The Mount Vernon Statement: What It Says, What It Means, and Why the Law Is What Actually Matters
What Is the Mount Vernon Statement?
On February 17, 2010, a coalition of prominent conservative figures gathered at the Collingwood Library and Museum in Fairfax County, Virginia, and signed a document they called the Mount Vernon Statement. The location was deliberate — organizers had sought to hold the signing at George Washington's nearby estate, but the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association declined to host it. The name stuck anyway.
The statement was modeled after the Sharon Statement, a similar declaration signed by young conservatives in 1960. Its stated purpose was to unite fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and national security conservatives under a single constitutional framework. The document called this framework "Constitutional conservatism," and its central organizing concept was "ordered liberty," a phrase drawn from natural law tradition and invoked as the connective tissue between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The signatories argued that the founding principles of limited government, rule of law, national independence, economic opportunity, and religious liberty were under sustained attack in American culture, education, and politics. The document was not legislation. It was not a court filing. It was a declaration of political principle, signed by private citizens and organizational leaders, carrying no legal force on its own.
That distinction matters.
Reporting the Document Fairly
The Mount Vernon Statement has been described as a defining manifesto of modern American conservatism. It has also been largely forgotten outside of policy circles. Neither characterization is particularly useful for someone trying to understand what it actually says.
Read plainly, the document makes several straightforward claims. It asserts that the founders intended to create a government of limited and enumerated powers. It asserts that individual liberty is best protected through constitutional structure rather than through the benevolence of any particular government or leader. It asserts that the three branches of government exist in intentional tension with one another, and that this tension is a feature, not a bug. And it calls on citizens, institutions, and elected officials to govern and behave in ways consistent with those structural commitments.
None of those claims are unique to one political movement. The argument that constitutional structure protects liberty has been made by lawyers, judges, and scholars across the ideological spectrum for two centuries. What the Mount Vernon Statement does is package those arguments in explicitly conservative political language and direct them at a specific political moment.
Whether one finds that persuasive, objectionable, or beside the point is a matter of personal and political judgment. What is not a matter of opinion is the underlying constitutional architecture the document describes.
The Legal Framework Underneath the Politics
Strip away the political context and the Mount Vernon Statement is, at its core, a recitation of well-established constitutional principles. And those principles have real legal content.
Separation of powers is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea. It is a structural feature of the federal government, enforceable in court. When executive agencies exceed their statutory authority, courts push back. When Congress attempts to delegate unbounded legislative power, courts have tools to address it. When judicial decisions stray into territory that looks more like policymaking than interpretation, the debate that follows is itself a constitutional one. These are not abstract disputes. They are litigated constantly, at every level of the federal judiciary.
Federalism, similarly, is a legal doctrine with teeth. The division of authority between state and federal government determines which laws apply in which circumstances. In family law, this plays out in concrete ways. Divorce, child custody, and parental rights are governed almost entirely by state law. Washington State has its own statutes, its own case law, and its own standards for how courts evaluate the best interests of a child or divide marital assets. Federal constitutional principles set a floor. State law fills in everything above it.
Individual rights protections are where constitutional law most directly touches the lives of private citizens. The Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment that extended many of its protections against state governments, establishes guarantees that no legislature can simply vote away. Parental rights, as courts in Washington and across the country have recognized, carry constitutional weight. The right to direct the upbringing and education of your children is not merely a statutory privilege — it is a liberty interest the government must have substantial justification to override.
Declarations Are Not Law. Courts Are.
This is the point that any document like the Mount Vernon Statement, whatever its political valence, cannot change. Political declarations inspire. They organize. They articulate values. They do not bind courts, constrain agencies, or protect individual rights on their own.
The legal system is where principles become enforceable. A declaration that the government should respect limited powers means nothing to a family court judge weighing a custody modification request. A statement that religious liberty should be protected means nothing to an employer disputing a workplace accommodation claim unless it is backed by statute and precedent. The gap between a stated principle and an enforceable legal right is exactly where qualified legal counsel operates.
Understanding the constitutional framework — separation of powers, federalism, individual rights — gives citizens a vocabulary for civic engagement. It helps people recognize when something feels wrong about how power is being exercised. But recognition is the beginning of the process, not the end.
If you believe your rights have been affected, whether in a family law matter, a dispute with a government agency, or any other legal context, the next step is a conversation with an attorney who can evaluate your specific situation under the law as it actually stands. The Law Office of Chad Foster serves clients in Snohomish County and the surrounding region, and is here to help you understand not just the principles, but the practical legal options available to you.
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