With our democracy under siege, this Independence Day was a somber one

The U.S. Supreme Court | Susan J. Demas illustration

July 4th hits different when you’re confronted by the unescapable reality that the American experiment is over in a fundamental way.

And no, that isn’t hyperbole if you read the U.S. Supreme court opinion released last week in Trump v. the United States by six right-wing justices, who function more like insular high clerics than thoughtful jurists.

The case was brought by Donald Trump, who has the distinction of being the only former president to be found guilty of 34 felonies in a hush money case tied to the 2016 election and faces dozens more in three other criminal cases.

But the majority on the high court — half of whom were appointed by Trump — handed him an astounding victory, ruling that presidents have almost limitless immunity, so long as something can be called an “official act.”

In May, Justice Sonia Sotomayor confessed that there are days that “I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried.” And in reading her scorching, 29-page dissent, I began weeping myself.

I've certainly never been an optimist, but I have to be these days because I have kids. I want them to live in a better world than the one they were born into. I think that's worth fighting for. I believe America is worth fighting for.

– Susan J. Demas

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” she writes.

You might be tempted to believe those scenarios are fantastical, although I would argue you have to be hitting the normalcy bias tap pretty hard to convince yourself of that. But as Sotomayor delineates, the court has given a wholesale rewrite to the powers of the presidency — which is tremendously significant in and of itself.

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” she writes. “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 fact that this decision dropped just three days before Independence Day quite honestly made it so much harder to comprehend.

We literally fought a war to free ourselves from despots. We rejected the temptation of establishing a monarchy of our own to forge a democracy, a bold undertaking few thought would work. And we beat back an empire that sought to throttle our republic in its infancy.

And yes, our history is marred by the original sin of slavery and the refusal to extend the rights of citizenship to anyone besides white men. But the ideals of our nation — the separation of powers, right to assemble, freedom of the press and so much more — have always been worth fighting for. Abolishing slavery, establishing the right to vote for women and African Americans and dismantling Jim Crow have all been part of our journey to make America a more perfect union.

That’s why I love America.

And no, I wasn’t raised in a particularly patriotic household, although my parents did periodically remind me that I was a bicentennial baby. I’ve never owned any flag-adorned clothing or cared much for the performative pomp and circumstance of July 4th (I didn’t like joining in pep rallies in high school, either, and would usually try to sneak off to the library to read a book).

In college, I majored in European history, focusing on the French Revolution, and was known to pedantically opine that its dedication to “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” made it far superior to its American cousin (I was always fun at parties).

But as I’ve aged, I’ve found that binary thinking is, more than not, overly shallow and not particularly constructive. I also find myself cringing when I hear those on the left flippantly bash America, as the underlying premise seems to be that our country is broken beyond repair and not worth saving.

Now I’ve certainly never been an optimist, but I have to be these days because I have kids. I want them to live in a better world than the one they were born into. I think that’s worth fighting for.

I believe America is worth fighting for.

And I don’t care if that sounds corny or MAGA-coded. The GOP has long pretended, particularly post-9/11, that they are the only true patriots. And under Trump, Republicans have become emboldened to declare that they’re fighting for a vision of America that existed before the 1960s — or even the 1860s.

Vowing to forcibly turn back the clock to darker times in our nation’s history when Black Americans and other people of color, women and LGBTQ+ people were denied basic rights and often subjected to state-sanctioned violence is an incredibly bleak and disturbing political agenda.

But it’s all outlined, in chilling detail, in Project 2025, the brainchild of the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation that’s an authoritarian blueprint for the next Trump administration.

And now with the Supreme Court deciding that it’s fine and dandy for us to have our very own King George III in the White House, it’s clear that the judicial branch won’t serve as a check on his abuses of power.

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law,” Sotomayor writes in her dissent. “Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Our democracy is no longer young at 248 years old, but it isn’t withering away — it’s under direct assault from those who reject pluralism and are determined to rule over us. We face a grave test in November. We cannot fail.

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