Why “We the People” Are Treated as Subjects—and Why Status and Due Process Must Be Asserted at the Start of Every Legal Matter

We are the Power!

     American constitutional doctrine begins with the premise that “We the People” are the source of all legitimate governmental authority. The Constitution is framed as an act of popular sovereignty, and cases like Yick Wo v. Hopkins expressly recognize that sovereign power originates in the people and is only delegated to governmental agencies, with law operating as the “definition and limitation of power.” Yet the lived reality of litigation, administration, and enforcement is starkly different. In concrete cases, individual citizens are almost never treated as “owners” of the system. They are processed as objects of statutory schemes, funding mechanisms, and bureaucratic routines. The dissonance arises because sovereignty in American law is collective and structural, while adjudication and enforcement are individual and procedural. The system recognizes the people as the ultimate source of law at the constitutional level, but it presumes each person to be a subject of law at the operational level, unless that person asserts status and due process rights in a way that fits existing doctrine and timing rules.

     Public law illustrates this structural displacement. In Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, the Court held that submerged lands under navigable waters are held by the state “in trust for the people,” such that the state cannot abdicate control in a way that destroys public use. The state, not each citizen, holds legal title and control. The “beneficial interest” of the people is diffuse, political, and mediated through institutions. That same pattern governs nearly every aspect of public authority such that legislatures, agencies, courts, and public corporations hold and exercise power “for” the public, but not as co-owned property divisible among individual citizens. An individual who attempts to litigate as if he or she were a direct co-owner of the state’s authority or assets runs immediately into standing doctrine, sovereign immunity, and the limits of implied causes of action. Federal standing rules require a concrete, particularized injury, not a generalized grievance about the legality of government policy. Sovereign immunity blocks many suits altogether unless the sovereign consents or Congress creates a cause of action. The system’s default posture is clear which is to say that they treat you like you are not an equity owner of the machinery; you are treated as a regulated party who must find a foothold within the categories of rights and remedies already recognized.

     Jurisdictional doctrine reinforces that subordination by building in strong presumptions. Subject-matter jurisdiction, the court’s power to hear a type of case, derives from constitutional and statutory grants and cannot be created by consent. Cases such as United States v. Cotton describe subject-matter jurisdiction as the court’s “statutory or constitutional power to adjudicate” and acknowledge that genuine subject-matter defects are non-waivable. At the same time, Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp. draws a sharp distinction between truly jurisdictional prerequisites and non-jurisdictional elements that can be forfeited if not timely raised. Personal jurisdiction, by contrast, is treated as an individual liberty interest that is fully waivable. In Insurance Corp. of Ireland v. Compagnie des Bauxites, the Court characterizes personal jurisdiction as a due process right that a litigant can waive expressly or by conduct, including failure to assert the defense in the first responsive pleading or by participating on the merits. If you do not make a jurisdictional record at the outset, the system proceeds on the assumption that the court has subject-matter jurisdiction, that personal jurisdiction is either proper or waived, and that you occupy the default status of “ordinary litigant.”

     Institutional incentives push in the same direction. The Supreme Court’s due process decisions in Tumey v. Ohio and Ward v. Monroeville expose the extent to which lower courts and local governments can depend on fines and fees, and how that dependency skews the treatment of individuals. In Tumey, a mayor-judge’s compensation was tied directly to fines he imposed, creating an unconstitutional financial interest in conviction. In Ward, the Court invalidated a mayor’s court where fines accounted for a substantial percentage of village revenue, even though the mayor did not personally pocket the funds. The vice was structural, meaning the tribunal was financially entangled with the success of enforcement. These cases recognize that, absent safeguards, courts will tend to treat defendants as revenue sources or compliance units rather than as rights-holders. If a litigant does not forcefully assert due process rights, the system’s effective posture is to treat him or her as raw material for an institutional pipeline.

     Procedural due process provides the minimum legal shield against being reduced to a mere object of administration, but only when it is invoked and framed within prevailing doctrine. Goldberg v. Kelly holds that welfare benefits, once conferred by statute, cannot be terminated without a pre-termination evidentiary hearing. The Court rejected the older “privilege” model and treated such benefits as statutory entitlements protected by the Due Process Clause. Mathews v. Eldridge then supplies the canonical three-factor balancing test for what process is due in any given context which is the private interest at stake, the risk of erroneous deprivation and probable value of additional procedures, and the government’s interest including administrative burdens. Together, these cases establish that once an interest rises to the level of “life, liberty, or property,” the state must provide some form of notice and opportunity to be heard, calibrated by Mathews. But the courts will not build that calibration for you sua sponte (on their own motion). If you accept truncated procedures without objection, you are presumed to have accepted them as adequate.

