One of the earliest civic traditions to emerge in the United States was the Fourth of July oration. Prominent citizens gave speeches in churches, town halls, and philanthropic societies reflecting on what it meant to be an American. These speeches often included a full reading of the Declaration of Independence, an exercise recommended by founding mother Mercy Otis Warren to American youth “as a palladium of which they should never lose sight, so long as they wish to continue a free and independent people.”

One of the most famous—and arguably best—of these orations was delivered by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams on July 4, 1821, on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Today, Adams’s speech is best known for his brief concluding remarks on foreign policy—that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But his task was even larger than sketching out an enduring approach to U.S. foreign policy. The speech was intended to show his fellow citizens that the principles of justice and philosophical claims embedded in the Declaration of Independence cohered with their own political experience and could guide them to national greatness.

Up from Monarchy

Adams opens his address by pointing to a contradiction in English history. Her kings reigned “in the name of the meek and humble Jesus” but ruled as despots and subjugated her people to a degrading servitude. Over the course of 700 years, the English people extracted civil and religious liberties from their rulers, but only in the form of grants of rights, not acknowledgments of inalienable natural rights. Political and religious liberty emerged in the British Isles, but only partially.

Though the English were a spirited and intelligent people and made use of the mariner’s compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, Adams wryly notes that they discovered none of these inventions. Their scientific and civilizational progress was impeded by political servitude to what Abraham Lincoln called “king-craft” in a speech he gave in Chicago in 1858.

Adams’s lesson is that the people and the government both matter; they must fit one another. America can reach the pinnacle of civilization if it nurtures a culture in which the spirited and intelligent are free to use their natural gifts for the sake of moral and economic self-improvement. He avers that Americans must couple the gifts we inherited from our British ancestors with purer principles of government.

British despotism made American independence necessary. However, even benign rule from English overlords would not have kept the empire together. Adams notes that Parliament had little knowledge of the colonies it governed and few personal connections with the colonists. He says that “the administration of justice” is “the greatest moral purpose of government.” But justice cannot be expected where the rulers do not know or understand the ruled.

Adams identifies two moral elements that make possible a just and free government: sympathy between members of society and sympathy between lawgivers and the people writ large. These bonds begin within the family, spread to neighbors and friends, develop into “the broader and more complicated relations of countryman and fellow citizen,” and conclude with a sense of charity for all mankind. Though we may have a sense of sympathy with foreigners, Adams says that the bonds between neighbors, friends, and citizens are “more deeply seated in our nature” and thus serve as the foundation for shared government.

A Nation Born

At the heart of his speech, John Quincy Adams turns to the Declaration of Independence itself and declares that “A nation was born in a day.” He did not mean that a mere proposition suffices for creating a nation. Adams instead thinks that real, tangible bonds between fellow citizens and between rulers and ruled are necessary. A government may exist without these bonds, but such a government is apt to be an alien despot that, at best, treats its subjects as sheep to be sheared. A nation—a real people—is a prerequisite to free and good government.

For Adams, the Declaration of Independence gives philosophical and legal meaning to those bonds forged by the nascent American people: “It proved that the social compact was no figment of the imagination; but a real, solid, and sacred bond of social union.” The social compact formalizes the moral relations between friends and neighbors in a legal framework, laying out the rights and duties of citizens.

To understand the elusive meaning of “a nation was born in a day,” let us turn to the ancient world. In his classic study of the religious foundations of Greek and Roman political life, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges boldly claimed that Rome was in fact built in a day. Romulus, upon choosing the site for his new city with the help of an augury, initiated a new religious rite, first purifying himself and his companions with sacred fire, then tracing the dimensions of the city walls by digging a trench with a copper plow. But Coulanges notes that the Romans preexisted the city itself. Before Romulus could inaugurate the city, the necessary social bonds already had to be in place:

As soon as the families, the phratries, and the tribes had agreed to unite and have the same worship, they immediately founded the city as a sanctuary for common worship, and thus the foundation of a city was always a religious act.

The Declaration of Independence serves for America what Romulus’s cult served for Rome. It formed a common purpose and belief for an emerging people—but without being founded on pagan superstition. The Declaration asserts the universal and proper grounds for legitimate government, which Adams calls the “unalienable sovereignty of the people.” By explaining these principles, providing a model of the spiritedness, intelligence, and moral character that make self-government possible, and avoiding unnecessary conflicts, America fulfilled all obligations it had to the rest of mankind.

Near the conclusion of his address, Adams contrasts America with Rome and Britain. These empires found glory in dominion and conquest. America would find glory elsewhere. If someone were to ask what America has done for the world, Adams tells us not to look to scientific innovation or to any Old World standard of glory, but to our Declaration of Independence, which “proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.”

Adams gives the last word in his address to our Lord, the “meek and humble Jesus.” If “that Spirit, which dictated the Declaration” would deign to address the nations of the world at this moment, “his words would be, ‘Go thou and do likewise!’” Adams is quoting Luke 10:37, the conclusion of the Good Samaritan parable.

Indeed, America of 1821 had not yet produced a great epic or novel. The poetry it produced was more or less relegated to our own shores. It had not discovered any inventions akin to gunpowder or the mariner’s compass. Instead, it gave mankind a greater gift: the best guide to moral and political excellence that had yet been written. This, for Adams, is the model of Christian charity.

America First

At the conclusion of his speech, Adams turns to foreign policy, because he recognizes that all great nations aspire to glory, an aspiration that usually manifests as an imperial impulse. That impulse is usually self-defeating, especially in a republic.

Adams warns his listeners that if America went abroad in search of monsters to destroy, her own governing principles would be transformed; we might rule the world, but we would certainly lose our own republican spirit. Adams intends to channel the aspiration to glory toward national self-improvement.

Though the Declaration of Independence asserts the universal grounds for just government, it is not an invitation to invade or invite the world. Adams reminds us that for the Declaration to have a wholesome and practical purpose, Americans must tend to our own nation and our fellow citizens. The best we can do for the rest of the world is serve as a model nation that might set an example by which other peoples can attain self-government.

