Conservatives are fond of invoking the American founding, the framers of the Constitution, and the principles that drove the fight for independence. Those invocations have always been selective and opportunistic, but they’ve grown downright farcical as right wingers contort themselves into knots to defend executive powers explicitly contradicted by the Constitution.

The Republicans’ veneration of the founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the Colonies, nothing angered them more than the crown’s deployment of soldiers on city streets—and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence that President Donald Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.

The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The founders were also students of history and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth amendments and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the founders worried about, well, exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.