     Equal protection and arbitrariness doctrine amplify the same theme. Yick Wo v. Hopkins invalidated the discriminatory enforcement of a facially neutral licensing regime, emphasizing that law must bind and restrain power rather than serve as a façade for arbitrary will. The Court did not treat the petitioners as sovereign “owners” who could veto municipal policy. It instead recognized their capacity as rights-holders to expose the gap between the ordinance’s text and its racially discriminatory application. The key was the record they built which was statistical disparity, patterns of denial, and the absence of neutral criteria. If similarly situated litigants fail to create a comparable record, the presumption of regularity and good faith attaches to governmental action. In practice, the system treats them as compliant objects of regulation rather than as active beneficiaries of constitutional constraints.

     Against this doctrinal background, the idea that “status” and due process must be asserted at the onset of any legal matter is not esoteric; it is simply the disciplined application of existing law to timing and record-building. “Status” in this context does not mean mystical invocations of sovereignty or idiosyncratic wordplay. It means clarifying, on the record and in the pleadings, who you are in law and in what capacity you act i.e. natural person, parent, fiduciary, officer of an entity, beneficiary, accused, or civil respondent. That capacity determines standing, burdens, defenses, and procedural protections. A parent in a custody case, for example, must assert parental status and the associated liberty interest in the care and custody of a child, which the Court has long recognized as a fundamental interest triggering heightened due process protections. A criminal defendant must assert the full panoply of constitutional rights that attach by virtue of that status. Silence at this level allows courts and agencies to treat you as a generic case file.

     Early jurisdictional practice is the second core component of proper status assertion. Where there is any plausible question about subject-matter jurisdiction i.e. wrong forum, statutory limits exceeded, constitutional constraints ignored, etc., a party must raise that objection directly in the pleadings and in oral appearance, identifying the specific constitutional or statutory provisions at issue. Courts recite that subject-matter jurisdiction can be raised at any time, and truly jurisdictional defects cannot be cured by consent. In reality, if the record never reflects a focused jurisdictional challenge, appellate courts will often treat complaints about jurisdiction as disguised quarrels with the merits. Similarly, personal jurisdiction objections must appear in the first motion or answer, separate from the merits. Once a litigant begins arguing the substance of the case without preserving that defense, the waiver doctrine recognized in Insurance Corp. of Ireland and codified in civil procedure rules closes the door. The court will proceed as if jurisdiction is proper, and any later effort to revive the issue is characterized as gamesmanship. A party who wants to avoid being treated as a passive object must therefore lodge and repeat jurisdictional objections at the earliest procedural stage, maintain them in subsequent filings, and insist on explicit rulings.

     The third component is the intentional invocation of due process at the level of procedure, not ideology. When served with a complaint, citation, or administrative notice, a rights-conscious litigant demands clear and specific notice of the factual allegations and legal bases for the asserted authority. That demand is not a refusal to participate; it is an insistence on the Goldberg/Mathews framework that meaningful notice precede meaningful hearing, and that procedures be calibrated to the gravity of the threatened deprivation and the risk of error. In administrative contexts, this can take the form of written requests for the statutory authority relied upon, an explanation of the procedure to contest determinations, and a demand for a hearing before significant property or liberty interests are impaired. In judicial contexts, it means moving to dismiss or strike where pleadings fail to state specific, actionable claims or where orders are issued ex parte (from one party) without adequate opportunity to be heard. Failure to articulate these objections locks in a presumption that whatever process you received was sufficient.

     Proper status and due process assertion must be distinguished from the fringe patterns that courts increasingly reject. Refusing to state one’s name, claiming to stand “outside” the law, or reciting pseudo-technical “secured party” formulas has no foundation in controlling authority. Courts treat such behavior as evidence of frivolousness, not as a basis for enhanced constitutional scrutiny. It undermines credibility, invites sanctions, and obscures legitimate jurisdictional or due process issues that might otherwise be taken seriously. The system is not moved by rhetoric that denies its existence; it is compelled only by arguments that expose conflict between its own acts and its own constitutional and statutory limits.

     Used correctly, early status assertion and due process invocation operate as both shield and sword. As shield, they prevent tacit waiver of jurisdictional defenses, compel disclosure of legal authority and procedures, and limit the ability of courts and agencies to rely on truncated or informal processes. As sword, they furnish the raw material for appeals and civil rights actions. Appellate courts and § 1983 tribunals ask whether the plaintiff made timely objections, requested appropriate procedures, and received explicit rulings. A record showing that a party identified their legal capacity, challenged jurisdiction on specific grounds, invoked Mathews and related due process principles, and was nonetheless denied a hearing or subjected to a biased tribunal aligns cleanly with the logic of Yick Wo, Tumey, Ward, Goldberg, and Mathews. That record allows later courts to see, in concrete form, how delegated power deviated from the constraints that “We the People” originally imposed.

     This approach does not place an individual “above” the system. It accepts that general laws bind citizens and that courts possess real authority when operating within constitutional and statutory boundaries. The point is not to annul the system by objection, but to force it to either conform to its own law or generate reversible error. The only form of sovereignty American courts will recognize at the individual level is the disciplined exercise of rights within the channels that doctrine and procedure already provide. If those rights are not asserted early, clearly, and repeatedly, the system will continue to treat the individual as a subject to be processed, not as a rights-holder whose status and protections demand respect.

~ Robert Michael and AI