John Quincy Adams believed that America would achieve a golden age. We were destined to become a great nation, one that could rival the greatness of Rome or Britain. In time, we would accomplish scientific, literary, and cultural achievements to rival or even surpass those of the Old World. But the peaks of civilization are fragile things. It is easy to forget that these are the products, not the sources, of civilization. Adams’s goal in 1821 was to remind his fellow citizens that our prosperity depends upon human reason, unleashed by political liberty but guided by morality, law, and religion.

Ultimately, Adams’s speech reminds us of the primacy of politics over all other arts. He relays the story of a musician in ancient Athens who asked Themistocles if he knew how to play the lute. “No!” replied Themistocles, “but he knew how to make a great city of a small one.”

We cannot achieve a golden age if we disengage from political life, if we permit Washington bureaucrats to dictate regulations to citizens with whom they share no attachment, if we let rogue judges thwart policies enacted through the consent of the people, or if we invite millions of strangers to our land with no ties to our culture or creed. We cannot solve the world’s problems—and our politicians have no right to demand that our blood and money be used to do so. We must instead direct our talents to moral and civic improvement within our own nation.

In both war and peace, John Quincy Adams’s advice is to put America first.

The post John Quincy Adams and the Promise of an American Golden Age appeared first on The American Mind.

At two o’clock in the afternoon on August 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln rose to address a crowd gathered at the Fulton County Courthouse in Lewistown, Illinois. He came to answer Senator Stephen Douglas, who had given a speech in Lewistown the day before. According to newspaper reports, Lincoln spoke for two and a half hours and had more listeners at the end of his remarks than when he began. The speech he delivered was not simply part of a campaign to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat. It was an act of recovery—an effort to recall the meaning of the American Founding at a moment when its principles were contested and under strain.

Lincoln spoke on that occasion of the evil of slavery existing in the American colonies when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “These communities, by their representatives in Old Independence Hall,” he recounted,

said to the whole world of men: “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.” This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.

***

A long excerpt from Lincoln’s speech at Lewistown supplies the epigraph for Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence. The choice is apt. Written on the eve of the nation’s Semiquincentennial, Spalding’s book is itself an extended act of recovery, offering a wise, accessible account of the origins, meaning, and continuing significance of America’s founding document.

A longtime student of the founding and now Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College, Spalding is clear about his undertaking. The Declaration, he argues, is the founding’s central act, articulating the principles that give the American experiment its coherence and legitimacy. Spalding’s project flows not just from love of country but from a conviction that “America is a good country, even a great country, perhaps the greatest, not because it is perfect—it is made up of imperfect human beings with original sin and their share of reoccurring wrongs—but because it is dedicated to, and constantly aspires to uphold, permanent principles about human liberty that are true.”

Spalding tells the story of “how in the summer of 1776 a band of iron men from thirteen separate colonies banded together and declared independence from—and declared war against—the most powerful nation in the world.” The Declaration is “the defining act of the great drama that is the American Founding,” he observes, and for Americans today the Declaration must remain central to civic education.

Spalding notes, with a nod to Saint Augustine, that we must know something before we can love it, and so we “must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.” To know the Declaration, we must know its history, and Spalding gives an overview of the imperial crisis, canvassing the major players and the political disputes of the Stamp Act Congress, the colonial response to Parliament’s coercive acts, the convening of the First and Second Continental Congresses, the commissioning of George Washington as general of the Continental Army, and the debate over the drafting and adoption of the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776. The historical narrative is well-paced and provides the necessary context to consider the document’s meaning.

***

The Declaration’s meaning takes us beyond history to nature. Although the colonists often invoked their rights as British subjects, the ultimate ground of their claim was not in the contingencies of history but in the permanence of nature. “They were convinced their cause was just,” Spalding argues, “and informed—as we shall see—by permanent truths, just as they were themselves subject to eternal judgment for the rectitude of their intentions.” The founders’ frequent appeals to nature grew out of the classical natural law tradition, which was transmitted to the colonists through the Christian engagement with classical philosophy, and especially Cicero. This tradition was preserved among the Protestant Reformers and in the Anglicanism of Richard Hooker (in whom C.S. Lewis once claimed to have found the highest, most beautiful expression of the classical natural law tradition).

The 17th-century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes rejected the classical tradition, but the Americans rejected Hobbes. Instead, they embraced the republican theorists among Hobbes’s contemporaries, especially Algernon Sidney and John Locke—both of whom invoked Hooker as an authority. Here Spalding is careful to note, for those who have ears to hear, that the Americans embraced an American Locke—read as a proponent of Christianity and natural law—without giving credence or paying much attention to his skeptical epistemology. The founders were not Lockeans, Spalding concludes, but they did adopt and use Locke’s “political arguments to great effect in their cause.”

Nor were many of the founders deists or pantheists. It is common in some academic circles to read the Declaration’s opening appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as a paean to religious skepticism, making God a distant and disinterested clockmaker, or conflating God and nature altogether. Yet as Spalding notes, the most widely read poem of the most popular poet in the colonies was Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” which treats nature as a preamble to faith and speaks of a soul that “looks through Nature up to Nature’s God” and finally “knows, where faith, law, morals, all began / All end, in love of God, and love of man.” The duality between nature and nature’s God, creation and Creator, is part of the broadly ecumenical classical tradition. “It is unfathomable,” Spalding points out, “that a Congress that publicly prayed together and worshipped together (regularly attending different church services in Philadelphia) and issued proclamations calling for days of prayer and fasting would approve an anti-religious or even a purely secularized Declaration.”

Read the rest here.

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“Like all fascists’ aesthetics,” declared a Guardian editorial, “Trump’s gaze is backward to an idealized ‘classical’ age and forward to a time when he, the Great Man, is immortalized in stone and gold.” The charge is familiar. President Trump is having a roughly 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the White House and wants to erect a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery; the article describes this as “trashing monumental public works while building cheesy monuments” and defiling the United States’ “collective heritage.”

