We hold these truths to be self-evident: that We The People are created equal; that We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; and that our labor belongs first to those who perform it and to the families whom that labor sustains. Labor must sustain the laborer first. That our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That government exists to secure the People, not itself. That no free person should be subject to any tax to which they have not given their own consent, in person or through real representation. Revenue must serve the People. We the People entertain grave and genuine doubt whether new taxes and laws in California are being enacted by lawful and constitutional vote. For a power over a man's subsistence is, in truth, a power over his will; and when taxation is carried beyond just bounds, and laws overreach unalienable Rights that are God given, We The People are rendered vulnerable to dependence, coercion, and, ultimately, absolute despotism. No lawful power is without bounds. That a just Government ought never to wrest from the mouth of Labor the bread which it has earned; that the faithful Administration of Justice is among the firmest Pillars upon which good Government must rest; and that a People who surrender essential Liberty for the promise of a little temporary Safety lose both.^1–4 These Principles are not new among us. They descend from the earliest Foundations of this Republic, and were maintained by Men, and their Wives and Partners who stood beside them, who pledged to one another their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor, and by the men and women of our Armed Forces who gave their last full measure of devotion on the battlefield to secure unalienable Rights for all. And in that same Spirit, carrying forward the hopes and design of our Founders—with the leadership of George Washington, the foresight of Alexander Hamilton, and their common devotion to Liberty before us—we, the undersigned, mutually renew that Pledge to one another, with equal Fidelity.

Slavery’s Abolition Was Written in 1776. The men who declared American independence in 1776 did not end slavery, and the contradiction between slavery and the principles they proclaimed remained unresolved as they conceived a greater vision for a future United States of America founded upon liberty and the freedom of the people. Many lived within, participated in, or profited from a nascent American economy sustained in part by siloed and segregated enslaved labor. Yet Thomas Jefferson’s original draft condemned the slave trade as a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Congress struck that passage before adopting the Declaration.^{5, 6} What remained were words broader than the generation that first proclaimed them: all men are created equal. Those words did not abolish slavery in 1776, but they placed within the American creed a principle that later generations could—and did—turn against slavery itself. George Washington, then commanding the Continental Army and not a signer of the Declaration, would later write of his desire to see slavery abolished by legislative authority, and in his final will he directed that the people he personally enslaved be emancipated under its terms.^{5, 6} The contradiction remained for another generation, but so did the principle. It carried forward an American promise that a person might labor by his own will, cultivate a field, learn a trade, open a shop, earn his livelihood, and stand before the law as a free person, owing no master the fruits of his labor. A person's labor belongs first to the person who performs it. That promise was not fulfilled by words alone. It required generations of resistance, legislation, civil war, and ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment. But the principle endured: no man may rightfully own another man's labor or compel it through bondage. In modern federal law, that principle continues in statutes prohibiting forced labor, including 18 U.S.C. § 1589, which reaches labor obtained through force, serious harm, coercion, or abuse of law or legal process. The words of 1776 did not finish the work; they began an argument over freedom that America is still bound to honor.

Our line: two cents of every dollar. In 1776, the taxes that drove a people to revolution took about two cents of every dollar they earned.⁷ We take that as our line today. Below it, a government serves us. Above it — without our consent, in person or through genuine representation — every hour we work to pay is an hour of labor for another party against our will. Revenue must serve the People; the People do not exist to serve revenue. That is where the course of forced labor begins, and where the human trafficking predicate act begins with it. We do not ask anyone to take this on our word. We ask the Department to measure it. The whole burden must be measured. Government may divide what it takes among taxes, assessments, fees, fines, surcharges, registrations, licenses, citations, tolls, penalties, collections, and other names, but the person who pays them has only one body, one life, one supply of labor, and one family to sustain. Separate powers may therefore create one burden. Separate charges may become one deprivation. What matters is not merely what each government takes alone, but what all government leaves behind. We already know the price of excessive labor, because it has been measured. Researchers at Stanford and Harvard Business School, pooling 228 studies, found that long working hours raise the risk of early death by nearly 20 percent — a toll they compared to secondhand smoke — that high job demands raise the odds of a doctor-diagnosed illness by 35 percent, that fear of losing a job raises the odds of poor health by 50 percent, and that these workplace stressors take more than 120,000 American lives a year and up to 8 percent of the nation's health spending.^{8, 9} A 2024 review of the medical literature found that long working hours raise the odds of suicidal thoughts by 44 percent — and at fifty-five hours a week, by 65 percent.¹⁰ The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization count 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in a single year traced to long working hours; a study of 603,838 people found fifty-five-hour weeks raise the risk of stroke by a third.^{11, 12} Behind those numbers are the hours we do not spend with our children, the sleep we do not get, the nights out and dinner outings we do not get, and the neighbors we have lost to despair. We are those numbers.

