The Declaration of Independence wasn’t really complaining about King George, and 5 other surprising facts for July 4th

 Editor’s note: Americans may think they know a lot about the Declaration of Independence, but many of those ideas are elitist and wrong, as historian Woody Holton explains.

  His book, “Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution,” shows how independence and the Revolutionary War were influenced by women, Indigenous and enslaved people, religious dissenters, and other once-overlooked Americans.

  In celebration of the United States’ birthday, Holton offers six surprising facts about the nation’s founding document – including that it failed to achieve its most immediate goal and that its meaning has changed from the founding to today.

Disappearing people

  One of the ways that brutal right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet would terrorize the Chilean people into patriotic submission to his authority was by disappearing people. This was different from simply torturing and executing them. He and his goons certainly did that too. But disappearing people was different. With executions and bodies, families at least had certainty with respect to what had happened to their loved one. With disappearances, they never could be certain that their loved one really was dead. There was always a small part of people that retained some amount of hope that maybe — just maybe — their loved one would show up after being released from years or decades in some prison. It was a brutal way to psychologically torture the family members of the person who had been disappeared and everyone else in society.

Like many populist leaders, Trump accuses judges of being illegitimate obstacles to safety and democracy

  Federal judges and at times Supreme Court justices have repeatedly challenged – and blocked – President Donald Trump’s attempts to reshape fundamental aspects of American government.

  Many of Trump’s more than 150 executive orders, including one aimed at eliminating the Department of Education, have been blocked by injunctions and lawsuits.

  When a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled on May 16, 2025 that the Trump administration could not deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants without first giving them the right to due process in court, Trump attacked the court.

Citizenship voting requirement in SAVE Act has no basis in the Constitution – and ignores precedent that only states decide who gets to vote

  The Republican-led House of Representatives passed on April 10, 2025, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act – or SAVE Act. The bill would make voting harder for tens of millions of Americans.

  The SAVE Act would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to first “provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” in person, like a REAL ID or a passport.

Treating people like horse dung

  One of the things that fascinates me about Americans living today is the willingness of many of them to treat immigrants like horse dung. I just don’t get it. No, I’m not saying that they treat people like that directly. I’m saying that they support and even get excited about how the U.S. government treats immigrants like horse dung.

  Consider what the U.S. government has done to migrants it has sent to El Salvador. Pursuant to a deal that U.S. officials have entered into with the Salvadoran government that involved payment of $6 million in U.S. taxpayer money, U.S. officials are sending migrants to that country to be incarcerated in a brutal prison in which it is common knowledge that torture and other horrific human-rights abuses are taking place.

3 ways Trump is acting like a king and bypassing the Constitution’s checks and balances on presidential authority

  I learned basic civics in my public school. But mostly, because it was more interesting, I also learned civics after school while watching the animated series “Schoolhouse Rock,” often with my abuela – my grandmother – who took care of me.

  Back then, “Schoolhouse Rock” had a wonderful episode, “Three Ring Government.” In singing narration, the characters explained “about the government, and how it’s arranged, divided in three, like a three-ring circus.”

How Jefferson and Madison’s partnership – a friendship told in letters – shaped America’s separation of church and state

  Few constitutional principles are more familiar to the average American than the separation of church and state.

  According to the Pew Research Center, 73% of adults agree that religion should be kept separate from government policies. To be sure, support varies by political or religious affiliation – with Democrats supporting the principle in much higher numbers – and depending on the specific issue, such as prayer in public schools or displays of the Ten Commandments monuments. Yet only 19% of Americans say the United States should abandon the principle of church-state separation.

  That said, criticism appears to be on the rise, particularly among political and religious conservatives. And such criticism comes from the top.

The establishment clause: Everything to know

  Religious freedom in the United States is guaranteed by two provisions of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  One, commonly known as the establishment clause, has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent government from either advancing (that is, establishing) or hindering religion, preferring one religion over others, or favoring religion over nonreligion.

Why Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an ‘experiment’ – and were unsure if it would survive

  From the time of the founding era to the present day, one of the more common things said about American democracy is that it is an “experiment.”

  Most people can readily intuit what the term is meant to convey, but it is still a phrase that is bandied about more often than it is explained or analyzed.

  Is American democracy an “experiment” in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded?