The White House has also increased its efforts to beautify Washington, D.C. along classical lines, restoring Columbus Circle to its former glory, pumping water through the formerly long-dormant fountains at Meridian Hill Park, resurfacing the Reflecting Pool, and announcing plans to construct a pedestrian bridge behind the Lincoln Memorial in accordance with the original McMillan Plan. Critics of the president remain unimpressed. “This is just straight-up fascism,” remarked a guest on a recent episode of Runaway Country with Alex Wagner.

But that claim raises a question: What is the architecture of a republic?

To answer that, we must look to the founders. For Thomas Jefferson, it was to be found in the neoclassical style. Drawing on the architecture of Greek and Roman temples, neoclassicism is easily recognized by its symmetrical design and column-laden facades. Jefferson hoped that classical buildings could give the fledgling republic an environment that felt permanent. He reasoned that an idiom which had earned “the approbation of the ages” would inspire Americans to pursue the virtues embedded into the very form of their surroundings.

Jefferson put that conviction into practice when he drew up the Virginia State Capitol with Charles-Louis Clerisseau. Modeled on an ancient Roman temple, the Capitol represented a greatness the nation could then only aspire to. When William Thornton submitted his design for the U.S. Capitol in 1792, he drew upon that same classical tradition. So did the architects of nearly every major federal building in Washington. From the Supreme Court and the Treasury Building to the National Archives and the White House itself, each building reflects the founders’ belief that public architecture should embody a classically inspired brand of republican virtue.

Anti-traditional styles like brutalism only arrived in D.C. in the 1960s and ‘70s, making them a relatively recent addition. They are also widely disliked. The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, which was until recently the home of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has drawn criticism for decades. A Washington Times architecture critic called it one of the “ugliest buildings in town” in 2007. Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan placed it “among the most reviled [buildings] in all of Washington—and with good reason.” Polling confirms the pattern: Americans consistently prefer traditional architectural styles to contemporary ones.

Popularity alone should not settle the question, of course. But in this case, public opinion taps into something basic and real: human nature prefers the beautiful to the austere.

Not every American setting calls for a neoclassical approach. Contemporary styles define the skyline of New York, where steel and glass skyscrapers reflect the forward vision of a city addicted to progress. Trump himself deployed that vocabulary in Trump Tower. Even brutalism finds its proper context in the Washington, D.C. Metro, where converging rays of stark concrete evoke the ruthless forward drive of the trains and make you feel as if you are living in a ‘60s-inspired vision of the future. Throughout the country, regional differences have given us beautiful vernacular architecture in everything from the log cabins of Appalachia to the Pueblos of the Southwest. Those forms work in their natural environments.

Moreover, there is room for some critique of how the Trump Administration has gone about executing its vision. Perhaps the lions at the base of the proposed arch were a monarchically coded mismatch for an otherwise republican monument. Maybe the ballroom could have been smaller. But these isolated cavils are incidental to the wholesale objection being mounted by Trump’s most devoted opponents, who dislike the neoclassical revival per se because they recognize that it “projects strength…these big columns, all the flags.” On that point, they are correct. When they leap from this observation to condemning the style itself as suspect, however, they reveal that they implicitly equate strength of every kind with fascism.

Jefferson did not look to classical architecture because it domineered. He looked to it because it inspired. When visitors climb the steps to the Supreme Court, they ascend from the low to the high. The columns and pediments draw the eye upwards, forcing mortal men to look towards the heavens. That should be the aspiration of any genuine republican government: not to crush its citizens, but to elevate them.

As we approach the republic’s 250th birthday, we ought to recover some of Jefferson’s optimism. What a civilization builds is what it becomes.

The post How Americans Build appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

What Makes an American—Birthright Citizenship and the U.S. at 250 | The Roundtable Ep. 324

On the cusp of America’s 250th anniversary, the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission has prepared a lineup of events celebrating the nation’s virtues. This week, Lucas Morel, member of the commission and professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, joins the show to celebrate the many and varied expressions of patriotism this occasion has called forth, while emphasizing the need to recover the merits of the Founding. Plus: Several important Supreme Court decisions have been handed down. Among them, birthright citizenship has been upheld in Trump v. Barbara. What does this spell for Trump, and America’s political community?

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 324 appeared first on The American Mind.

A few miles from this room, 86 years ago, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, with Hitler’s army right across the English Channel, and delivered a speech for the ages. We all remember how he ended: “we shall fight on the beaches…in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender.” But we stop one sentence too soon. Immediately following that famous line, Churchill made another assertion: that even if his island were subjugated and starving, the struggle would go on “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill looked across the Atlantic—to a younger nation born of English stock—and staked the survival of the West on the promise that America would come.

And America did come. We joined our British brothers in arms with courage—and with steel. From the shipyards of the Clyde to the assembly lines of Detroit, we together churned out boats, guns, cars, and planes faster than the enemy could destroy them. Our industrial capacity was not accidental. It was the mark of a confident, strong alliance, built upon a shared civilization ready to defend its way of life. It was propelled onwards unto the breach by the “Anglo-Saxon courage” that President Trump hailed during King Charles’s visit in April—a unique and distinctive gift of our common inheritance, running through the veins of Americans and British alike, persisting across centuries and continents.

Now the Anglo-American alliance has never run one-way. Two days after September 11, under orders from the great Queen Elizabeth II, the guard at Buckingham Palace played not “God Save the Queen” but “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Grieving Americans heard our own anthem rise above London and understood we were not alone. We saw across the ocean not just an ally, but a brother—mourning with us on the basis of something far more fundamental and ancient than mere strategic ties. That moment was not an act of diplomacy, but of kinship.

But our bond runs deeper than wars and anthems.

“We Hold These Truths”

In 1215, in the fields of Runnymede, an English king was made to put in writing that he was not the author of the law but its servant—that the “law of the land” stands above the throne. Five and a half centuries later, a document drafted in Philadelphia opened by appealing to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and declared that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Different centuries, yet the same fundamental truth. Jefferson did not invent that truth in Virginia. He inherited it from Runnymede, from the common law, from England, and from the great Western civilization that preceded it.

