We 21st-century Americans know a lot about the founding of our country in no small measure due to the sacrifices of a single couple, who, because of their dedication to the cause of liberty, spent much time apart, and who blessed America with their correspondence born of those separations: John and Abigail Adams.
Indeed, it was 249 years ago tomorrow that future U.S. President John Adams wrote:
The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.—I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by Solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be Solemnized with Pomp and Parade with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
Writing on July 3, 1776 from Philadelphia to his wife in Quincy, Massachusetts, Adams was referring to July 2, 1776, the date on which the Continental Congress voted to approve the Richard Henry Lee resolution, which declared “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” After the July 2 vote for independence, the Continental Congress needed to approve and publish the actual Declaration of Independence, and printer John Dunlap produced it on July 4 with the bold and centered imprimatur “IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776[.]” The Declaration contains Jefferson’s immutable, “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.” This is the reason we celebrate July 4, and not July 2, as our Independence Day in the United States.
Only “four score and seven years” (87 years) later at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Lincoln pondered those days in Philadelphia when “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He delivered the most concise, succinct, and simple explanation for the U.S. Civil War through a 271-word speech in which he declared that the War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” He eulogized the sacrifice of the fallen at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, arguing that their sacrifice should elevate the nation’s commitment to preserving the Union, and he exhorted his compatriots to continue attempting to make a more perfect Union such “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” (emphasis mine).
Now we are engaged 249 years later in a great civil travail, testing whether “a government of laws, and not of men” (as Adams also famously stated) can long endure until its 250th birthday in 2026, and thus remain the world’s oldest modern democracy. We have seen masked gunmen—purportedly law enforcement officials—snatch citizens and non-citizens alike from our streets, disappear them into unmarked vans, and deport them to countries not their own with no due process. The current administration has arrested more than 5 elected government officials and judges, including sitting U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, sitting U.S. Congressperson LaMonica McIver, and sitting Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, for various “Trumped-up” reasons, with some of these officials and civilians charged, others not charged, and charges dropped. The corollary is whether our nation will crumble under the weight of these consistent direct attacks on its institutions and mechanisms of democracy.
I wrote in this space about the three “Venezuelan Deportation Flights to El Salvador prisons” cases under the guise and specious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which, coincidentally, dates from President Adams’ administration when the U.S. was on the precipice of war with France in 1798. I stated that we are the heirs and beneficiaries of the Founders’ lived experience who rebelled against the tyrant King George III. The Constitution is our inheritance from the Framers who worried about a tyrant or wanna-be dictator destroying the Republic. It is right to recall that the Framers designed the structure of our Constitution to permit the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, as well as the almost two thousand judges of the judicial branch, to check the Executive to ensure that another tyrant never looms over the People.
The Courts have, until now, been a bulwark. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled on June 27, 2025 in the birthright citizenship case that so-called “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions, the very kind the Congress gave the Courts power to issue in the Judiciary Act of 1789 in order to limit Executives, “fall[ ] outside the bounds of a federal court’s equitable authority under the Judiciary Act[…] [b]ecause [they] lack[ ] a historical pedigree.” The Court cites English practices at the time of our Nation’s founding, stating: “Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding. […] Suffice it to say, then, under longstanding equity practice in England, there was no remedy ‘remotely like a national injunction.’” The Court’s citation of English practices from the time of our founding kills the irony of citing the legal practices of a country we separated from precisely because of the King’s abuse of America; in effect, this reasoning diminishes the American Courts’ inherent authority to challenge the abuses doled out by America’s current Executive. Even more galling than this, however, is the Court’s resignation that “No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.” The Founders’ concerns in 1787 in Philadelphia remain present and relevant in 2025, although apparently not matched by the Court’s concerns.
By refusing to permit the nationwide injunction against the birthright Executive Order, the Court has genuflected before a plainly unconstitutional and illegal Order which purports to amend the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This calls to mind a statement by the now-former Chief Justice of the Venezuelan Supreme Court, Cecilia Sosa, who happens to be the first female Chief Justice of any Supreme Court in Latinameric. Venezuelan journalist Carlos Roa advised me of the 1999 resignation of the former Chief Justice when the Venezuelan judiciary surrendered to the growing authoritarianism of Hugo Chávez. At that time, the National Constituent Assembly declared its power to remove Supreme Court Justices, which was not within its jurisdiction. But Venezuela’s highest court submissively complied with that measure, without legal foundation. Judge Sosa resigned in protest, declaring: “The Supreme Court committed suicide to avoid being murdered. The result is the same, it is dead.”
Let this not be the America of the future. Happy Birthday, America! Let it not be our last.