Ted Cruz said what?

It's being reported by NBC News:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Monday called for armed protesters who occupied a federal building in Oregon to "stand down peaceably.

"Every one of us has a constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds," Cruz told reporters in Iowa. "But we don't have a constitutional right to use force and violence and to threaten force and violence against others. So it is our hope that the protesters there will stand down peaceably, that there will not be a violent confrontation."

This is how politicians talk when they're following polls instead of the founding principles and the founders example.

Sometimes there are higher priorities than ending things "peacefully."

I'm not defending the particular group in Oregon group in question right now, but I do know Congress has failed to hold a rogue executive and federal bureaucracy in check. As a result, Obama's about to take extra-Constitutional power grabs to unprecedented new levels.

The excesses of government overreach wears on the patience of growing numbers of the American people.

Sooner or later, there's going to be some push-back. It's how the founders designed things to work.

Consider the words of Thomas Jefferson:

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."

Jefferson also wrote:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."

If a president fails to practice constitutional restraint, and if the Congress and the courts fail to hold a renegade president to prescribed constitutional bounds, or tries to make excuses to justify the excess, each has lost its moral authority to dictate standards to the rest of us.