Similarly, in 1535, on the scaffold at Tower Hill, Sir Thomas More—whose feast day, I just learned, we are celebrating today—called himself “the King’s good servant, and God’s first.” Not but God’s. And God’s. Saint Thomas understood that a man who serves the king contrary to the natural law is no true subject. Instead, a man who serves the king in accord with virtue and faith has a loyalty and a patriotism much more profound than anything a tyrant could erase. Thomas More was not the only Englishman to understand this: John Fisher, Edmund Campion, Thomas Becket, and many others would also give their lives as a profound witness to this truth.

Two and a half centuries later, after leading America’s own fight against tyranny, George Washington would echo Thomas More in his Farewell Address, insisting that religion and morality are the nation’s “indispensable supports,” and that no republic should expect its integrity to outlast its faith. Washington understood that no matter the political system, free people must be governed first by virtue and faith, by being the nation’s good servants and God’s first, or they would soon be overtaken by accident and force. Drawing from his Christian forebears, Washington proclaimed that faith was not ancillary to America’s system of self-government, but its lifeblood.

The West is, above all, an embodied reality, with a unique and distinctive character, visible everywhere and anywhere they appear—from the English shires to the Australian outback to the great American frontier. It is a people possessed by destiny, by the spirit of adventure; the sons of a small island kingdom that built an empire upon which the sun never set—so vast that it transcended the reach of the night itself.

It is a people with a clear-eyed vision of who man is and what he is made for—who recognize, at the core, that man is made in the Imago Dei, the image of God. From Aquinas and medieval monasteries to Runnymede and Philadelphia—our ancestors held to this fundamental truth.

And this is why the Trump Administration cares so deeply about Europe, and about Britain.

Our Difficult Task

Yet our civilizational alliance is precisely what so many today seek to erase. There is a movement across the West that treats our great inheritance as a source of guilt and shame, as something to atone for rather than to hold sacred. It calls tradition backward, faith antiquated, patriotism extremism, the family oppressive, and borders xenophobic. In this new religion, rights are not the recognition of God-given dignity but the whims of governments, NGOs, and bureaucratic institutions. Disagree, and you are flagged, fined, de-banked, disqualified, and in some cases prosecuted.

Now, unfortunately our friends in Great Britain know this reality best of all. A mother arrested for praying silently on a sidewalk. An entire generation of young British girls subjected to unspeakable forms of abuse by savage foreign gangs, not merely because they were girls but because they were British. A political class that not only refuses to acknowledge such crimes but persecutes and criminalizes those who do. An ever-expanding content moderation regime drafted by unelected bureaucrats and enforced by threat of fines against those who do not comply. This is not the defense of democracy; it’s an offense against it.

If you hollow out the West’s anthropology, you do not get a neutral, frictionless order. You get a “gray goo” society that no longer believes it has anything worth defending and a people without the confidence or clarity to defend against shared external threats. And make no mistake: every measure of strength we surrender only empowers our true adversaries around the world.

This is a threat to all of us: Americans, Britons, Europeans alike. Under President Trump, America has been given something of a reprieve—a chance to recover our borders, our industry, our faith, and our founding ethos. However, we have no illusion that this reprieve is permanent. And it is precisely because we have been given a little room to breathe that we now turn back toward our friends, and toward the special relationship with the United Kingdom first and foremost.

Our common project is one of restoring civilizational self-confidence. Yet this is not merely an academic exercise. Confidence that lives only on social media or in lecture halls is not confidence, but nostalgia. A civilization sure of itself builds things. It defends its people. It leads in the industries that decide the future. It keeps its hand on the supply chains that sustain it, not out of selfishness, but for the common good.

This confidence was once the backbone of the Anglo-American alliance: shared defense, shared invention, shared industrial might. We all let it wither. We deindustrialized in the name of efficiency and in the process offshored our sovereignty. We routed the supply chains for our medicines, our microchips, and our minerals through the territory of our principal rival and called it free trade. We let our shipyards close and our defense industrial base thin to the point where the arsenal of democracy could not, today, do what it did in 1943.

This confidence demands meeting our defense commitments, not merely as lip service to an alliance but as a primary duty that a nation owes its own people. It demands rebuilding sovereign capacity in the industries that matter—shipbuilding, energy, technology, and advanced manufacturing. It demands a Western supply chain for critical goods that no adversary can switch off. It demands that we once again traverse the frontiers of space and human excellence, instead of regulating ourselves into ineptitude. A West that cannot make its own steel, its own ships, its own chips, and, importantly, its own patriotism is not sovereign.

And now the hardest matter: mass migration.

Mass migration, pursued without limit and without consent, is not one issue among many. It is the leading edge of civilizational erasure. A people is not an interchangeable population, and the West is not a set of “ideas” that anyone can simply adopt by stepping across a border. It is a particular inheritance sustained by those who belong to it. Mass migration is charitable to neither migrants nor citizens—and is rife with human trafficking, sexual violence, and the replacement of native populations. To admit large numbers of alien peoples is not to enrich Western civilization but to dissolve it. This is an existential crisis facing all of us. Yet too many Western leaders have abandoned civilization in service of their own oikophobia—guilt, self-hatred, and all-consuming hostility toward one’s own homeland—often against the direct wishes of their people. And yes, we also see this concerning movement in America as well.

Against this crisis, our shared tradition—our special relationship—should answer with clarity: sovereignty is not the enemy of human rights but their precondition. Law and order is not injustice, but necessary to human flourishing. Virtue is not repression, but the road to true freedom. Our civilization is not something to be embarrassed by, but something deeply good and true.

Rebuilding Civilization, Together

Let me close where I began.

This year America marks its 250th birthday, and we know we have good roots. We were English before we were American. Our liberties were the Magna Carta’s before they were the Declaration’s. Even our defiance in 1776 was, in no small part, an attempt to rediscover the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that England once taught to us.

