Constitutional Accountability: What the Constitution Demands of Us—And What We’ve Allowed Instead

After reading a recent investigative report by CalMatters on the state of public defense in rural California, one thought kept returning to me.

Patriotism is easy when it costs nothing. Constitutional accountability is harder. It demands that we measure our actions not by symbols or slogans, but by whether we are faithfully upholding the principles the Constitution imposes on those who govern, those who enforce the law, and those who claim to defend it.

It’s easy to stand for the flag, quote the Founders, and speak proudly about freedom and liberty. It’s harder to confront what those words actually require of us—especially when the people affected are poor, forgotten, or politically inconvenient.

The Constitution does not promise justice only to those who can afford it.

It does not guarantee due process only when it is efficient or inexpensive.

And it does not tolerate a system where liberty is traded away because defending it properly costs too much.

This is not a theoretical concern.

A recent investigation by CalMatters documents how flat-fee public defense contracts in rural California have created systems where speed is rewarded, scrutiny is discouraged, and constitutional safeguards are treated as optional expenses rather than obligations.

In these systems, public defense becomes a budget line item instead of a constitutional duty. Flat-fee contracts reward pleas over trials, silence over challenge, and efficiency over investigation. When defense attorneys are disincentivized from filing motions, testing evidence, or conducting meaningful investigations, the Constitution is no longer a safeguard—it becomes a slogan.

The Founders did not design our justice system to be convenient.

They designed it to be uncomfortable.

They understood that power, left unchecked, will always justify itself. That is why the right to counsel exists—not to move cases along efficiently, but to force the government to prove its case lawfully, openly, and beyond a reasonable doubt. When the system begins to defend itself, and appointed counsel becomes aligned with the system rather than the individual, it is the people the Constitution was meant to protect who suffer most.

As a veteran, this is impossible for me to separate from my oath.

That oath was not to a flag, a party, or a moment in time. It was to the Constitution of the United States—against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That oath was never limited to foreign battlefields, and it did not expire when the uniform came off.

The defense of the Constitution is not limited to threats beyond our borders. Every generation learns the same lesson: the gravest danger to liberty is not invasion, but erosion from within. When freedom becomes something measured by wealth or power, we forget what made America different—that ordinary people could live, speak, and act without fear of a government deciding who mattered and who did not.

Generations before us paid dearly—some with their lives—to secure a system where liberty is protected by law, process, and accountability, not by wealth or convenience. When we accept a justice system where outcomes depend on money, contracts, or efficiency, and where defendants are rushed through pleas without meaningful investigation, we are not honoring that sacrifice. We are spending it.

And this is the uncomfortable truth we should be willing to confront:

If we proudly call ourselves patriots, yet accept a system where the least powerful suffer the greatest harm and constitutional rights depend on budgets or status, then the patriotism we claim is symbolic, not substantive.

Real patriotism is not blind loyalty to institutions.

It is loyalty to principles—especially when they are inconvenient, expensive, or unpopular.

This investigation by CalMatters is not easy reading. It shouldn’t be. But if we are serious about the America we say we believe in, we cannot look away from what we have allowed the justice system to become.

Read the full investigation by CalMatters:

How one firm became California’s “WalMart of public defense”