Establishing, then keeping, the republic

  To the extent you can generalize about such a diverse group, the founders meant two things, I would argue, by calling self-government an “experiment.”

  First, they saw their work as an experimental attempt to apply principles derived from science and the study of history to the management of political relations. As the founder John Jay explained to a New York grand jury in 1777, Americans, acting under “the guidance of reason and experience,” were among “the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.”

  Alongside this optimistic, Enlightenment-inspired understanding of the democratic experiment, however, was another that was decidedly more pessimistic.

  Their work, the founders believed, was also an experiment because, as everyone who had read their Aristotle and Cicero and studied ancient history knew, republics – in which political power rests with the people and their representatives – and democracies were historically rare and acutely susceptible to subversion. That subversion came both from within – from decadence, the sapping of public virtue, and demagoguery – as well as from monarchies and other enemies abroad.

  When asked whether the federal constitution of 1787 established a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin is famously said to have answered: “A republic, if you can keep it.” His point was that establishing a republic on paper was easy and preserving it the hard part.

Optimism and pessimism

  The term “experiment” does not appear in any of the nation’s founding documents, but it has nevertheless enjoyed a privileged place in public political rhetoric.

  George Washington, in his first inaugural address, described the “republican model of government” as an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

  Gradually, presidents began to talk less of a democratic experiment whose success was still in doubt than about one whose viability had been proven by the passage of time.

  Andrew Jackson, for one, in his 1837 farewell address felt justified in proclaiming, “Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment, and at the end of nearly half a century we find that it has preserved unimpaired the liberties of the people.”

  Such statements of guarded optimism about the American experiment’s accomplishments, however, existed alongside persistent expressions of concern about its health and prospects.

  In the period before the Civil War, despite participating in what in hindsight was a healthy, two-party system, politicians were forever proclaiming the end of the republic and casting opponents as threats to democracy. Most of those fears can be written off as hyperbole or attempts to demonize rivals. Some, of course, were sparked by genuine challenges to democratic institutions.

  The attempt of Southern states to dissolve the Union represented one such occasion. In a July 4, 1861 address to Congress, Abraham Lincoln quite rightly saw the crisis as a grave trial for the democratic experiment to survive.

  “Our popular Government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln observed. “Two points in it our people have already settled – the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains – its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.”

Vigilance required

  If you tried to quantify references to the democratic “experiment” throughout American history, you would find, I suspect, more pessimistic than optimistic invocations, more fears that the experiment is at imminent risk of failing than standpat complacency that it has succeeded.

  Consider, for example, the popularity of such recent tomes as “How Democracies Die,” by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and “Twilight of Democracy,” by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. Why this persistence of pessimism? Historians of the United States have long noted the popularity since the time of the Puritans of so-called “Jeremiads” and “declension narratives” – or, to put it more colloquially, nostalgia for the good old days and the belief that society is going to hell in a handbasket.

  The human-made nature of our institutions has always been a source of both hope and anxiety. Hope that America could break the shackles of old-world oppression and make the world anew; anxiety that the improvisational nature of democracy leaves it vulnerable to anarchy and subversion.

  American democracy has faced genuine, sometimes existential threats. Though its attribution to Thomas Jefferson is apparently apocryphal, the adage that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance is justly celebrated.

  The hard truth is that the “experiment” of American democracy will never be finished so long as the promise of equality and liberty for all remains anywhere unfulfilled.

  The temptation to give in to despair or paranoia in the face of the experiment’s open-endedness is understandable. But fears about its fragility should be tempered with a recognition that democracy’s essential and demonstrated malleability – its capacity for adaptation, improvement, and expanding inclusivity – can be and has historically been a source of strength and resilience as well as vulnerability.

  About the author: Thomas Coens is a research associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee.

  This article was published by The Conversation. 

Why 14th Amendment bars Trump from office: A constitutional law scholar explains principle behind Colorado Supreme Court ruling

  In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents, and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023 that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

A constitutional revolution is underway at the Supreme Court, as the conservative supermajority rewrites basic understandings of the roots of US law

  In a 2006 episode of the television show “Boston Legal,” conservative lawyer Denny Crane asserted that he had a constitutional right to carry a concealed firearm: “And the Supreme Court is going to say so, just as soon as they overturn Roe v. Wade.”

