America250 and the Forgotten Language of Equality

During the America250 celebration, the sitting President of the United States declared in his State of the Union Address that "America is back." Without further elaboration, we are compelled to return in our minds to those who promulgated the Declaration of Independence.

They were not boasting.

They were not proclaiming superiority.

They came before the "candid world" asking to be received as an equal among the community of nations — asserting their right to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth.

The Declaration was a petition for recognition, not a victory speech.

Donald Trump's boast, therefore, unintentionally reminds us of a deeper truth: all nations are equal. Every Independence celebration since 1776 has served as a ritual reaffirmation of that principle. The 250th celebration is only the latest reminder.

Yet reminders only matter if they are heeded.

The Missed Opportunity of Equals

In their response to Proclamation 10998, Dominica and Antigua & Barbuda missed a rare opportunity to remind the United States of its own founding logic.

These nations are not merely neighboring states. They are constitutional mirrors of America itself — sovereignties that transferred authority from monarch to people. Their constitutions, like America's, vest final power not in a crown but in the citizenry. They achieved through constitutional process precisely what America claimed in 1776: the right to govern themselves as equals.

When the United States arbitrarily included them in travel restrictions nominally directed at declared enemies, the constitutional parallel was exact: a more powerful nation imposing its will without consultation, treating sovereign equals as subordinate territories.

The appropriate response was not diplomatic negotiation alone.

It was constitutional reminder.

What the Reminder Might Have Said

A joint statement from Dominica and Antigua & Barbuda to the United States government, delivered through formal diplomatic channels and released publicly, could have invoked the language America itself established:

"We recognize that the United States faces challenges in its relations with neighboring states. But we note that Presidential Proclamation 10998 includes our nations in measures we did not provoke and cannot remedy.

This is the posture the American colonies rejected in 1776.

When you declared independence, you did not claim exemption from international norms. You claimed inclusion in them — on equal terms. You asked the world to recognize that sovereignty resides in peoples, not in the powerful.

We hold that same sovereignty. Our peoples, like yours, are the source of governmental authority. We stand equal in law, even when unequal in power.

The principle you invoked in 1776 binds the powerful no less than the powerless."

Such language would not be protest. It would be education — reminding the United States that its own constitutional logic prohibits hierarchical sovereignty.

The Silence That Speaks

Instead, silence prevailed.

Diplomatic channels addressed the practical inconvenience. No voice invoked the constitutional principle.

This matters because smaller nations possess a moral authority the powerful lack: they can speak from the position America once occupied. They can remind the United States that its founding claim was not "we are strong enough to be free" but "all nations are equal under natural law."

By remaining silent on the principle while negotiating the practice, Dominica and Antigua & Barbuda allowed the language of hierarchy to prevail over the language of equality.

America250 as Constitutional Window

The founders understood that independence did not confer superiority. It conferred equality — and responsibility.

When the colonies appealed to the world, they were not seeking permission to dominate others. They were seeking recognition that no nation had the right to dominate them.

If America now behaves as the power it once resisted, the lesson of 1776 has been reversed.

America250 therefore functions less as a celebration and more as a constitutional window — a rare moment when the nation's attention turns explicitly toward its founding principles. Presidential Proclamation 10998, issued during this commemorative period, reveals the distance between America's founding plea for equality and its contemporary exercise of power.

The Unanswered Question

Yet the tragic dimension remains unspoken: Would America hear such a reminder?

Nations with the clearest constitutional standing to invoke 1776's logic — those who share America's transformation from monarchical to popular sovereignty — may be precisely the nations America is least prepared to hear.

This does not excuse the silence. It explains why the silence is costly.

The Declaration of Independence established a principle that binds the strong no less than the weak. When smaller nations fail to invoke that principle, they do not merely forfeit leverage in a single diplomatic dispute.

They allow the memory of equality to fade — not just in Washington, but everywhere sovereign peoples still seek recognition as equals rather than submission as subordinates.

The 250th anniversary will pass. The proclamation will be forgotten. Another routine exercise of American power will recede into history.

Unless someone remembers to speak the language of 1776.

That language remains available. It has always been available.

The question is whether anyone will use it.

 Central to Donald Trump’s behavior is an unexamined premise: that the United States is a European project in the New World, not a constitutional project rooted in universal responsibility. Once that premise is accepted, exclusion becomes strategy, force becomes justification, and constitutional violations become secondary.

The American Mistake

 America did not invent constitutional government in 1787.

The first constitutions written in the New World were extensions of royal charters granted to the thirteen Crown colonies. They already defined authority, limited power, structured offices, and bound governors to law. What Americans ratified in 1788 was not a novel form of government, but the transfer of sovereignty from Crown to People within an already-existing constitutional tradition.

Mistaking that transfer for invention proved fatal.

By believing the Constitution was something we created, Americans came to believe it was something we could manage—reinterpret, expand, suspend, or correct when inconvenient. Fidelity gave way to ingenuity. Obedience gave way to interpretation. Responsibility gave way to power.

The world accepted the myth. And America paid the price.

After nearly 250 years, the United States has been incorporated into existence but has never matured. It behaves like a corporation that confuses innovation with legitimacy and adaptability with wisdom. Constitutional violations are excused as policy disagreements. Oaths are treated as ceremonial. The Constitution survives not because it is obeyed, but because it is rhetorically admired.