A long train of abuses. Prudence tells us that a government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and we have borne these burdens as our parents bore them before us. But when a long train of abuses upon our bodies performing labor — the countless hours taken from our lives, the bread taken from our tables and mouths, the backs and shoulders and hearts we exert to earn it — pursues invariably the same object, to hold us in labor for another party, it is our right, it is our duty, to provide new guards for our future security. A long train of abuses need not arrive in one great act. It may grow by accumulation. Government may create an office for one purpose, another to administer it, another to enforce it, another to collect from it, another to adjudicate it, and another to repair the injury that follows it, until government activity itself becomes the reason for still more government activity. Administration is servant, never sovereign. Departments, boards, commissions, bureaus, authorities, committees, agencies, contractors, courts, and machines possess no Rights against the People. They are instruments of government, and government itself is an instrument of the People. Their existence cannot become their own justification. Their payrolls, powers, convenience, statistics, expansion, technology, and preservation cannot become ends superior to the Life, Liberty, labor, property, and subsistence of the People from whom all lawful authority proceeds. Power does not establish justice. That government possesses a power does not answer whether that power has been exercised wisely, proportionately, or justly. Revenue must follow public necessity; public necessity must not be manufactured to follow revenue. Enforcement must answer genuine public need; public need must not be enlarged merely to sustain enforcement. Government must not create the necessity by which government perpetuates itself. Our forebears had their petitions, their assemblies, and, ultimately, their muskets. We have the constitutional order they left us, together with laws enacted, expanded, and refined across two centuries for the grave occasion when government power becomes destructive of the liberties it was instituted to secure: a Department of Justice empowered to investigate and seek reform of a pattern or practice, 34 U.S.C. § 12601; courts in which violations of federal rights may be heard, including under 42 U.S.C. § 1983; and statutes addressing forced labor and racketeering, including 18 U.S.C. §§ 1589 and 1962. We hold, as the town of Braintree held in 1765, that no free person should be subjected to taxation without consent given personally or through lawful representation. We hold that a power over a person's subsistence is a power over that person's will; and that when such power is abused to keep a people in poverty, dependence, or compelled labor, it approaches the despotism our constitutional system was designed to resist. We hold that no government should take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. What sustains life deserves protection. And we invoke these laws now, together and in peace, to seek reform of every destructive exercise of government power that takes from the People what sustains them.

