Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) delivered one of his sharper committee-room takedowns on Wednesday after Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) balked at a State Department nominee’s embrace of a core American idea: that our rights are endowed by a Creator, not granted by government.

The exchange unfolded during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing for Riley Barnes, whom President Trump nominated in June to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Barnes, a veteran State Department official and former senior speechwriter who has also served as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, used his opening remarks to anchor U.S. human-rights policy in first principles.

Quoting Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first address to department employees, Barnes recited: “We are a nation founded on a powerful principle … that all men are created equal, because our rights come from God our Creator — not from our laws, not from our governments.” He then underscored the point: American diplomacy should defend “historic, natural rights” rather than chase an ever-expanding list of politicized entitlements.

Kaine bristled. He suggested that saying rights do not come from government echoes a theocratic mindset, invoking Iran as an example. “That’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine argued, claiming Tehran justifies repression by asserting it uniquely understands God-given rights. He called the statement “extremely troubling,” and added that if people of different faith traditions defined “natural rights,” their answers would vary widely.

Cruz happened to enter the room as Kaine finished. “I almost fell out of my chair,” he said, because the notion Kaine cast as “radical and dangerous” is “literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.” Cruz then recited Jefferson’s famous lines from the Declaration of Independence — penned in Kaine’s home state — that we are “endowed by their Creator … with certain unalienable Rights,” among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The senator’s point was simple: America’s claim is that rights pre-exist government, which exists to secure them.

Barnes’ testimony, and the dust-up it provoked, offered a window into the philosophical fault line that increasingly divides Washington’s approach to human rights. On one side is the natural-rights tradition — the idea that rights are universal, inherent, and not contingent on legislative whims. On the other is a more positivist view that treats rights as products of law and policy, endlessly redefined by governments and international bodies.

Why does that distinction matter for the job Barnes seeks? The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor routinely faces regimes that insist “rights” are what the state says they are — often to excuse censorship, persecution, or religious oppression. A bureau grounded in the American understanding of unalienable rights is less likely to be blown off course by diplomatic fashions or pressure from authoritarian governments masquerading as moral arbiters.

Kaine’s Iran analogy also drew fire for conflating the American founders’ claim — that rights are inherent and government is limited — with a regime that asserts divine warrant to crush dissent. Those are opposites: natural rights restrain rulers; theocratic decrees empower them. That was precisely Cruz’s critique: invoking Jefferson’s text is not a call for clerical rule; it’s a reminder that government is the guardian, not the giver, of liberty.

Barnes, for his part, framed the bureau’s mission in terms that would be recognizable to generations of American diplomats: protect human dignity, defend freedom of conscience and expression, and resist the temptation to replace timeless rights with identity-based privileges. “These values aren’t identity politics,” he said, pushing back on the trend to inflate “rights” into a malleable list tailored to the moment.

The hearing also underscored how personnel choices shape policy. If confirmed, Barnes would join a State Department team under Secretary Rubio that has tried to re-center U.S. advocacy on free speech, religious liberty, and due process — issues that cut across borders and ideologies. His critics plainly prefer a more expansive, government-as-grantor conception. Expect that argument to surface again when the committee votes.

In an era when even the plain text of the Declaration can spark controversy, Cruz’s intervention turned a routine confirmation hearing into a seminar on first principles. Whether one agrees with his tone, the substance isn’t new — it’s America’s starting point. As the founders had it, government doesn’t mint rights; it acknowledges and safeguards them. That is exactly the standard many dissidents abroad hope the United States will still champion.