But America’s gratitude cannot be passive. Churchill did not say the New World would merely wish the old well. He said it would step forth. This is what America is doing now, and as we do so, we ask you, our friends in the United Kingdom, to join us. As our ancestors did as they mapped an untamed North America and charted untraveled waters under the Union Jack, what Americans and Britons on both sides of the Atlantic must do is step forth together and execute a deliberate effort of civilizational renewal. We must rediscover our shared history, our common faith, and our core virtues, and manifest those realities in strong and sound public policy that defends borders, dominates in industry, protects our freedoms, and leads together on the global stage. We must regain the courage to build nations worth defending—and defend them without apology.

Our shared history has been one of stepping forth time and time again in the interest of and in the aid of the other. I am confident we can do so once more, together.

The post The Indispensable Civilizational Alliance appeared first on The American Mind.

Chief Justice John Roberts begins the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship opinion in Westminster in 1608 with Calvin’s Case and the English law of royal subjectship.

I would begin in Philadelphia in 1776.

Between those two places—and those two moments—lies the American Revolution. And the Revolution changed more than who governed America. It changed the very foundation of political membership.

That is the central problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. The Court’s opinion is learned, careful, and historically rich. Chief Justice Roberts traces the English doctrine of jus soli through Calvin’s Case, Blackstone, a substantial body of antebellum American authorities, and finally United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It may well become the definitive defense of the conventional understanding of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

But it answers the wrong question.

The issue is not whether America inherited English legal language. It plainly did. The issue is whether America also inherited England’s understanding of political membership.

The majority assumes that the American Revolution left the English understanding of political membership largely intact. The dissents argue that the Revolution rejected that understanding and replaced it with an American conception of citizenship grounded in the consent of the governed. That is the real disagreement in this case.

A New Creed

Under English common law, nearly everyone born within the king’s dominions became a natural-born subject. Birth within the sovereign’s territory created permanent allegiance to the Crown because the child was born under the king’s protection. That doctrine made sense in a monarchy. It reflected a world of subjects, sovereigns, dominions, and perpetual allegiance.

But the United States is not a monarchy.

The Declaration of Independence did more than announce separation from Great Britain. It rejected the political philosophy upon which English subjectship rested. Jefferson’s words—that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed”—were not mere rhetorical flourishes. They announced a new theory of political legitimacy. And the Declaration’s closing words made the rejection of perpetual allegiance explicit: the new states were “absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.”

English law rested upon allegiance to the Crown. The American Republic would rest upon the consent of a self-governing people.

That revolutionary transformation should have been central to the Court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

Instead, the majority largely assumes that English subjectship and American citizenship belong to the same constitutional lineage. Roberts proves an important proposition: England recognized birthright subjectship. But he does not prove the decisive one: that Americans who had repudiated monarchy intended, less than a century later, to constitutionalize the English law of royal subjectship as the definition of citizenship in a republic.

Justice Joseph Story helps explain why that distinction matters. Story was steeped in English law, but he was not merely Blackstone with an American accent. His great constitutional project was to explain how inherited English legal concepts had been adapted to the institutions and principles of an American republic. He stands as a bridge between the common-law inheritance and American constitutionalism.

That is the bridge missing from the majority’s account. Roberts reads the inherited legal tradition largely as a line of continuity from Calvin’s Case to Wong Kim Ark. But the American constitutional genealogy runs along a different path: the Declaration of Independence, Story’s adaptation of inherited law to republican constitutionalism, Lincoln’s reaffirmation of the Declaration as the nation’s first principle, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment.

Abraham Lincoln understood this better than anyone. He did not treat the Declaration as a mere political manifesto. Lincoln treated it as the nation’s statement of principle. In his famous meditation on the Constitution and the Union, Lincoln described the Declaration’s principle of liberty as the “apple of gold,” with the Constitution as the “picture of silver” framed around it. The frame was made not to conceal or destroy the apple, but to preserve it.

That is precisely the point here. The Constitution must be read as law. But it is American law, not English law. And the 14th Amendment must be read as part of the Constitution’s effort to vindicate the principles of the Declaration after the catastrophe of slavery and Dred Scott.

Preserving the Cornerstone

The Reconstruction Congress was not attempting to preserve English constitutionalism. It was completing the work begun in 1776.

The Declaration proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” Dred Scott denied that promise, holding that an entire class of Americans could never become members of the political community. The 14th Amendment repudiated that decision. But it did so by restoring the principles of the American Founding, not by reviving the legal doctrines of the British Crown.

This is why the majority’s repeated description of the Citizenship Clause as “declaratory” does not resolve the question. Declaratory of what? The common law of royal subjectship inherited from England? Or the constitutional law of citizenship that Americans had transformed through the Declaration, the Revolution, and nearly a century of republican self-government?

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, not 1768. It should therefore be interpreted through the constitutional understandings of the American Republic, not simply those of the British Empire.

The Citizenship Clause provides: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. The clause does not simply require birth in the United States. It adds a second requirement: the person must be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Those words must do real work.

The majority effectively equates “subject to the jurisdiction” with “subject to American law.” Anyone physically present in the country, except diplomats and members of sovereign Indian tribes, must obey American law. From that premise, the majority concludes that virtually everyone born here becomes a citizen.

But the Reconstruction Congress was speaking of something more profound than traffic laws and criminal jurisdiction. It was defining membership in the American political community.

The debates surrounding the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment repeatedly invoked the ideas of complete jurisdiction, complete allegiance, and undivided political obligation. Senator Lyman Trumbull, the principal author of the Civil Rights Act, explained that citizenship extended to those who were subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States—not merely to those temporarily answerable to its laws.

Every foreign visitor is obliged to obey American law while here. So is every foreign student, every tourist, every diplomat’s driver, and every person who crosses the border unlawfully. But mere obedience to law is not the same thing as complete political allegiance. If it were, the jurisdictional language would add almost nothing to the constitutional text.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 used slightly different language, extending citizenship to persons born in the United States and “not subject to any foreign power.” The 14th Amendment altered the phrasing, but not the underlying concept of complete political jurisdiction. The point was not mere geography. It was political membership.

That is why the dissents have the stronger originalist argument.