Let facts be submitted to a candid world. Our government — its Legislature, its agencies, and its officials — continuously sends hither swarms of officers; activates Super Intelligence (SI), machine-learning systems and data sets; and deploys Doppler radar, lidar, high-tech cameras, and license-plate readers to surveil, locate, stop, cite, and seize us in the name of safety, using thousands of provisions of the Vehicle Code to eat and take from us what sustains us: our money, our subsistence, and our mental resources — fines generated or processed by machines, collected at scale and automatically, with threats of levies, seizures, and lawsuits, sometimes before any meaningful hearing and with no practical forum in which a person may be heard. Government exists to answer injury and secure Rights; it must not create injury merely because its machinery possesses the power to intervene. — An administrative government grown in California, among other States, has demanded payment before a hearing — as much as $1,580 to contest a plate frame and a registration sticker — so that the very hearing by which a person seeks to be heard becomes a thing that person must first buy.¹⁵ — They have taken what begins as an administrative matter under a Vehicle Code and made it an instrument capable of chilling a person's liberty and firmness: a registration issue becomes a reason to stop; the stop becomes an encounter; the encounter may become detention, search, arrest, impoundment, seizure, and criminal accusation. Administration must not manufacture the occasion for its own expansion. When the same government possesses collection machinery capable of locating wages, property, and financial accounts, and can levy, garnish, seize, and calculate what remains to be taken, an administrative exaction may cease to be merely a ticket and become a power over subsistence itself — taking a person's money downward toward zero, weakening the means by which that person may resist, travel, labor, obtain counsel, reach a court, preserve a home, or simply remain free — until, stripped of the means of subsistence, that person is displaced onto the streets of the United States of America by the very government instituted to secure his liberty. — And there, after a person has been reduced in property, shelter, dignity, hope, and means, government-supported harm-reduction systems in California distribute syringes, smoking equipment, and other drug-use supplies to people living in that suffering. We do not say that these supplies are given for the purpose of causing addiction; public-health authorities state that their purpose is to reduce overdose, infection, and death. But neither may the later presence of addiction be turned backward in time and offered as proof that the person caused his own homelessness. A person may reach for drugs after displacement to numb pain, sorrow, despair, trauma, or mental anguish; and where government thereafter points to that addiction as the explanation for the homelessness itself, the effect may be to conceal from public view whatever economic, administrative, or governmental acts helped place that person on the street in the first instance. The federal government itself has now questioned this approach: in 2026, the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services rejected the continued funding of systems they contend perpetuate homelessness and shifted federal policy toward treatment and recovery. We therefore submit the whole sequence to a candid world: what happened before the tent, before the syringe, before the addiction, before the despair, and before society concluded that the person lying upon the pavement had done it all to himself. — And when an infraction or administrative violation becomes the gateway through which that person is drawn into criminal process, not upon proof of an independently committed crime, but because the administrative encounter furnished the occasion to search for, create, or manufacture one, administration has become coercion, and regulation has become an instrument of control. The occasion for government action must not become the justification for unlimited government action. We submit that such conversion is an abuse of governmental power requiring federal scrutiny. In Mr. Mackintosh’s federal action, that sequence is alleged not as an isolated traffic dispute but as part of a larger pattern of racketeering, extortion, fraud, obstruction, forced-labor dynamics, and abuse of legal process under the federal statutes set forth there; those allegations remain for adjudication, but the facts may be submitted to a candid world. — They have made the family car collateral for debt, knowing that it carries us to labor, carries our families, and may carry goods and services through interstate commerce: they hold registrations, suspend licenses, and send hither swarms of officers who use machines and intelligent systems to locate, cite, impound, and tow our cars; and, where supported by the facts, place those cars into systems of lien sale or auction. A car that carries a person to labor is not merely metal and glass; for millions of Americans it is the instrument by which labor is reached, wages are earned, food is brought home, children are carried, commerce is conducted, and independence is preserved. What sustains a person's life becomes part of that person's liberty. Control over that instrument may therefore become control over what sustains the person himself. They compel labor labeled “community service” from those who cannot pay, after their subsistence has already been taken from them into poverty, and we submit for federal review whether such labor, when imposed absent a criminal judgment and through abuse of law or legal process, crosses the line drawn by federal law. The Supremacy Clause commands that conflicting state law must yield to the Constitution and laws of the United States. — They have taxed the gasoline that moves our cars and carries us to labor at more than sixty cents a gallon in state excise tax, with the rate adjusted over time; extended income-tax increases once enacted as temporary; raised combined sales taxes above ten percent in many communities; permitted fee upon fee to accumulate upon the cost of living; and presented each new burden as another little temporary safety. — They allocated nearly $24 billion of the dollars we wore our bodies out to earn to homelessness and housing programs over five fiscal years, while the State’s own Auditor reported that California lacked sufficient information to determine the continuing costs and outcomes of many of those efforts — while the fines, holds, and tows that take working people’s cars and livelihoods went on.¹³ — They have retaliated against those who object, as alleged in the federal action described here. One of us wrote to the Governor and the Mayor and their offices, and through their chains of command, to complain of these things; thereafter came four traffic stops, alleged excessive force, alleged threats of deadly force, tows, and the threatened loss of the car that is his home on wheels. His case is in federal court. This Declaration does not depend upon it, and signing this Declaration does not join it. It stands beside it.

