04/22/2026
Every year your freedom gets a little smaller.
Most people never notice.
I'll never forget when I first started practicing law as a prosecutor in 2008. The Virginia criminal code fit in a modest volume you could carry under one arm.
Today?
Two large volumes - and thicker every session.
Civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote a book called Three Felonies a Day. His thesis - one I can't vouch for, but one worth sitting with that seems conceivable - is that the average American unknowingly commits three felonies every single day just by going about an ordinary life.
Whether the exact number is right or not, the direction is undeniable: the net keeps widening, and ordinary people keep falling into it.
Think of your life as a bubble.
Inside that bubble, you act freely - you work, you build a business, you raise your family, you live one with your neighbors and with nature.
That is the space a free person is supposed to occupy.
That bubble is shrinking.
A little smaller every year.
A little less room to breathe.
A little more of your ordinary life suddenly subject to a permit, a fee, a fine, or a felony you didn't know existed.
Like a frog in a pot with the chef slowly turning up the heat - by the time you feel it, you can't jump out.
This is what our legislators get wrong in Richmond ...
Every.
Single.
Day.
They go down to the General Assembly and come back proud of how many new bills they passed - as if the volume of legislation is the measure of a good legislator. As if they somehow became more moral than us and we, The People, need more rules.
In reality, most of those bills are restrictions - on trade, on business, on property, and on individual freedom.
It is long past time for candidates in the next cycle to run on a different record. Not how many new laws they added, but how many they took off your back. Candidates need to be proud of how much freedom they gave back to our people.
Not how much they regulated you, but how much they freed you.
Not how they grew government, but how they helped you live the life you were meant to live.
If you're running for office and you can't answer the question "What did you take off the people's back?" - you are part of the problem.
The bubble doesn't have to keep shrinking. But it will - unless we start sending people to Richmond who understand that their job is to give freedom back, not to take more of it away.