  That was a joke, an unimaginable event, when the show aired 17 years ago. Then in 2022, the court announced both changes, shifting the butt of a joke to the law of the land in a brief span of years – and signaling the start of what is sometimes called a “constitutional revolution.”

  Scholars describe a constitutional revolution as “a historic constitutional course correction,” or a “deep change in constitutional meaning.”

What the First Amendment really says – 4 basic principles of free speech in the US

  Elon Musk has claimed he believes in free speech no matter what. He calls it a bulwark against tyranny in America and promises to reconstruct Twitter, which he now owns, so that its policy on free expression “matches the law.” Yet his grasp of the First Amendment – the law that governs free speech in the U.S. – appears to be quite limited. And he’s not alone.

A seismic change has taken place at the Supreme Court – but it’s not clear if the shift is about principle or party

  In the summer of 2022, the U.S. witnessed a dramatic change in how the majority of Supreme Court justices understand the Constitution.

  At the end of a single term, the court rejected the long-standing constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights, and ruled that religion can have a bigger role in public institutions.

  These outcomes reflect a seismic shift in U.S. law and policy, but scholars of the court dispute what kind of change it was, exactly – a principled or partisan one. As a close observer of constitutional politics, I believe this is an important debate with deep consequences for the perceived legitimacy of the court.

State funds for students at religious schools? Supreme Court says ‘yes’ in Maine case – but consequences could go beyond

  For nearly three-quarters of a century, one issue in education has come up before the Supreme Court more than any other: disputes over religion.

  Carson v. Makin, a case about Maine’s tuition assistance program for students in districts without high schools of their own, continues the pattern – with potential consequences for schools, families, and courts across the country.

  On June 21, 2022, the court ruled that parents in rural districts lacking public high schools, but who receive state aid to send their children to private schools instead, can use that money for tuition at schools with faith-based curricula. In a 6-3 order, the court held that Maine’s requirement that tuition assistance payments be used at “nonsectarian” schools violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment because parents could not send their children to the schools of their choice.

Privacy isn’t in the Constitution – but it’s everywhere in constitutional law

  Almost all American adults – including parents, medical patients, and people who are sexually active – regularly exercise their right to privacy, even if they don’t know it.

  Privacy is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. But for half a century, the Supreme Court has recognized it as an outgrowth of protections for individual liberty. As I have studied in my research on constitutional privacy rights, this implied right to privacy is the source of many of the nation’s most cherished, contentious, and commonly used rights – including the right to have an abortion.

When are book bans unconstitutional? A First Amendment scholar explains

  The United States has become a nation divided over important issues in K-12 education, including which books students should be able to read in public school.

  Efforts to ban books from school curricula, remove books from libraries, and keep lists of books that some find inappropriate for students are increasing as Americans become more polarized in their views.

An old soldier’s denial on Afghanistan

  In a letter to the Los Angeles Times regarding the Afghanistan debacle, Stephen Sloane, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy who served in the Vietnam War, is a perfect demonstration of how so many people, especially in the military, live lives of denial when it comes to foreign interventionism.  

Why is paper money constitutional?

  The official money of the United States today is paper currency. But that’s clearly not what the U.S. Constitution says. It says that gold and silver coins shall be the nation’s currency. 

  How is that possible? I thought the Constitution was supposed to be the highest law of the land. I also thought that it was the responsibility of the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce the Constitution. Why then are Americans living under a paper-money monetary system rather than the system stipulated in the Constitution?

The managed economy destroys the First Amendment

  The First Amendment guarantees people the right of free speech. It is a restriction on the power of the federal government to punish people for criticizing federal officials or for saying things that the government doesn’t like. 

  Why did our ancestors want the Constitution amended in that way? Because they were certain that the federal government would end up attracting people who would have the desire and the inclination to do bad things to people who criticized them or said things that public officials didn’t like. 

The case of Biden versus Trump – or how a judge could decide the presidential election

  Imagine the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020. Given the unprecedented number of mail-in votes this election, Americans may wake up and still not know who won the presidential contest between Republican President Donald J. Trump and Democratic challenger Joseph Biden.

  The contest could be so close that a result can’t be known until mail-in ballots in several key states, perhaps Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Florida, can be fully counted.

  It’s conceivable that either candidate will refuse to accept the result, whether before or after the counting of absentee or mail-in ballots. That could lead to several lawsuits to stop the counting, to keep counting, or to force a recount.