Freedom at 250: A Conversation with Mike Schietzelt
As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, North Carolina Rep. Mike Schietzelt sat down with American Habits editor Ray Nothstine for a wide-ranging conversation on the principles of self-government. A Marine Corps veteran, attorney, former law professor, and father of four boys, Schietzelt reflects on federalism, the burdens of public office, and how the sacrifices of earlier generations should shape the way we live today.
I think one could look at the Declaration now and probably say a lot of the abuses from the Crown apply to the federal government and more specifically federal overreach into states and localities. What’s your job as a state legislator to address that?
Rep. Mike Schietzelt: Not that anything today rises to what the colonies endured in the 1760s and ’70s under King George, but there is an important role for state legislatures within that broader civic framework. You can’t be afraid to throw your weight around a bit.
We often talk about the separation of powers and Montesquieu’s idea of dividing authority among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In political science, that’s the horizontal separation of powers. But there’s also a vertical separation of powers, and in America we call that federalism.
Think about James Madison in Federalist 51, I believe, discussing how you “pit ambition against ambition.” That’s not just Congress checking the president or vice versa. The states also have their own ambitions, and they’re meant to counterbalance the ambitions of the federal government.
There have been times in our history when the federal government has gotten a little too big for its britches, when it’s stretched the Commerce Clause, for example. Cases like Wickard v. Filburn, during and after the Great Depression, come to mind.
And when that happens, it’s incumbent upon the states to push back, whether that means challenging bad Supreme Court precedent, resisting bad laws from Congress, or not taking the bait when the federal government uses its spending power to chip away at state autonomy. When Washington starts to overstep, you can’t be afraid to make your presence felt.
Do you see any specific areas today where North Carolina should assert its authority more strongly to preserve that balance the Founders intended?
Schietzelt: I can certainly talk about areas where North Carolina is already beginning to assert its authority and, in some ways, starting to lead.
Beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we saw a major expansion of the administrative state, which ballooned during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Today, the administrative state does just about everything at the federal level. And states followed that model. North Carolina has its own administrative apparatus. Some agency heads are elected, but others are appointed.
Self-governance requires self-governance.
What you end up with is what Montesquieu warned about as the very essence of tyranny, the consolidation of two or more powers in a single body. These agencies write rules and exercise legislative power. They enforce those rules as the executive. And they even have their own courts, which interpret their rules. Until recently, both federal and state courts tended to defer heavily to these agencies. That created a real concentration of power in bodies that aren’t democratically accountable.
In North Carolina, and in other states, we’re starting to show some leadership by pushing back against that. One example is the REINS Act. Now, if a proposed rule hits a certain cost threshold, meaning it could have significant long-term impact, it must come to the General Assembly for a vote. That brings major regulatory decisions back to the people elected by their communities.
We’re also following the federal courts, which in the Loper Bright decision overturned Chevron deference. That means federal courts will no longer defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations or of the statutes they administer. Here in North Carolina, we had Savage v. North Carolina Department of Transportation, where our courts similarly moved away from broad agency deference.
Sometimes states must be out in front, what Justice Louis Brandeis called the “laboratories of democracy.” We may offer 50 imperfect solutions, but sometimes that’s what it takes to show the federal government, “We’ve gone too far off the rails, and here’s how we get back on track.”
We seem to talk a lot about rights but not so much about responsibilities compared to the founding generation. How can citizens rediscover that balance between liberty and responsibility that animated the founders?
Schietzelt: How do you reclaim that sense of personal responsibility? We talked a lot at the founding about self-governance. Self-governance requires self-governance.
It seems silly to say that out loud, but it’s true. We were talking about this before we hit the record button. There were people at the founding who were far more geared toward the individual liberty side, what we might call a small-libertarian view of what the new government should be, versus others who saw more into a collective view. Samuel Adams famously wanted to turn America into a Christian Sparta, for instance.
One example that always pops out to me is Thomas Jefferson, very famously writing, “That the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Those two words, powers and rights, what sort of power and right does the dead hand have over the living? That passage is quite famous. Most folks aren’t familiar with Madison’s response to his friend when he wrote back, not talking about powers and rights, but of duty. He said, “If the earth is the gift of nature to the living, it extends only in its natural state, but the things that the dead generations have built create this debt, this charge upon the living.”
I don’t know that we see things that way. Culturally, we’re not tied to this multi-generational view. We don’t have the huge family structures that we used to have in America. I think that’s really impacted the way that we see our obligations, both to the past generation and to the future generation, with fewer people having kids and seeing things through that lens. I don’t know how you reclaim that other than we really must do our best to teach history, to teach the context in which America became what it is today, how we got there, and really present a vision of the path forward.
This is a good segue into asking given all the negative political news and hyper-politicization today, do you think there are any ideals most Americans possess now that lives up to the legacy of the founders? What are we doing right?
Schietzelt: One thing we’re still doing right is that we’re willing to fight with each other about things we think matter. We talk about politicization today, but politics has always been rough. Think about the Federalists using the Alien and Sedition Acts to jail Democratic-Republicans in the late 18th century, and then the Republicans turning around and doing the same thing to the Federalists once they gained power.
So, in terms of how willing we are to engage on issues we care about, it can get nasty, sure, but it’s always been a little nasty. I keep throwing out too many historical quotes, but I love this one from Jefferson. When Alexander Hamilton was writing as “Pacificus” about the foreign-affairs powers of the president and the scope of executive authority, Jefferson was desperate for someone to respond. He wrote to his friend James Madison, “For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select some of the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.”
They weren’t afraid to go after each other. The difference was that they were generally better at attacking ideas rather than attacking the person.