Citizenship in America

Justice Thomas begins with a question the majority never fully confronts: What did Americans understand citizenship to mean after they had rejected English subjectship? That is the proper originalist inquiry. It is not enough to ask how English courts defined the king’s subjects. The constitutional question is how Americans defined members of a self-governing republic.

The majority’s treatment of United States v. Wong Kim Ark illustrates the same methodological difficulty. Roberts portrays today’s decision as little more than the faithful application of settled precedent. That gives Wong Kim Ark much broader force than it actually possessed.

The case involved a child born in San Francisco to parents who had been lawfully admitted and permanently domiciled in the United States. That holding was sufficient to resolve the controversy before the Court. Whether the Constitution mandates citizenship for children born to temporary visitors or to those unlawfully present was not presented.

To be sure, Justice Horace Gray’s opinion draws heavily on the English tradition of jus soli. But the opinion’s reasoning extended well beyond the facts before it. Its discussion of temporary visitors and the full scope of the Citizenship Clause should be evaluated on the strength of its historical reasoning, not treated as though every observation carried the force of the Court’s holding.

That is especially important because Wong Kim Ark itself looked backward through the English common-law tradition. Today’s Court repeats that move. But whether Justice Gray correctly understood the original meaning of the 14th Amendment remains the very question under debate.

Over the past two decades, Edward Erler, Michael Anton, and I, along with several other prominent legal scholars, have argued that the Citizenship Clause must be understood against the backdrop of the American Revolution rather than the English common law of perpetual allegiance. That argument does not deny England’s commitment to jus soli. It asks whether the American Revolution rejected the premise on which English jus soli rested.

Chief Justice Roberts presents an intellectually serious account of the conventional view. The majority opinion deserves respect for its scholarship and for its careful engagement with difficult historical sources.

But scholarship is only as persuasive as the question it seeks to answer.

Roberts proves that England followed jus soli. He proves that English subjects acquired allegiance by birth within the king’s dominions. He proves that Wong Kim Ark embraced that historical tradition.

What he never quite proves is why the American people, after repudiating monarchy and proclaiming government by consent, should be presumed to have constitutionalized that English doctrine rather than adapting inherited legal language to their own revolutionary understanding of citizenship.

The disagreement between the majority and the dissent is therefore not ultimately about Blackstone, Calvin’s Case, or even Wong Kim Ark. It is about what the American Revolution accomplished. Did it merely transfer sovereignty from the king to the people while leaving the English understanding of political membership intact? Or did it reject that understanding and replace it with citizenship grounded in consent, allegiance, and membership in the American political community?

Justice Thomas places that question at the center of the inquiry. For an originalist, that is exactly where it belongs.

The Declaration of Independence eloquently and definitively answered that question in favor of the doctrine of consent rather than the feudal doctrine of jus soli. In this, its 250th anniversary, it should not have been overlooked.

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The Declaration of Independence imagines revolution and legislation as two distinct phases in man’s political history. First, an aggrieved people “alter or abolish” a form of government destructive of man’s rights. Only then does that people “institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

America’s revolutionaries, however, had to fight and legislate at the same time. As they were beating the British, they ratified state constitutions and legislated for a free people. New Hampshire’s temporary constitution was written before the Declaration was adopted, as was South Carolina’s. Ten of the 13 colonies adopted constitutions before the Battle of Saratoga in 1777—only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island did not. (Massachusetts adopted its constitution in 1780, well before the Treaty of Paris.)

Although state constitutions were defective in significant ways, they accomplished much. Combined with the Articles of Confederation, they were good enough to win independence. State constitutions reflected a social vision for a republican people that Americans could rally around during the war, one that would be elaborated for decades. They contained the promise of something better, something worth fighting and dying for.

America’s revolution in domestic policy removed the pillars of the old aristocratic family while establishing the grounds for a middle class ready and able to defend republican self-government. Some elements remained implicit, but much was spelled out through state legislation.

Republicanizing Inheritance Law

Especially crucial to the new regime were inheritance law and a republican conception of family law. Alexis de Tocqueville argues that the family “ought to be placed at the head of all political institutions” since it shapes the destiny of a people. Lawgivers throughout history have taken great interest in inheritance laws. Lycurgus of Sparta created inalienable family estates for all citizens, locking families and land in place for centuries. Caesar Augustus linked inheritance laws directly to family policy as he was establishing the principate. Russian reformer Pyotr Stolypin imagined breaking up estates as part of an effort to stave off disaster for the Romanovs before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.

Laws of entail (which limit an owner’s ability to divide and sell property) and primogeniture (which favored first sons in inheritance) were pillars of Europe’s feudal order. Edward I codified entail in 1285, according to David Hume’s History of England. Both primogeniture and entail came earlier to France and Germany; later and more harshly to Spain and Russia; and later and somewhat more easily to Scandinavia, as depicted in Sigrid Undset’s epic novels.

As a result, an intimate connection developed between family and land. The family came to be understood across generations on a trustee model. “Family spirit,” as Tocqueville writes, is “materialized in the land.” The idea of legacy was enshrined through law, as marriage became the indissoluble bond between the family and the land. Men represented the family in councils as leaders; the role of sons was fixed. Capital was tied to land, so the economy emphasized stability over dynamism.

Whereas primogeniture and entail support the patriarchal family, American states abolished them in order to lay, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “the axe to the root of Pseudoaristocracy.” Jefferson wanted “to annul” the privilege of those who owned estates as “essential to a well-ordered republic.” America defeated aristocracy on the battlefield and at the hearth.

Aristocrats from Europe could not plant their family institutions in America, nor could polygamists—whether from Muslim lands or domestic sects—transplant their family situations here. Property would become more widely held and more easily circulated. Repealing primogeniture and entail takes “away from landed property owners a great interest of sentiment, memories, pride, and ambition in preserving the land,” as Tocqueville points out. Families eventually sold estates to redeploy capital toward higher-growth investments. As property circulated, more people could own it, which set the stage for the American Dream.

