When a presidential debate devolves into an argument over golf scores and afterward the public argues about the candidates' mental acuity or personal honesty, when the question for voters is who is the sharper debater rather than who would be more faithful to the Constitution, when both major party candidates support mass surveillance, undeclared foreign wars and borrowing trillions of dollars a year to fund a bloated government, nearly all of which is nowhere countenanced by the Constitution, we can safely conclude that personal liberty in our once free society has been radically diminished and is in the twilight of its existence.

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago this week, Thomas Jefferson was fuming in his rented rooms in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress was softening the tone of his final draft of what would become the most critical document and most precise statement of the origins of human freedom in American history.

The Declaration of Independence — which is dated July 4, 1776, but was signed and released days afterward — is both an indictment of King George III and his government as well as a manifestation of limited government and maximum individual freedom. Though the final version dropped some of Jefferson's more bellicose language, the document as we know it is largely his — not only his lofty language but also the three principal Jeffersonian values that it manifests.