Leadership Quote by Steve Chabot

A sitting politician telling you not to obey politicians is a neat little paradox, and Steve Chabot’s line lives in that tension. On its face, it’s civics as street advice: authority isn’t automatically legitimacy; your conscience has veto power. The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost parental, which is part of the tactic. It sidesteps ideology and aims for a moral reflex anyone can recognize in a workplace, a classroom, a courthouse, a Capitol.

The subtext is where it gets sharper. “If it doesn’t seem right” lowers the bar from legal reasoning to gut-level judgment, inviting ordinary people to treat their intuition as a check on power. Then he tightens it: “If it violates your own principles.” That double-structure does two jobs: it dignifies individual ethics while insulating the speaker from having to specify which principles should govern public life. It’s a libertarian-flavored appeal that can sound like bravery or like an escape hatch, depending on who’s using it.

Context matters because politicians reach for this frame in moments when institutions are distrusted: controversial policing, bureaucratic overreach, wartime orders, pandemic rules, party-line demands. It’s a rhetoric of permission. The listener is being authorized to disobey, but in a way that keeps the disobedience personal and private rather than collective and programmatic. That’s why it works: it flatters the audience as moral agents, critiques “authority” in the abstract, and avoids naming the specific authorities - including, potentially, the speaker’s own side.