On September 3, 2025, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened at the Capitol to review five State Department nominees. The session was routine until Senator Tim Kaine broke with one of the oldest ideas in American political thought: that rights exist independently of government.
The exchange began with Riley Barnes, nominee for assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor, who echoed the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal” and possess rights “endowed by our Creator.” Kaine cut in sharply.
“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,” he said, calling the argument “very, very troubling.” Kaine insisted rights flow from constitutional law, not natural rights grounded in a Creator (Washington Stand).
The Founders’ Foundation
Kaine’s framing runs against the architecture of American law. The Declaration of Independence, written before the Constitution, established the principle that rights come first. Jefferson’s text declares rights are “unalienable” because they come from a source outside government.
George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), which Jefferson drew upon, begins: “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights… when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity.” This was not poetry; it was law. Mason codified rights as pre-political, fixed by nature, not by statute (Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776).
James Madison carried the principle into the Bill of Rights. In Federalist No. 51, he warned that government must be limited precisely because rights exist outside it: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” For Madison, law did not create rights. It restrained government from violating them.
Why It Matters
If government is the source of rights, then rights can be redrawn whenever legislatures shift. That makes them temporary, transactional, and vulnerable. But if rights are understood as preexisting, whether attributed to God, to natural law, or to universal human dignity, they are untouchable.
That is why Jefferson and Mason used the language they did. They needed a higher ground. A principle strong enough to bind future governments and remind them that their authority had limits.
For atheists, the argument still holds. Belief in God is not required to see the logic. If rights are inherent to human beings — not manufactured by law — they remain a permanent inheritance, immune from repeal.
The September 3 hearing was meant to examine diplomatic nominees. Instead, it exposed a deep philosophical divide. Kaine argued rights begin with law. Jefferson, Mason, and Madison insisted they come before it. Two and a half centuries after independence, the question still stands: is liberty granted by government, or does government exist only to protect what people already possess?