Today amidst all the parades, barbecues and fireworks, it’s incumbent on us to reflect on the document that was signed on July 4, 1776. And if you read the Declaration of Independence, you’ll realize that the rogue conservative Supreme Court majority has made a mockery of the intent of our Founding Fathers who pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to break free from the tyranny of the British king.
The Declaration of Independence reads:
“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. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
And what follows is a detailed list of the official actions by King George III that led delegates to the Second Continental Congress to decide that it was necessary for the 13 American colonies to declare independence from the British Empire.
But on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, ruled that a president has “absolute immunity” for his official acts and “presumptive immunity for acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a scathing dissent, wrote that the majority decision “makes a mockery of the principle” that no one is above the law. She added: “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
The decision exposed the total hypocrisy of the so-called ‘originalist” conservative justices who claim that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted according to how its framers understood it. What they did here is invent a new principle not found in the Constitution that gives former President Donald Trump what he wanted by making it difficult to prosecute him for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even worse, it gives him free rein to act like a modern-day King George III should he return to the White House.
On the eve of the Independence Day holiday, the Biden-Harris campaign dropped a new ad in swing states criticizing the 6-3 ruling by the high court.
In the ad, a narrator somberly declares:
Nearly 250 years ago, America was founded in defiance of a king, under the belief that no one was above the law, not even the President, until now.
The same Trump Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade ruled that the president can ignore the law, even to commit a crime. because Donald Trump asked them to. He’s already led an insurrection and threatened to be a dictator on Day One. Donald Trump can never hold this office again..
Laurence Tribe, the Harvard Law School constitutional scholar, noted in an MSNBC interview on Monday that the Supreme Court ruling came just three days before Independence Day.
” We had a revolution so that we wouldn’t have a king and now this Supreme Court says that’s what we’re giving you. I don’t think we should accept that present, but it seems to me that all that does is basically put the court on the ballot this November.”
Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson, in her Letters from an American newsletter on Substack, described the American colonies’ path to independence from 1763 to 1776.
As late as fall 1775, the Second Continental Congress wrote directly to the king, emphasizing that they were still his “faithful subjects” and blamed the king’s ministers for enacting policies that forced the colonists to arm in self-defense. They pleaded with the king to use his powers to restore harmony with the colonies. But the king had already declared the colonies to be in rebellion after the April 19, 1775, battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.
And then, Richardson notes, that a newly-arrived immigrant Thomas Paine wrote a 47-page pamphlet titled “Common Sense,” that “inspired his new countrymen to make the leap from blaming the king’s ministers for their troubles to blaming the king himself.”
Richardson wrote:
Paine rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others, and he ridiculed the idea that an island should try to govern a continent. “Where … is the King of America?” Paine asked in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend … so far as we approve of monarchy … in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”
Indeed, back in January 1776, Thomas Paine foresaw the danger posed by a would-be dictator like Trump.
By June 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, had formed a five-member committee, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, to draft an independence declaration. The resolution was passed on July 2.
On that day, Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote a letter to his wife Abigail, Richardson wrote. Adams said it was the “delegates’ ultimate conviction that a nation should rest not on the arbitrary rule of a single man and his hand-picked advisors, but on the rule of law.”
Two days later, on the Fourth of July, the delegates to the Continental Congress formally signed the Declaration of Independence.
In an interview for PBS NewsHour, Richardson said that until the Supreme Court came up with a brand-new doctrine this week, there really “hasn't been much dispute about the power of the president since the founding of the United States of America.”
The people who framed the Constitution as well as the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence, were very clear that they did not want a king, that it was important for the chief executive to have guardrails around him at the time, is what they thought, and that those — that it was imperative that the president always was answerable to the law.
So we had Alexander Hamilton, for example, in Federalist 69 being very clear that the president could be impeached, the president could be convicted of treason or bribery or high crimes or misdemeanors, could be removed from office, and, crucially, would always, as he said, be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.
Columnist Mike Litwin wrote in the Colorado Sun that the Supreme Court in effect has “turned American democracy upside down.”
“That idea that no one is above the law — including a president — is the nation’s founding principle. If you’ve read the Declaration of Independence, which I’m assuming most of the justices have, you have to know that much,” Litwin wrote.
”As Thomas Paine wrote a few weeks after the July 4th declaration, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” I wonder what Paine would say if he knew someday souls could still be tried in America, but not a president who attempts to overturn an election.”
And finally, Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King wrote that “having defeated King George III in 1783,” we could “end up two centuries later with an American sovereign with powers that would make previous tyrants drool.”
King wrote:
The thought of the mendacious, narcisstic, vengeful Trump with those powers is terrifying. Dismiss the notion that “there’s no telling what he would do.” We know better. Trump and his inner circle have told us what he’ll do.
King said it falls to people who cherish democratic values to stave off that danger by going to the polls on Election Day “to reject Trump and all that he stands for.”
He concluded by writing:
And thus, here we are on the Fourth of July with democracy on the line.
Let this be the day a second Declaration for Independence is launched, proclaimed on behalf of people who reject the notion of an imperial president, and who hold dear democratic ideals and principles. Let us pledge to defend it with our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.