Georgia repealed entail and primogeniture in 1777. Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Vermont abolished entail before Saratoga, and primogeniture thereafter. Every state that had both “abolished them during the Revolution,” according to Tom West. Some never had them.

Widely available property would support the middle-class, nuclear family model. It even affected the old world, as nearly every European country abolished entail and primogeniture during the 1800s; Britain waited until 1925.

But the nuclear family has limits, too. According to Tocqueville, one “dreams of the establishment of the generation that is going to follow, and nothing more.” In America, families disappear as rapidly as fortunes. Rents no longer pay the bills, though dividends might. Parents prepare children for independent life away from the family, and parental authority legally expires when children become adults. Children need practical schooling for real careers, which means many move away to pursue their dreams and fortunes. Homes become “assets” more than loci of meaning. The family thins, but is sweet and close.

The Founders’ Indirect Method of Promoting Family Life

Family in times of churn risks becoming, in Tocqueville’s words, something “vague, indeterminate, and uncertain.” Rather than anchoring the family to land, the founders sought stability by defining family form and function. The American nuclear family might be more temporary than the medieval family, but it would be centered around raising children to honorable adulthood.

The founders channeled natural human desires (for posterity, for love and loving one’s own, for sex, for protection) toward enduring, procreative marriage between husband and wife. As I have argued elsewhere, laws reinforced through a system of honor allowed divorce in limited circumstances and prohibited adultery, polygamy, and sodomy. They united man and woman, by consent, in a union where two were recognized as one.

American laws were often stringent in theory, but somewhat loose in practice. America adopted and expanded English common-law marriages. In colonial times, fornication was illegal and severely punished with public shaming and corporal punishment, and fornication remained illegal after the Revolution—but these prohibitions instead aimed mostly to maintain a healthy marital culture, and punishments declined. Laws against sodomy and adultery followed the same pattern: strictness in law, mercy in practice. Once a marriage was formed, divorce would be allowed only for reasons that struck at the heart of marriage—adultery, abuse, desertion, and, in some cases, infertility. Obscenity was hardly available. Allowances for human weakness coexisted with public favor for a stable family form.

What emerged from the American Revolution was a mixed family regime for a republican government. Defending the nuclear family supports the republican revolution in government, as it rests on old wisdom about the distinct needs and nature of men, women, and children—wisdom the founders held and social scientists continue to affirm.

At the same time, Tocqueville would not be surprised by the atomizing pressures on the nuclear family in the founders’ regime. This is why American statesmen have always given pride of place to Christian practice as a means of reinforcing support for the family. Throughout most of our history, public opinion on matters of sexuality remained relatively strict until the revolution in obscenity law in the 1950s and divorce law in the 1970s. The founders sought to uphold a family structure buttressed by public opinion that discouraged destructive practices and protected and promoted the republican family.

In a technological republic where wealth is no longer tied to land, reinstituting primogeniture and entail is a nonstarter. Protection of the family form as it relates to function is the only path. Those interested in reviving our republican roots should take up that mantle today. Human nature remains the same—and so do the needs of an enduring republican people. America’s revolutionary family legacy is the only place to begin.

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The famous philosophical maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the sacred Greek precinct of Delphi is “Know thyself,” an imperative at the heart of the Western tradition of liberal education. It includes both the Greek tradition of political philosophy inaugurated by Socrates and the rich and ample resources proffered to Western men and women by biblical revelation. A corollary to that imperative is the Platonic/Aristotelian call for thoughtful and conscientious human beings to “care for the soul” as the one thing most needful, a call that also powerfully resonates in the Christian tradition.

Yet for all its formidable achievements, the contemporary Western world has lost touch with both indispensable imperatives, not least because our dominant currents of thought have attempted to explain away the soul. These currents are determined to reduce the human being to a sophisticated animal bereft of meaningful self-consciousness, moral agency, mutual accountability, and the rich interiority that is nothing less than the “image of God.”

Even as modern man rejects a noble and humanizing appreciation of “sacred limits and restraints,” as Leo Strauss called them, and any real appreciation of the “greatness and misery of man” (in Pascal’s inimitable words) that defines the human condition, we proudly proclaim ourselves lords and masters of nature. At the same time, we jettison the true grounds of liberty and human dignity and increasingly deny that there is any soul or self for us to know or care for.

Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy pointed out, modern intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and scribblers of all sorts delight in affirming that man is nothing but a brute, a preprogrammed automaton, a soulless product of subhuman determinants, a plaything of the historical process—anything but a human being with consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility. Both Tocqueville and Percy pungently observed the damning paradox that our “demi-savants” proudly delight in: proclaiming themselves to be beyond freedom and dignity, thus revealing themselves to have souls, even if profoundly distorted ones. Human beings can never completely escape the “grandeur and misery” that defines our condition. Today’s ideological perversions unintentionally confirm this point, and abundantly so.

In an unusually thoughtful and suggestive essay in the Spring 2026 issue of Comment magazine, the distinguished sociologist Christian Smith (recently retired from the University of Notre Dame) discusses the prominent role of the social sciences in this “flattening of the human person” and the systematic reduction of the “irreducible” into something other than itself. As Smith ably argues, the human sciences do not begin by “considering seriously the actual nature of human persons, as best that can be understood through combined personal, social, and historical experience.” Instead, obsessed with the allure of being “scientific”—an empiricism that neglects truths, motives, goods, and experience that are unquantifiable—they construct abstractions that have little to do with human beings and societies.

Smith has nothing against authentic science and respect for the empirical. But scientism distorts reality by confusing human beings with the “theories” of their own making. Smith argues that this can be seen in the “rationally calculating utility maximizers” of modern economics; the imperial utilitarianism of rational choice theory; the “behaviorism” of so much psychology and sociology; the undue obsession with race, class, and gender of so much ideologically minded social science; and the reductive determinism that explains away human moral agency in favor of determinants that are in reality merely influences on what Aristotle called the human capacity for “reflective choice.” The examples of such deformations of the human person are legion. Smith provides the reader with an appreciation of just how widespread these pseudo-scientific distortions are and how they warp human self-understanding.