A constitution that is understood as an invention can be improved.

A constitution that is understood as an inheritance must be honored.

America chose the first. History is now demanding the second.

 Today I am thinking about US Proclamation 10998 which became effective at 12:01 a.m. (January 1, 2026). It applies to all of us.  Not only to the countries mentioned. 

Avoid self-deception

Lying to others is easy. Lying to oneself is easier. Truth requires work.

Concluding Post: What This Series Was Really About

This series began with a simple problem: many Americans use constitutional language fluently but think about the Constitution incorrectly. We treat high crimes and misdemeanors as severe crimes instead of constitutional violations. We treat “legal” as if it meant lawful. We expect courts to fix constitutional failures they were never designed to address. And we forget that the Constitution assumes something essential: an engaged, attentive People.

Across five short essays, we rebuilt the Constitution’s basic architecture:

Part I showed that high crimes and misdemeanors are not bigger crimes, but a different category altogether—violations of the Constitution itself.

Part II explained why an action can be legal in form and yet unlawful in substance.

Part III clarified why constitutional violations begin with impeachment, why intent is presumed for constitutional officers, and why impeachment is not a political indictment.

Part IV demonstrated that the judiciary does not govern and was never meant to.

Part V returned responsibility to where the Constitution places it: with We the People.

Taken together, these ideas point to a single conclusion: constitutional government depends less on institutions than on constitutional understanding.

The Constitution does not protect itself. Courts do not protect it for us. And no officeholder can substitute for an educated sovereign People who understand what has been entrusted to them. Self-government is not self-executing. It must be practiced.

This series was not written to inflame, accuse, or persuade along partisan lines. It was written to restore clarity—because clarity is the precondition of responsibility. If the Constitution is to endure, We the People must remember how it was designed to work—and what it quietly asks of us.

Author’s Note

Why I Wrote This Series

I wrote this series because I have come to believe that many of our deepest constitutional conflicts are not the result of bad faith, but of bad classification. We argue endlessly about outcomes while misunderstanding structure. We debate power while ignoring responsibility. And we look to courts to solve problems the Constitution assigns elsewhere.

This series is not a legal argument and not a partisan intervention. It is an educational one.

My aim was to speak to non-lawyers in plain language about how the Constitution actually functions—what kinds of violations it recognizes, how accountability is supposed to work, and why the People themselves remain central to constitutional life.

The Framers assumed a citizenry capable of understanding these distinctions. That assumption may be strained today, but it has not been repealed. If these essays help even a few readers recover a clearer sense of their role as constitutional actors—not spectators—then they have served their purpose.

The Constitution is not just a document we inherit. It is a responsibility we either carry—or quietly surrender.

Why the People Are the Final Constitutional Authority

The most consequential misunderstanding in American constitutional life is not about courts, or impeachment, or even presidential power. It is about who bears responsibility for the Constitution itself.

Many Americans assume that constitutional authority ultimately resides in institutions—especially courts. When something goes wrong, we wait for a ruling. When power is abused, we ask what judges will say. When the Constitution is strained, we look elsewhere.

That instinct is understandable. It is also wrong.

The Constitution does not vest final constitutional authority in courts. It vests it in the People.

This is not a slogan. It is a structural fact.

The Constitution was not written by judges, interpreted into existence by courts, or enforced into legitimacy by lawyers. It was written by the People, ratified by the People, and sustained only so long as the People insist on fidelity to it.

Every constitutional officer—legislator, executive, judge—takes an oath not to a court, not to a party, not to a leader, but to the Constitution itself. That oath is not ceremonial. It is a declaration that authority flows from the People, through the Constitution, and only then into office.

Courts play an important role in this system, but they are not its guardians. They resolve disputes. They interpret law when asked. They do not initiate constitutional accountability, enforce constitutional fidelity, or supervise governance.

That work belongs elsewhere.

When the Constitution is violated, the first constitutional response is not litigation. It is judgment by the People, acting through their representatives. That is why impeachment exists. Not as punishment. Not as politics. But as a mechanism by which the sovereign People decide whether constitutional power has been abused.

This design assumes something modern Americans are rarely told: self-government requires self-restraint.

The Framers did not expect constant constitutional violations. They expected constitutional obedience to be the norm. Impeachment was meant to be rare not because violations should be tolerated, but because officials were expected to govern within constitutional bounds.

At the same time, the People were expected to remain attentive. Not outraged at every disagreement, but alert to genuine abuses of authority. Not passive spectators waiting for courts to intervene, but active custodians of constitutional order.

When we forget this, the consequences are predictable.

Legislators stop asking whether a law exceeds constitutional authority and ask instead whether it might survive judicial review. Executives test limits until someone tells them to stop. Citizens wait for verdicts rather than exercising judgment. Courts, pulled into roles they were never designed to play, become both blamed and overburdened.

This is how constitutional government weakens—not through collapse, but through misplacement of responsibility.

The Constitution does not protect itself. Courts do not protect it for us. And no institution can substitute for an engaged, constitutionally literate People.

That was the Framers’ bet.

They trusted that a people capable of establishing a Constitution would also be capable of sustaining it—by recognizing violations when they occur, by refusing to normalize them, and by holding constitutional officers to the standard their oaths require.

Self-government does not end at the ballot box. It begins there.

If the Constitution is to endure, We the People must stop treating it as someone else’s job to enforce—and remember that it was always ours.