and by that I mean two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a group of colonists published a list of reasons they were finished with a king. Not a feeling. A list. Numbered, specific, damning. They accused King George III of obstructing justice, of bending judges to his will, of shipping people across the sea for trial, of taxing them without their consent, of planting troops among them.
From the Declaration of Independence:
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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
We seal that document behind glass and read it aloud once a year (or at least we should), somewhere between the barbecue and the fireworks.
The Constitution was never designed to restrain a president who has abandoned the rule of law. It is a set of instructions to the people sworn to enforce it: the Congress, the courts, the Justice Department, the party holding the gavel. So the question this Fourth of July is not really what King Trump has done. He told us for a decade what he would do. Project 2025 ran to more than 900 pages of detailed instructions on replacing democracy with a monarchy, dressed up in something they call unitary executive theory.
The question of our time is who let him abuse power, obstruct justice, and bend Congress to his will.
"He has obstructed the Administration of Justice." Federal judges have found this administration defied their orders at least 31 times this term, and that is only the count we know of. In one Minnesota courtroom, a single judge documented 96 violations in January alone. One judge. One month. The pattern is not an accident. It is the Trump-Vance business model.
"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone." Rule against him and the Vice President calls for your removal. Block his order and a White House adviser calls your ruling an insurrection. The Trump Justice Department sued every judge on an entire federal court, all of them, for the crime of pausing a deportation long enough to check whether the law was followed.
“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.” This administration flew men to a foreign prison with no charge, no hearing, and no way home. A judge ordered the planes turned around. They landed anyway. Jefferson wrote this grievance in 1776. It needed no editing, only a flight manifest. The transportation method is different now. The denial of due process is not.
“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” Tariffs are taxes, and the Constitution hands that power to Congress alone. He imposed them by decree, country by country, on again and off again, until even this hyper-partisan Roberts Court told him to stop. We dumped tea in a harbor over less than this. These days, thanks to Trump’s tariffs and failure to address affordability, the tea is too expensive to throw.
“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.” He federalized the National Guard and sent it into American cities over the objections of governors and courts. Chicago. Portland. Los Angeles. The founders listed a standing army among us as grounds for revolution. Two hundred and fifty years later, it's just a Saturday.
The Constitution Didn’t Fail. Its guardians did.
Congress holds the power of the purse.
Article One is not ambiguous: no dollar leaves the Treasury except by an appropriation made by law. It is the one check that never needs a courtroom, the one weapon that cannot be captured by a bent attorney general. So King Trump simply refuses to spend what Congress ordered spent. The Government Accountability Office has ruled it illegal over and over: charging stations, disaster relief, schools, libraries. More than 400 billion dollars frozen in open defiance of the law. And the GOP-controlled Congress, holding the one instrument no court can take away, has abdicated their responsibility to the Constitution, to their Oath of Office, and has betrayed the trust of every voter.
There was once a Supreme Court that was supposed to be the referee. After Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society were done with it, it is Supreme in name only. It refuses to bind itself to a code of ethics, and more and more, it rules in the dark. On the shadow docket, the emergency track with no public argument and no explanation, it has waved his policies into effect in roughly four of every five cases, rewriting the country overnight and letting the lawsuits crawl for years.
And when it finally ruled in daylight, it did not merely defer to him. It enlarged him. The Roberts Court threw out a ninety-year-old precedent and handed the criminal elect the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will, carving out an exception for one and only one: the Federal Reserve, the single institution whose independence it truly protects, because that one moves markets. It shielded the bankers and delivered the rest to the “King”. So federal agencies can now drop the word “independent.” Thanks to this bent Court, every one of those agencies now answers to the King.
The press was once a pillar of democracy. You have heard me say it before: any meaningful democracy requires an informed, educated, and engaged society. Information is one of the pillars that holds the whole thing up. And a handful of billionaires bought the pillar out from under us.
