Are You Celebrating Independence from Tyranny on this 4th of July?*
Heather Cox Richardson’s 4th of July post, quoted in full below,[i] gives us historical perspective on the Second Continental Congress’s adoption of the Declaration of Independence and subsequent events that contributed to developing and preserving a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” albeit imperfect.
Millions of Americans may be less than enthusiastic to celebrate the country’s independence from tyranny this July 4th. With this administration’s design to destroy self-government and install a king, those interested in preserving a constitutional republic — in more than name only — may instead be going through the stages of grief as we systematically lose independence from tyranny under an authoritarian regime that enjoys the full backing of a cowering, do-nothing Congress and a complicit Supreme Court.
It didn’t take long for Trump to demolish what took decades, centuries, to build. “Accomplishments” thus far include upending the lives of hundreds of thousands of federal workers; rendering hundreds if not thousands of human beings to a notorious prison or other black sites for no legally sanctioned reason and without due process; creating concentration camps to hold thousands of people whose only “crime” is coming to this country to escape tyranny and violence and create a better life for themselves and their children — and whose contributions far exceed the cost; destroying alliances; making us a laughingstock, a country that cannot be trusted; destroying America as a refuge, as the leader in the quest for human and civil rights throughout the world; destroying the country as the place where the best minds in the world want to study and apply their genius; and destroying America’s exceptionalism by taking a reaper’s sickle to programs and institutions that made us safer and more secure.
The programs and institutions he is destroying made us safer by creating, uniting, and strengthening alliances throughout the world; preserving and saving lives; eradicating disease; encouraging democratic principles so people have a voice in how they are governed; guarding the country against cyberattacks and infiltration; protecting consumers and the financially vulnerable from corporate exploitation; enforcing workplace protections and environmental safeguards; assuring that the food we eat is safe, among many others.
The administration has overridden the Constitution by leaping headlong into Congress’s domain. The Constitution provides a mechanism to create and to eliminate government agencies, departments, and programs, to pass and to abolish all sorts of laws and regulations, to increase and to reduce spending. That authority falls squarely within Article I. A fully complicit Republican-led Congress has ceded those structural mechanisms to a wrecking ball with no check, no balance, and no voice in opposition. Congress’s resounding silence is complicity.
Congress did do one thing. The so-called “big, beautiful bill,” just passed. The tsunami that will wipe out the lives of millions of Americans is coming. For what? to avoid being primaried, to stroke an ego, and to sustain oligarchic rule in the United States!
Then there’s the Supreme Court. Trump, who recently posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law” — a quote attributed to Napoleon — can do anything he wants, including violate any laws without adverse consequence to him. That appears to be how he’s lived much of his life. The evidence suggests that’s what he thought even before the Supreme Court created — for him — immunity from prosecution for any crimes he commits so long as he nominally couches his criminality in some “official presidential act.” No previous president had the need (sans Nixon?) to evade prosecution for crimes committed while in office and no prior court endowed such immunity on a president, a protection with no constitutional footing that places him above the law. As Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng said of the quote above, “At least [for once] he’s being honest.” Trump Publicly Admits He Thinks He Can Break Any Law He Wants (February 15, 2025): he can, with a shroud the Supreme Court created — for him — out of whole cloth.
Then, there’s the loss of individual rights and liberty interests. Three years ago, I published Happy Independence Day to Rich, White, Straight, Male, Fire-Breathing, Gun-Slinging, Christian Zealots. To Everyone Else, Not So Fast. Text from that post is repeated below because it is more relevant now than when I first wrote it.
I live in Utah where a disproportionate majority of elected officials are conservative Mormons, where the Mormon Church is consulted on policy, and its leadership must approve all significant legislation. That symbiotic church-state relationship has existed here since Utah joined the Union.
