929-1939: The Great Depression consumed every ounce of political oxygen.

• 1941-1945: World War II demanded resolute unity over dissent.

While our citizens fought foreign foes or breadlines, Woodrow Wilson’s administrative dreams and Franklin Roosevelt’s alphabet agencies metastasized unchallenged. The scheduled next great cleansing was can-kicked down the generational field, and the federal government exited its constitutional bounds.

The Missed Fourth Reset (1980s-1990s)

Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric cracked the Overton Window of that time, and Ross Perot’s 1992 & 1996 insurgencies proved voter appetite for reform. Yet nothing structural happened. Why?

• Eighty-plus years of public-school civics had converted Jeffersonian vigilance and Madisonian originalism into Wilson-FDR-LBJ hagiography; students were indoctrinated to venerate the administrative state rather than restrain it. (The 17th-century Society of Jesus and Vladimir Lenin were made proud!)

• Teachers’ unions and textbook committees ensured curricula framed federal aggrandizement as “progress,” leaving restorationists to wear the “reactionary” label.

• Legacy mainstream media, already consolidated, amplified that orthodoxy and quarantined dissent.

Today—The Ticking Fifth Alarm

Today’s urban progressive establishment is replaying the proven playbook: delay reform, mask intentions, kick that can, and edge America toward the soft-socialist, aristocratic European model. If they succeed again, the old world’s hereditary rigidity—locked-in class status, frozen mobility, extinguished exceptionalism—will settle permanently over the United States in the second half of this century.

Symptoms of Dangerous Delay

Run-Away Promises

Our gross federal debt has exploded past $37 trillion just a few weeks ago. Unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare etc. now exceed $105 trillion—that’s around $410,000 for every adult in the country today, and over $932,000 for every current taxpayer—every single one of us including you, dear reader—how will that ever be repaid? Your personal portion of that will be over $1 million shortly—are you ready for that to be fully withdrawn from your bank account and retirement savings?

Entitlement Time-Bombs

Both Social Security and Medicare face insolvency in 2033—that’s “next week” on Jefferson’s long clock. No one on Capitol Hill can plausibly claim ignorance; they simply hope the detonator ticks on the next majority’s watch. Only a few voices—Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, maybe one or two others—speak the truth aloud, and they get excoriated and threatened with primary challenges for doing so.

Administrative Hypertrophy—The Many-Headed Hydra

More than 2.3 million civilians draw federal salaries, issuing regulations that now dwarf the U.S. Code by over a factor of three! (The all-in expense for these currently active federal employees and their retired predecessors is over $500 billion every year. Count that out! $500 billion.) Even Elon Musk’s much-vaunted DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) initiative was able to nick only a couple of the swamp hydra’s necks, proving that something even greater is required to achieve the Heracles-level heroism required to actually slay the swamp hydra—and that tweeting about the monster is not the same as cauterizing its stumps.

Polarization & Transactional Citizenship

The JFK “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” ethic is inverted; voting blocs now auction ballots for benefits. French Revolution style economic mobs rule. Chants of “democracy,” the breeding ground of tyranny and authoritarianism, ring from urban, modern-day Agora’s dotted across our former Republic. Geographic self-sorting hardens our red expanses and the little blue urban bubbles, while trust in every branch of government circles the drain.

Technology Outruns Law

AI, robotics, crypto, and bio-engineering have sprinted into a 21st-century frontier governed by statutes, if any at all, written for rotary telephones and railroads, leaving both innovation and liberty hostage to bureaucratic improvisation, lack of due process, and sovereign immunity.

Jefferson’s Prescription—Revolution as Regular Civic Hygiene

Jefferson did not praise violence; he prescribed periodic corrective pressure. His 1789 dictum that “the earth belongs… to the living” framed constitutions as leases, not chains. Like controlled burns in forestry, modest, regular upheavals prevent catastrophic infernos. Twice postponing those burns now guarantees a much hotter blaze or certainty of a hurricane hit using Jefferson’s “storm” analogy.

The Storm on the Horizon—Crisis or Conflict First, Restoration After

What the SBOR Actually Expects and Requires

The SBOR is not an activist blueprint for a polite Article V convention. As its author, I’m wise and savvy enough to know that an actual crisis or conflict is a necessary pre-requisite to finally break the incumbent-entrenchment model—both the near-permanent House manufactured by gerrymandered mega-districts, direct election of Senators by the People (and not the State legislatures as it was before ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913), and the extra-constitutional fourth branch of administrative and bureaucratic rule by fiat.

Today, 30–40 percent of US citizens already favor wholesale constitutional restoration and limited federal government whether they call it that or not, and that share grows each year for a few decades now. They are storing not just intellectual capital and moral resolve, but also the firearms, ammunition, and provisions that the ideological left and their partners in the mainstream media have been hand-wringing about for those same decades. They understand that convening a constitutional convention before the swamp hydra is actually vanquished for a while again would simply let the monster kick the can a third time. We will not allow any further can-kicking!

Early-to-Mid-2030s Flashpoint Potentiality

Exact dates are unknowable; history rarely sets appointments. But fiscal mathematics, demographic pressure, and constitutional illiteracy make the early 2030s the apparent window in which inevitability spikes into opportunity. When the storm wall finally breaks, a populace steeped in restorationist principles must be ready to channel their fury and intent into whatever must be done to permit viable and lawful re-founding—lest that chaos birth something worse.

Hurricane Category 2 or Hurricane Category 5

Jefferson’s eye wall has already formed. The hurricane must and will hit, because arithmetic promises it and history demands it. What category it strikes land at turns on whether the tens of millions of us outside the bright blue urban bubbles have prepared—materially, intellectually, spiritually, and intentionally—for the moment when central authority falters and the need for our action arrives. Those preparations must include a shared understanding of the SBOR’s purpose: to restore Madisonian architecture, lock the swamp hydra’s heads in constitutional irons, and buy three to five generations more of fresh republican air.

“It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”

The hurricane is no longer an abstract possibility; it is essentially an imminent certainty. Choose now whether to huddle beneath rotting timbers or to stand ready, like Jefferson’s farmers greeting the storm, to rebuild our house of liberty when the skies finally break.

You Know What You Have To Do Now

You keep reading to the end of these articles and you’ve known in your gut that crisis or conflict are coming soon enough. So: continue to prepare accordingly; develop your plans for action with your friends, family, and neighbors; and:

• READ more about The Second Bill of Rights on its website.

• JOIN its mailing list.

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• SPREAD its message everywhere—”tell two friends to tell two friends” style.