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I had a longer effort post that got eaten by the gateway monster but as a change of pace from all the LLM talk I'm curious if any one was watching the SOTU. My reflexive read was broadly positive but I also felt a bit uneasy with there being not just one but two CMHs and two Purple Hearts and a Legion of Merit. My feeling is that this was not the proper place, at the same time I think that Trump may have scored a significant mid-term coup by by calling on people to stand if they felt that the first duty of the government is to the citizens of the nation, "why wouldn't you stand for that" feels like something that will be showing up in campaign commercials come August.
The exact quote was, "the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens" ... which is a bit more obviously Orwellian than your paraphrase. Maybe that's just a question of style; as a question of substance, both the original quote and the paraphrase are wrong.
The first duty of the American government is to obey the Constitution.
That's a complicated duty, and far-too-often breached, but at least technically that's the duty that qualifies our leaders to fit the definition of "the American government" rather than for an entry in the wiki for auto-coup. It's not always even a popular duty, though it's generally at least popular enough that "pass an amendment to widen what other duties the government can legally handle" doesn't ever get considered. Many people think violating the Second Amendment would be a good way to protect American citizens from shootings. Most think violating the Tenth Amendment often helpfully protects American citizens from being taken advantage of. Some think violating some combination of the Fourth through Eighth Amendments is a good way to protect American citizens from criminals. A few think violating Art. I election laws could be justified to protect American citizens from bad politicians. Many thought that violating the Assembly Clause was justified to protect American citizens from Covid.
They're all wrong.
Those are all real threats that American citizens deserve some protection from, true, and so are illegal aliens (both in the sense that some are serious criminals and in the sense that all of them do a little bit to undermine the rule of law), but the concept of protection is not a backdoor password to unchecked power, and it it seems pretty transparent that the people who attempt to use it that way are more interested in the power than in the protection.
I see where you're going with this, and to some extent agree that a shared commitment to the words is what embodies the power of the American government, but I wouldn't go wholesale on this because it'd be too easy to See Like A State and circularly define that the first duty of American Government is to protect American Government (defined as a polity that obeys the Constitution), and governments protecting themselves qua governments over the actual opinions of The People is basically the definition of totalitarianism.
So I think I'll argue that there is a Zeroth Principle in the Constitution that the American people choose to bind themselves by it until and unless they decide to change it (via the established procedures) or replace it, for which some procedures have been written, but other routes are implied to exist by the Declaration of Independence.
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