Mae'r defaid wedi bwyta fy brechdanau

A recent poll found that only about half of Americans could identify "the adoption of the Declaration of Independence" as the event whose anniversary we celebrate every year on July 4. I have no idea how well-designed or well-implemented the poll was, but I think the result is plausible -- after all, the Trump administration, which has made a great deal of noise about the nation's 250th anniversary, has made almost no mention of the Declaration of Independence. Trump prefers to speak in vague generalities about America's (and his own) "greatness" and "strength", and to castigate anyone who suggests America (or he) has ever made a mistake.

But let's talk about the Declaration, specifically its most well-known words:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Taken literally, this is obvious nonsense. All men are clearly not "created equal": some are smarter than others, some stronger than others, some more patient than others, some more generous than others, etc. Frankly, some are far more qualified to run a government, a family, or a corner store than others.

When I first thought of writing this post for the Fourth, my take was a pragmatic question of politics, governance, and unconscious bias. Of course all individuals aren't literally "equal", but it is apparently human nature to see people of a different family, a different race, a different language, a different religion, a different upbringing, as inherently inferior to oneself. Sure, by any conceivable measure some individuals really are "better" than others, but who gets to decide? If you're OK with government treating Group X as inherently better than Group Y, remember that after the next election, or after the revolution, you might be in Group Y yourself. If we allow ourselves to impose inequality on people a priori, through accidents of their birth rather than through the evidence of their own actions, we will likely delude ourselves into excluding millions or billions of people who really are just as good as we, just as capable of contributing to society, and just as deserving of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Jamelle Bouie's July 1 column takes a different tack. Bouie discusses the historical context of the sentence, pointing out that it wasn't meant as a literal, concrete statement about the here-and-now, but as a statement about a mythical pre-government "state of nature" in which no person was automatically superior to others by virtue of accidents of birth. This wasn't a new idea when Jefferson wrote it down in Philadelphia. A few months earlier, Thomas Paine had written

“all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.”

An even more succinct statement of the same idea dates to the English Peasants' Uprising of 1381:

"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"

In summary, God didn't create nobles and serfs, only people. If one person can be viewed as "made in God's image," so can any other person. The distinctions of race, class, caste, wealth, citizenship, and so on are not God-given and inevitable but artificial human constructs.

As Bouie puts it, to Jefferson this was an abstract "thought experiment" about a mythical past, merely a preamble to the list of grievances that provided justification "for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

But to Black Americans (whether enslaved or nominally "free"), it was much more concrete and immediate, arguably the central point of the Declaration. In 1774, the enslaved Bristol Lambee wrote to the Sons of Liberty that "liberty, being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African as it is to the happiness of an Englishman, and that we, notwithstanding our present state of slavery, have, in common with other men, a natural right to be free, and without molestation to enjoy such property as we by our honest industry may acquire.” Another petition from Black Americans in 1777: “Your petitioners apprehend that they have, in common with all other men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great parent of the universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind, and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatsoever...” And they didn't let up, continuing to confront America's white leaders with the hypocrisy of their statements of liberty and equal opportunity when millions of Negroes had neither, until the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments relegated slavery officially to the past. And they didn't let up for another ninety years until the Civil Rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc. relegated the presumed inherent inferiority of one race officially to the past.

Tim Miller of The Bulwark has an interesting interview with Atlantic writer Clint Smith. Tim starts by quoting Jefferson in 1826, and Gerald Ford in 1976: Jefferson sees America as setting a precedent of freedom that will eventually be exported to the whole world, while Ford celebrates America's mutually-beneficial importing of people from the whole world. Both visions are consistent with Ronald Reagan's "city on a hill" metaphor: America at its best, when it most closely lives up to its ideals, should be an example for the rest of the world.

Anyway, Smith makes the point that "the vast majority of those who fought for freedom never got a chance to experience it for themselves, but they fought for it anyway because they knew that someday someone would."

America has always been a work in progress, a statement of noble ideals that it never lived up to, but towards which it tried to progress, slowly and with occasional backsliding but refusing to give up on making the world slightly better than before.


My previous Independence Day posts:

• 2024, also 2024


• 2020


• 2018
  

A lot of big news from yesterday’s SCOTUS decisions, but I want to focus on the two conflicting decisions about independent agencies and boards.

In one decision, the Court ruled that the President couldn’t fire a Federal Reserve board member based on an allegation of wrongdoing without giving her the chance to contest the allegation. In the other, the Court ruled that the President could fire a Federal Trade Commission board member with no cause or allegation whatsoever, simply “based on my Article II powers”.

The laws controlling both agencies (as well as lots of department inspectors general whom the President has also fired without cause) are pretty similar, specifying that to avoid political interference, the holder of such-and-such office cannot be fired without a performance-related reason stated in writing (I think cc’ed to Congress). The first such laws were passed in the late 19th century, and many more have been passed since. They’ve been tested in the courts, most notably in the case of Humphreys Executor in the 1930’s, in which the Supreme Court upheld the law and said the President had to follow it in order to fire such-and-such official.

In handing down two contradictory rulings the same day, the Court doesn’t seem to have pointed to any major difference in the texts of the laws; as far as I can tell, they protected the independence of the Federal Reserve but not other agencies simply because ending the Federal Reserve’s independence would cause a bigger business panic than ending the independence of other agencies. Justice Barrett pointed out this contradiction in her concurring opinion.

Anyway, the usual Republican 6-3 majority on the Court reversed Humphreys, saying that every Congress for the past 150 years and every Supreme Court for the past hundred has been wrong: laws limiting the President’s ability to fire executive agency officials are inherently un-Constitutional interference by the Legislative branch in the workings of the Executive.

IANAL, but this sounds nonsensical to me. This isn’t a case of the Legislative branch intruding on the Executive branch; it’s a case of the Law intruding on the Executive branch. Laws are written by the Legislative branch, but in almost all cases they also need a President’s signature, and they’re often tested by the courts. In other words, all three branches have already had their say; the law no longer belongs to one branch or another, but to the whole nation, and it binds everyone, regardless of which branch (if any) they work for.

The administration’s (and the Court majority’s) argument, taken to its logical conclusion, amounts to saying “laws don’t apply to the President, because he’s a separate branch of government.” The Court has already taken a big step in that direction with the 2024 immunity decision, and this is another big step.

As Robert Reich points out, the authors of the Constitution had just fought a war of independence from a King, and were extremely concerned about the President being too powerful and becoming, in effect, a King. But if you happen to be the President, or have political interests in common with the President, turning the President into a King above the law sounds pretty cool.