To call this Saturday the nation’s 250th birthday is to indulge a comfortable fiction. 1776 was a declaration, not a birth certificate – and the founders wrote its claims of human equality while this nation enslaved human beingsSays who? well, 'Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist' So you know what you’re in for.
So I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250”, and I’m not alone.
The affection is thin this summer: the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction early this year. That is not ingratitude. Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision.
Without the context, this statement is worthless. There's no definition of 'the country's direction' to say exactlt what they were dissatified with - it might as well have been the march of progressive ideas as the return of conservative ones.
Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts.
Wait for it, wait for it…
The president tried, by executive order, to read the children of undocumented and temporary residents out of the 14th amendment. The court blocked him, six to three – though only five justices joined the chief justice’s full constitutional reasoning. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, concurring, called the Reconstruction amendments “an anticaste, antisubordination reset”, not “a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery”. The citizenship clause was not a gift the founders left us; it was a repair, built after Dred Scott, slavery and war to overrule a court that had made blood the measure of belonging.
Birthright citizenship is proof that the founding promise did not preserve itself; it had to be rebuilt into the constitution after the country’s own highest court exposed the lie beneath the celebration.
Does this man realise that the Founding Fathers were facing a much different world when they wrote that into the Constitution?
The victory did not last the afternoon. Within hours, the president called the ruling “too bad for our Country” and told Congress to “start TODAY” on ending birthright citizenship, insisting no amendment was needed. That is not how the constitution works – ordinary legislation cannot rewrite a constitutional guarantee. But he is reaching for a door a sixth justice left ajar: Brett Kavanaugh wrote that Congress could carve out exceptions by statute. A repair can be upheld in the morning and marked for demolition by nightfall.
Repair also means seeing people as people. The court upheld state laws barring transgender girls from girls’ sports, and in the West Virginia case it let the category decide without asking whether excluding one child – who socially transitioned in grade school and took puberty blockers before she ever competed – actually served the state’s stated interests. That isn’t equal protection. It’s permission to discriminate.
The court upheld state laws banning BOYS from girls sport as the voters in that State evidently wanted...but discrimination is a 'bad' word, even when it's the right thing to do to protect the integrity and safety of female sport.
Celebration will not house people, protect voters or repair what power is trying to break. A country can be taken apart slowly, lawfully, one ruling at a time – and the people taking it apart are not vandals but officials: a president who cancels a housing signing by lunchtime, a court that clears the way for the largest checks, all of it done in the name of patriotism. The answer is not fireworks, and it is not despair. It is to name plainly what is being damaged, and by whom – then to get busy fixing it.
Trump has named it - it's people like you, with an extreme progressive agenda - and he's getting busy fixing it.