Smith wisely remarks that these deformations almost always presuppose an understanding of the human person that is rarely, if ever, subject to critical examination. This leads to oscillations between fanciful utopianism (“credulously optimistic humanism”) and “descents into dark pessimism, misanthropy, and nihilism.” These theories are never simply false but instead take limited or partial insights and then insist, in the name of a spurious scientism, that “humans are really essentially nothing but [some reductionist X].” Smith astutely observes that the human scientists who promote these theoretical systems exempt themselves from their own inexorable logic:

Was Skinner a conditioned pigeon? Were structural-functionalists cultural dopes? Was Foucault just another power relativist? If so, why should we take any of them seriously? If not, what explains their magic trick of transcending their own humanity?

How then are we to escape from these distortions in the human sciences that “tend to fragment and flatten, sometimes even dehumanize humanity”? To begin with, we need to return to Aristotle’s simple but profound observation that “every science…must attune its methods to fit its particular subjects of study.”

As I argued in the Spring 2026 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, the search for precision has its limits, and the study of human things is as much art as “science,” in the modern sense of the term. As Aristotle observed early on in his Nicomachean Ethics, we must “not look for the same degree of exactness in all our studies.” In studying human beings, we must also render visible “invisible” the goods of the soul—including our beliefs about the true, the good, and the beautiful—through a careful, sympathetic dialectical study of human things, a point that Smith quite thoughtfully develops. The scientist must recognize his own humanity, interiority, and moral responsibility. He must not exempt himself from his own humanity. He must do justice to both “the brilliantly light and the dreadfully dark sides of humanity” if he wishes to be truly scientific, as Smith points out with the help of the theologian and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. This is the beginning of wisdom.

The social sciences must draw from and build upon old-fashioned liberal education, with insights to be discerned from literature, history, philosophy, and theology. Without these crucial foundations, social science succumbs to abstractions and chimerical constructions that distort more than they illuminate. Who understands man better than Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Niebuhr, whatever their differences? We must restore the human to the human sciences so that they will cease trying to explain away the precious ensouled person that is the human being.

Smith’s vitally important insights can contribute to the restoration of a social science with soul, and thus to a civilization that does not try to bury the vital reality of the human being in his “grandeur and misery.” The twin imperatives of “knowing thyself” and “caring for the soul” lie at the heart of civilized liberty.

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For years, America’s immigration policy has been determined less by the elected branches of government than by a handful of federal district judges. Presidents proposed policies, Congress enacted statutes, and almost inevitably, a single judge somewhere in the country would issue an order purporting to suspend those policies nationwide. That era may finally be drawing to a close.

The Supreme Court’s two immigration decisions issued last week mark an important turning point—not simply because they uphold significant Trump Administration immigration policies, but because they reaffirm a more fundamental constitutional principle: immigration policy belongs primarily to the political branches, not the judiciary.

The Court’s decisions addressed different questions: Mullin v. Doe concerned the executive’s authority over Temporary Protected Status, while Mullin v. Al Otro Lado involved the government’s ability to regulate when and how aliens arriving at the border may invoke asylum procedures. Both opinions reject the increasingly common assumption that federal judges may freely substitute their policy preferences for those of Congress and the president in matters of immigration.

That conclusion should surprise no one familiar with the Constitution or with the current Court’s commitment to adhere to its original meaning.

Article I gives Congress authority over naturalization and immigration. Article II charges the president with faithfully executing the immigration laws and conducting the nation’s foreign affairs. The judiciary’s role is different. Courts are supposed to resolve concrete legal disputes—not make immigration policy. For too long, however, that distinction has been blurred.

Beginning during the first Trump Administration and accelerating in recent years, nationwide injunctions or nationwide class actions have become the preferred weapon of litigants seeking to defeat executive policies with which they disagree. A single district judge can effectively veto the actions of the elected branches for the entire nation, often within days of a complaint being filed and long before appellate review. Nothing in the Constitution contemplates such extraordinary judicial power.

Federal judges possess neither the democratic legitimacy of Congress nor the political accountability of the president. Their authority extends only to deciding the cases before them and granting relief necessary to protect the specific parties before the court. They were never intended to function as a continuing supervisory council over every major policy dispute in the country. Last week’s decisions reflect a welcome recognition of that important constitutional principle.

Immigration, perhaps more than any other area of law, requires political judgment. Decisions concerning border security, humanitarian protection, foreign relations, labor markets, and national sovereignty inevitably involve competing policy considerations that courts are poorly equipped—and constitutionally unauthorized—to balance.

Reasonable people may disagree about how policy judgments in the area of immigration should be resolved. Americans have long debated the proper scope of asylum protections, the wisdom of Temporary Protected Status, and the best means of securing the southern border. But under our constitutional system, such decisions are supposed to occur in Congress, at the White House, and ultimately at the ballot box—not through nationwide decrees issued by unelected trial judges.

Critics will undoubtedly portray the Supreme Court’s two rulings as victories for one political party or another. That misses the larger point. The real winner is the constitutional separation of powers.

When courts respect the limits of judicial authority, they strengthen rather than weaken the rule of law. Judicial modesty is not judicial abdication. Courts remain fully empowered to decide actual cases, interpret statutes, and enforce constitutional guarantees. What they are not empowered to do is assume responsibility for making national immigration policy, a distinction that protects everyone.

The precedents the Supreme Court established will not apply only to Republican presidents or conservative policies. They will constrain future courts considering the actions of Democratic administrations as well. Constitutional principles endure precisely because they are not dependent upon agreement with the policy of the moment.

The Framers deliberately divided governmental power among three separate branches because concentrated power is dangerous regardless of who exercises it. Judicial overreach is no less inconsistent with constitutional government than executive overreach or legislative overreach.

The Supreme Court’s decisions on immigration represent an encouraging course correction. They remind lower courts that judges are not policymakers. They reaffirm that immigration decisions belong principally to the elected branches. And they take another step toward restoring the proper constitutional balance among the three branches of government.

That is good news not only for immigration policy, but also for the Constitution itself.

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