Paramount paid the King $16 million to settle a case its own lawyers called meritless, and days later it won federal approval for the merger it wanted. The King gave a thumbs up. When a comedian told a joke he did not like, the King’s FCC, run by one of Project 2025’s authors, Brendan Carr, opened an early review of the network’s broadcast licenses, a threat against free speech, cloaked as paperwork and aimed at every broadcaster watching. Trump has sued the New York Times for $15 billion. He has threatened to prosecute reporters for treason when he deems the coverage informs society about his corruption, incompetence, and failures. He has acted to defund public broadcasting.
Thanks to the criminal elect Trump, the country that invented the First Amendment now ranks 64th in the world for press freedom.
The founders opened the Declaration of Independence with the sentence that matters most, the one that comes before the grievances. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Not from a private equity office, a mansion, or a massive yacht. Not from a black robe or from a white sheet. Not from a six to three order signed at midnight. From “We the People.”
The Constitution cannot restrain this president. It is parchment and ink. What it can do, all it was ever meant to do, is divide power so that no one branch can seize it. Three branches, each built to check the other two, so that lawlessness in one would meet resistance in the others. That was the design. It is a good design. It requires only that the people running it do their jobs.
They didn’t. A feckless GOP-controlled Congress laid down its power of the purse. A captured Roberts Court handed him the agencies. Two branches that were built to stop a runaway executive instead cleared the road. The system did not break on its own. It has failed because people have abdicated their responsibility to defend the system.
The remedy the founders prescribed was never despair, and in 2026 it is not muskets. The remedy is the vote, which no shadow docket can quietly stay. The remedy is a free press, and in 2026 that means one too distributed to be bought, where the people write the grievances down and pass them hand to hand. The remedy is the freedom to assemble, so we are not alone with them.
Tomorrow the sky will light up. Families will gather and enjoy every minute, as they should. But do not mistake the fireworks for the point. The point was never the barbecue, the beverages, the sparklers. The point was the list. The point was the flat refusal to be ruled by a king of any kind, and least of all a corrupt, lawless, cruel one who happens to be a convicted felon.
We held truths out loud once, against a king who had grown too comfortable, and against everyone who let him. Together, we fired a King 250 years ago. It is well beyond time to do it again.
This time the muskets are a pen, a printing press anyone can own, and a ballot. So use them. Check your voter registration today, and make sure it is active and accurate. Then send people to Congress who will honor their oath over their party, defend the Constitution over their donors, and answer to us over him. There is no other list that matters more.
We held these truths once. Let’s hold them again, out loud, together.
Together we can. Together we must.
Court orders ignored at least 31 times, AP review, May 2026: https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/the-president/trump-administration-defied-federal-court-orders-at-least-31-times-review-finds
96 documented violations, District of Minnesota, January 2026, Just Security: https://www.justsecurity.org/131966/trump-administration-accountable-violating-court-orders/
DOJ suit against an entire federal bench; VP calls for judges’ removal, Protect Democracy: https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-trump-administrations-conflict-with-the-courts-explained/
El Salvador deportation flights, planes not turned around, Boasberg contempt finding, NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/president-defies-judges-orders-contempt-rcna201455
Court halted most tariffs; struck the birthright order; struck the precedent insulating independent agencies while sparing the Fed, Washington Post 2025-26 term tracker: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/supreme-court-cases-2025-26-term/
Shadow docket win rate near four in five, no argument, no explanation, Brennan Center: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-abuse-shadow-docket-under-trump
National Guard federalized into Chicago and Portland; “legal insurrection,” Lawfare: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-appellate-void--trump-could-defy-judges-without-confronting-the-supreme-court
Impoundment illegal repeatedly; more than 400 billion dollars frozen, Senate Appropriations / GAO: https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/minority/government-watchdog-finds-trump-has-illegally-impounded-funding-for-4th-time-in-recent-weeks
Paramount 16 million settlement, CBS bias monitor, merger approved, PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trumps-censorship-and-control-campaign-threatens-press-freedom-fcc-commissioner-says
FCC early license review after Kimmel joke, NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/first-amendment-advocates-blast-fccs-early-review-abc-broadcast-licens-rcna342580
NYT 15 billion suit, treason threats, public broadcasting defunding, US ranked 64th, press-freedom summary: https://eciks.org/11199-87109-press-freedom-threats-2026-trump
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