Referring to the then-current forms of government in the colonies, the Declaration of Independence, 248 years old on Thursday, says it is a time “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” It goes on to lay this at the feet of George III: “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.”
And here we are, today, July 1, 2024, with a new King-in-waiting, courtesy of a deeply compromised Supreme Court (“compromised” is a nice way to say a range of things from ideologically extreme to intellectually bankrupt to bought and paid for, and I am saying all of them). A King who could sit at the head of a government that recent Supreme Court decisions have turned on its head, giving to courts the power to hobble the federal agencies that do the crucial work of protecting us from corporate greed. Abuses and usurpations. You might even say absolute tyranny.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent makes this plain:
After a public reading of the Declaration upon its approval by the Second Continental Congress, a statue of George on horseback at Bowling Green was pulled down. The story is that 40,000 musket balls were made out of it (so it goes). William Walcutt painted the scene of its destruction in 1857, and apparently was only one of many artists drawn to the incident from the nation’s founding at a time when the Union seemed in peril of pulling itself apart.
It managed to survive, the nation. So far anyway. Who’s to say if it will survive this.
Samuel Cohen 