I hadn’t completely given up on local politics but took comfort that the United States Constitution and its Supremacy Clause, its Privileges and Immunities Clause, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s incorporation doctrine and Due Process Clause provided a backstop to keep in check Utah’s collection of religious zealots, racists, misogynists, homophobes and, more recently, Big Lie conspiracy theorists. Since at least Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court — the final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning — has acknowledged that “equality” is more than an empty truism, gradually recognizing and expanding what should be obvious. In his majority opinion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, which reaffirmed much of Roe v. Wade, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote about liberty interests that were, seemingly, “woven into the societal fabric”:
“Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child-rearing, and education. . . . These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
In Obergefell v. Hodges in which the court required all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex marriages, Justice Kennedy explained:
“The identification and protection of fundamental rights is an enduring part of the judicial duty to interpret the Constitution. That responsibility, however, ‘has not been reduced to any formula.’ . . . Rather, it requires courts to exercise reasoned judgment in identifying interests of the person so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect. . . . That process is guided by many of the same considerations relevant to the analysis of other constitutional provisions that set forth broad principles rather than specific requirements. History and tradition guide and discipline this inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries. . . . That method respects our history and learns from it without allowing the past alone to rule the present.
“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.”
Since the unprecedented retraction of constitutionally recognized rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, other rights that are firmly grounded in the same constitutional sources as were reproductive rights, including contraception, parental rights, interracial marriage, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage, are now on the chopping block. See ‘Liberty’ Does Not Mean What You Think It Means (by the author).
Reversing a half-century of precedent in which “liberty” and “equality” finally became more than mere constitutional platitudes, SCOTUS takes us back to 1868 and before.
In response to Dobbs Barack Obama tweeted, “Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, but it also relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues — attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans.”
Saying the quiet part aloud, Senator Cornyn (R-TX) responded with his own tweet: “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.”
Plessy, you may recall, announced the racist separate-but-equal doctrine which Brown recognized as anything but equal under the Constitution and mandated ending the manifestly racist policy through integration.
Once Cornyn’s tweet went viral, the Texas Senator back-spun, trying to make it appear he meant to applaud the Supreme Court’s overruling precedent. Claiming the constitutional recognition and expansion of rights in Brown is somehow equivalent to its exact opposite — the court’s elimination of 50 years of constitutionally recognized autonomy to make “the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy” — reveals at least one of two things about Cornyn: he’s not too bright and/or he is about as honest as the other Senator from Texas. The way I read it, Cornyn, and likely the supermajority on the Supreme Court, would like the states to decide for themselves whether to reinstate the separate-but-equal doctrine.
The Supreme Court also removed significant safeguards under the First Amendment Religion Clauses against government endorsement and establishment of religion by mandating that states “fund explicitly religious instruction.” This was the term the Supreme Court decided to ignore the speed bumps (Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post, July 2, 2022).
Using its shadow docket, the Supreme Court revived the ghost of Dred Scott in the birthright citizenship case, allowing Trump — at least for now — to use an executive order to deny the constitutionally protected birthright citizenship of people born in the United States who are subject to its jurisdiction. See What the Supreme Court’s Ruling Will Mean for Birthright Citizenship (Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, June3 27, 2025).
The court’s results-oriented, cherry-picked use of history applied equally to its expansion of gun rights, “tossing out the approach endorsed by every federal appeals court to have weighed gun restrictions in favor of a history-focused analysis that seems destined to pose daunting constitutional hurdles for gun regulation.” As Justice Breyer wrote in dissent, the majority gave “a laundry list of reasons to discount seemingly relevant historical evidence,” which gives jurists “ample tools to pick their friends out of history’s crowd.” This was the term the Supreme Court decided to ignore the speed bumps (Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post, July 2, 2022).
In her hopeful July 4th essay, Heather Cox Richardson wrote:
“The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their ‘Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor’ to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle.
“Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to ‘take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
“Words to live by in 2025.”
*My brother the talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.
[i] And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish were locked into a lower status than white Americans. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle.
Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Words to live by in 2025.