Notice. This Declaration is truthful information about a possible federal offense, delivered to the law enforcement agency of the United States. Any act taken against a signer for signing it is retaliation, 18 U.S.C. § 1513(e), and no case need be pending for that law to apply, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(f)(1). We give notice to the Governor, the State, its Department of Justice, its agencies, its contractors, and every person associated with them in fact: on the first such act, counsel for the signers will file at once, for damages, for all of us.

What we are, and who we are not. We are not anti-government. We are not anti-tax. Government requires revenue to perform the duties entrusted to it. Revenue is a means of government; it must never become government's end. The same generation that refused a stamp tax in 1765 levied a war tax in 1798 to build a navy, put down a tax revolt, and then pardoned its leader. They were right both times. A nation must fund its defense, its borders, its courts, and the lawful duties entrusted to it through government accountable to the People. That is consent. Taxation without consent is the wrong we name. But authority to tax does not make every tax prudent, necessary, just, or without limit. Power does not establish justice. Government cannot measure each burden alone when the People must bear them together. The whole burden must be measured. We are for limited government and limited taxes — limited in amount, limited in time, limited by necessity, and limited by what must remain with a family so that it may live, rest, raise its children, maintain its home, preserve its health, and remain free. Government must leave enough of the People with the People. The money for relief exists. The Department's own National Fraud Enforcement Division, created April 7, 2026, states that more than a trillion dollars in taxpayer funds are at risk each year; in one June 2026 takedown it charged 455 defendants with more than $6.5 billion in fraud.¹⁴ Every one of those dollars was earned first by We The People — hours of our labor, taken from our paychecks before we ever saw them, and after we earned them by abusing our body during working labor. Public money remains the People's money after government receives it. If that much can be stolen without anyone noticing, that much can be returned to us, or never taxed at all.

We therefore declare and petition. (1) That the Department of Justice open an investigation under 34 U.S.C. § 12601 into the Governor, the Mayors, the Attorneys General, and every official and agency that built and grew California’s citation, hold, tow, impound, fee, and collections system and the taxes that feed it. We do not ask for a prosecution. We ask the Department to gather our evidence — every signer's account, every ticket, hold, tow, bill, assessment, fee, surcharge, penalty, and compulsory governmental exaction — until the facts bear out the pattern and practice; and then to write, and enforce, a consent decree that reforms the taxes, the police stops, the citations, the registration holds, the tows, and the collections that hold us in forced labor. We do not ask the Department to consider. We ask it to act. (2) That no person be required to pay before being heard, and that no ticket, tow, DMV hold, administrative fee, or governmental exaction cost a person a job, a license, a home, or the means by which that person sustains life. What sustains life deserves protection. (3) That California and its cities grant a permanent emergency tax cut — in the amount found unnecessary, duplicative, wasted, unlawfully obtained, or destructive of subsistence — and that every rate above our 2% tax line be reviewed. The whole burden must be measured: what government takes, why it takes it, where it goes, what benefit returns to the People, and what remains afterward for the person whose labor produced it. (4) That counsel take up this class, using the draft complaint below, and that every signer be heard on their own claim and made whole in damages. (5) That we will keep rallying Americans to petition — lawfully, peacefully, in writing — until relief comes; and that if any branch fails to balance the others, we will carry this Declaration to the next.

In good faith and in God We Trust. We sign this of our own God-given free will and under no one's direction. No one paid us. Signing makes no one a party to any lawsuit. We assemble peacefully, and we seek redress through the courts and the Department of Justice, and nowhere else. We are the people who drive to work before dawn and come home after dark. We are the ones the citation finds, the hold stops, and the tow takes. We are not asking for charity. We are asking for what is already ours: the bread our labor earned, the time our families are owed, a newborn brother or sister for our children, a place to call home, and a government that keeps the oath its officers swore — to protect and defend the Constitution. Government exists to secure the People, not itself. That oath is not kept by guarding a document. It is kept, or broken, in the lives of the people whose rights it protects — and it is broken every day those rights are violated. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the rectitude of our intentions, we mutually pledge to each other our names, our labor, and our sacred honor.