On its 250th birthday, our constitutional republic is failing the people it was founded to serve
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Trump v. United States
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The article directly references this landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, which is central to the author's argument about constitutional failure and unchecked executive power
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Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956
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The article uses this act as a key example of how political decisions about infrastructure have historically benefited the wealthy and connected while disadvantaging poorer communities through route selection and land value manipulation
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Tulsa race massacre
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Referenced as 'Tulsa riots' in the article as an example of violent suppression of Black economic success - readers would benefit from the full historical context of this 1921 destruction of the Greenwood District
We have become way too accustomed to the idea that the founders of this country did not foresee the damage that could be done by a madman serving as president. Our problem isn’t just the unhinged lunatic whom 77 million of our fellow citizens saw fit to elect in 2024. It’s the whole fucking system.
This country is supposed to be comprised of three essential elements: The Constitution, our set of governing laws, which is written on paper and is kept in Washington D.C., the only piece of land in the United States that is not a state, but the “District of Columbia.”
The second element is the land. The United States started out with the 13 states that had been colonies of the British Empire. The country expanded as land was seized by force from indigenous people whose presence here predated settlers from Europe by thousands of years. It was further expanded by the Louisiana Purchase, which was not a transfer of title to land, much of which was unexplored at the time of its sale, but instead a granting by sale of the right to take lands controlled by indigenous tribes by treaty or conquest by war. The rest of the land we now consider the Continental United States was seized forcibly from Indian peoples or gained by war with Mexico or treaties and purchases from Spain.
The third element is people. I don’t use the term “citizens” here, because the founders did not grant citizenship except to white men. Citizenship had to be gained for slaves by fighting a Civil War with slave-owning states, and by amendments to the Constitution granting citizenship to former slaves and those born within the boundaries of the country and by the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
Our constitutional republic is failing because the Constitution is failing the other two elements or our country, the land and the people. The Constitution has been chipped away by the Supreme Court, which has imposed limits on citizenship of people by restricting the right to vote. The Congress, another branch, has abdicated its responsibility to provide a check on the other two branches by refusing to write laws limiting the power of either the judiciary or the executive.
This has left the executive – the president – unbound. The Supreme Court quite literally removed one check on the executive – the ...
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