And that’s something we’re still doing, we’re still willing to engage. I just think we need to make it less personal and more about the ideas, instead of impugning the character of someone who disagrees. But in terms of human nature, I don’t think we’re all that different from the founding generation.
True. It’s just magnified now because we have so many ways to create more noise.
Schietzelt: It’s a bit like looking back 100 or 200 years from now and saying, “Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, those guys were incredible. Why don’t we play basketball like that anymore?” It’s selection bias. We remember only the highlights, not the missed shots or the rough games.
I think the same thing happens with our politics. We romanticize the past, but the truth is we’ve always struggled with how to engage each other in fair and productive ways.
Before I reached out to you, I didn’t know this, but I read that you grew up the son of a disabled Vietnam veteran. I’m interested in that, and I have a high view of so many men who fought in Vietnam. Can you tell me more about that experience?
Schietzelt: Dad was a fascinating character. He passed away about a year and a half ago. He was an orphan by age 10 and his mother left the family when he was around nine, and then his father died a year later. He and his four siblings were brought up by different aunts and uncles. He was the “problem child,” so he ended up being raised largely on his own.
I think that left him without much of a sense of family identity. Going back to what we talked about earlier—intergenerational duty—where does that come from when you don’t feel connected to the family you grew up with?
For him, that sense of belonging came from the Marine Corps. That’s where he found identity and purpose, where he became part of something bigger than himself.
He loved telling me some of the funnier stories, like getting into a fight with the 101st Airborne at a bar in Da Nang and, to be more accurate, getting his backside kicked by them. He didn’t talk much about his combat experiences until I became a Marine myself. Then he started to open up about that.
One story that always shocked me was about the Mayaguez incident. Three weeks after the fall of Saigon, the Khmer Rouge captured the SS Mayaguez and held it hostage. America was desperate to project power after our withdrawal from Vietnam, so they sent Marines to rescue the crew. My dad was one of them.
The intelligence was terrible. The preparation was terrible. His helicopter was shot down, and half the men on board were killed. He ended up treading water in the South China Sea for several hours before they were rescued.
I could go on about his life after the war. He moved to Black Hawk, Colorado, back then it was a town of about 232 people. And in one of those odd turns, he was apparently interviewed by the FBI because one of the regulars at the bar where he worked was a guy named John Hinckley Jr.
I know that name well as a child of the ’80s.
Schietzelt: For me, all of that has shaped my life in a few important ways. First, it reminds me, very acutely, that we’re all miracles to be here. Think of how many things had to line up over time for any of us to exist in this moment.
I once told a professor that my dad had been part of the Mayaguez incident, and he just looked at me and said, “You’re lucky to be here. You’re lucky to be alive.” And I don’t take that for granted.
Dad also embodied the classic Marine ethos: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” He passed that on to my brother and me. His message was always, “Go out of your way to help anyone you can but if someone sets themselves against you, you take note of it and act accordingly.” That shaped how we grew up.
You also performed “Taps” for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. I’d imagine that has some kind of influence on the kind of representative and lawmaker you strive to be, including being a Marine Corps veteran yourself. How has that impacted you as a citizen and lawmaker?
Schietzelt: It’s incredibly impactful. You’re standing there with your bugle, watching the chaplain, watching the Marine Corps body bearers, these guys whose whole purpose is to be strong enough to carry the caskets. You see the ceremonial infantry preparing for the 21-gun salute. It all reminds you of the profound weight of service and sacrifice.
As I left the Marine Corps and carried those images with me, I started teaching First Amendment law at Regent University in Virginia Beach. Around that time, I came across an idea from Professor Doug Laycock, a major religious-liberty scholar and Supreme Court advocate. He said that the value of rights like religious liberty depends on our willingness to exercise those rights responsibly. If we want people to understand why we value something like the First Amendment, we must demonstrate that value through how we use it.
That really hit me this year, especially around Memorial Day. I was speaking to a crowd and realized the real “call to action” from Memorial Day is about how you live your everyday life. How you use the rights secured for you by someone who died on a battlefield, that’s what gives meaning to their sacrifice. It’s about self-government and responsibility. Someone died to secure your right to speak, to worship, to participate. How are you using it? Are you abusing it? Are you using it to troll people online? Or are you using it to foster conversation, seek understanding, and pursue truth?
I’ve reflected on that a lot this year as we’ve moved through session and as people reach out for comment. What are we doing with these rights? Are we just trying to stick a thumb in someone’s eye? Or are we trying to do something productive, something in service of that “more perfect union” the Constitution calls us toward?
You’re an accomplished attorney, but your most important job is a father of four young boys. What kind of North Carolina and nation do you want to leave to them? It seems like we can do better.
Schietzelt: We hope we can do a lot better. When I was approached about running, I waffled on it. Do I want to do it? Do I not? Because it’s a hit. It’s a burden.
You’re not getting rich from it either in North Carolina. [laughs]
Schietzelt: [laughs] No, I took a huge pay cut to do this, a huge one. And as someone who didn’t grow up with money, that’s a big deal.
But I feel an obligation to my children. Whatever world I’m handing off to them, it needs to be better than the one I stepped into as an adult.
It goes back to self-government and the separation of powers. I want to help create a world where they can flourish, where they respect the privileges and rights they’ve been given. I want them to feel grateful that they can worship according to the dictates of their conscience, that they can speak their minds without fear, and that they can engage respectfully and seriously with the world around them.
I joke a lot and I love to laugh, but I take this part seriously: if you have the ability to speak your mind and contribute something valuable, you have a duty to do so. That’s how I want my boys to approach the world.
I hope my example shows them how to engage with their neighbors and their community. And if that example influences others too, even better. We can argue and vehemently disagree while still recognizing each other’s humanity.
That’s what I think about most: Am I doing my part to move them, and everyone else, toward a better tomorrow?
