Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler said Saturday that President Donald Trump’s newly signed "One Big, Beautiful Bill" is helping restore economic opportunity for America’s small businesses while marking the nation’s 250th anniversary.

The debates between Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen Douglas not only rank amongst America’s landmark speeches but could be a primer for political philosophy students. In campaigning against one another, the rising statesman and elder politician tackled some of the most essential questions of morality and politics.

What does it mean to be human? To be a citizen? Who decides? For Lincoln, the answers revolve around the logic of the Declaration of Independence.

While the Illinois representatives formally debated seven times, they also delivered rival remarks in Chicago on July 4, 1858. Lincoln’s address is now remembered as his “electric cord” speech. In it, Lincoln argued that the principle that animates and unites Americans as a people across generations is “all men are created equal.”

Denouncing the Dred Scott decision (in which the Supreme Court stated that slaves were not citizens), Lincoln explained the meaning of that maxim: “I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.”

However, Lincoln argued, they did consider them “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this meant.” 

Lincoln’s focus on the meaning of equality made sense: it was the crucial issue of the time. New states were entering the union and could sway the country toward freedom or slavery depending on what they allowed within their own borders.

Sen. Douglas cared not whether slavery be voted up or down. For him, “popular sovereignty” meant that the people (or rather a certain segment of the people) of a territory should be able to determine if a state was a free state or a slave state. After all, the majority rules, and America boasts a federalist system. In other words, states could decide the question for themselves.

Lincoln certainly agreed that states should be able to shape local policies. He would not want to interfere with cranberry laws in Indiana or oyster laws in Virginia. But Lincoln objected to Douglas’s view, which seemed to reduce the institution of slavery “as something having no moral question in it.”   

While a republic can tolerate all sorts of policy disagreements, it requires unity when it comes to first principles. America had persisted with the tension of slavery for 82 years, but it could only do so because the “public mind did rest” in the belief that slavery was on the “course of ultimate extinction.”

The growing indifference toward, or worse, active justification of slavey, began by John C. Calhoun and furthered by Stepehen Douglas, pulled Lincoln back into the political arena to renew the work of the Founding.

As many did during the beginnings of the country, Lincoln compared the tyranny of a king with slavery: “Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”

The analogy was particularly apt for a speech delivered amidst Independence Day festivities.

According to Lincoln, those celebrations are “to remind ourselves of all the good done in th[e] process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it.”

Eliciting a peoples’ common history and origin story inculcates gratitude. Citizens reflect on how far we have come as a nation. This provides the opportunity to be thankful for all the people who have contributed to America moving towards justice and the institutions that contemporaries benefit from but did not build by themselves. Civic traditions foster goodwill and unity towards fellow citizens across generations.

By Lincoln’s time, around half of America’s populace could not trace their lineage to the “iron men” of the Founding. Still, the binding ties of the American people persisted—and would persist for many ages to come.

The American national character is sustained by custom and culture and grounded in principle. Lincoln closed his July 4th speech by reflecting on this reality, and his stirrings in Chicago rank with the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural.

While many have no blood ties to the Founding Fathers:

“When they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

“That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Today, we celebrate America’s 250th birthday and the principles that, for us, are ever ancient, ever new. We recall them, grapple with their meaning, and hear their murmurings when we fall short of their demands. To be able to do so is a responsibility and a privilege.

So, happy birthday, America. And thank you.

'Think, reflect and to pray'

Economic freedom

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RealClearWire—As fireworks light the sky this July Fourth and we mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, we celebrate more than a birthday. We honor the most successful experiment in human freedom the world has ever known—an experiment that delivered unprecedented abundance, opportunity, and dignity to ordinary people.

No nation in history has lifted the average citizen to the standard of living enjoyed by everyday Americans. Our system of liberty and limited government created wealth and mobility unmatched anywhere on Earth.

Despite being a young country by global standards, the United States has produced more patents and technological breakthroughs than any other nation in history. That is the fruit of a culture that rewards merit, risk-taking, and individual initiative. It is why people from every corner of the globe still see America as the land of freedom and opportunity—the place where they can build a better life for their families through hard work and faith in tomorrow.

I know first-hand what makes America exceptional because I’ve lived it.

I grew up in the slums of Harlem and a trailer park in Oklahoma. Neither of my parents graduated high school. I delivered pizzas to put myself through college, served as an officer in the U.S. Army, built a successful business career, and raised five children alongside my wife of 40 years.

I’m not exceptional; I’m a citizen of an exceptional country, and I serve an exceptional God. My story is not unique because it is extraordinary. It’s unique because this could only happen in the United States.

The American dream saved my life. It’s why I’m running as the only Republican-endorsed candidate for governor of Minnesota. I want my grandchildren, and every child in our state, to have the same opportunity to succeed through hard work, personal responsibility, and freedom.

America is the greatest country in the history of the world. But we are a nation under attack from within. Take my home state of Minnesota. It used to be a state on the rise, named one of the best places to live in the United States. But that’s not the case anymore, as corrupt politicians and a concentrated group of Somali immigrants who hate everything this country stands for stole billions of dollars from American taxpayers. Over the years, we have watched crime overtake the Twin Cities, and our schools continue to decline in free fall.

Today, many of the institutions that shared our American greatness have become “the enemy within.”

For decades, socialists and Marxists have comprised roughly 40% of the faculty in American colleges and universities. They have infected three to four generations of students with Marxist, anti-American ideology. Tragically, these same students have not received a holistic education of our nation’s virtues and achievements. The result is predictable and devastating: only 19% of Americans aged 45 and younger can pass the U.S. citizenship test. Our young people have been taught America’s sins in exhaustive detail while hearing almost nothing of its unmatched virtues. Consequently, we now have the least patriotic generation in our history.

We also face the lowest church attendance in our republic’s history. A secular worldview has displaced the biblical understanding of human nature, rights, and responsibility that shaped our founding. The consequences are everywhere: the lowest marriage rates and birth rates in American history. Young people are willing to dismiss the First Amendment to stifle debate and discussion.

At the same time, we are absorbing large numbers of immigrants who show little-to-no interest in assimilating into the language, culture, and values that made America exceptional. That approach is not sustainable. A nation cannot remain itself if it stops requiring newcomers to become Americans in more than name only.

Our public schools deliver the lowest academic performance in generations. Vocational education has been devalued. And the United States now suffers the highest rate of children living in single-parent households in the entire world—a crisis that drives more social, academic, and economic disparity than any other single factor.

Worst of all, Western civilization itself—the source of individual rights, the rule of law, and the scientific method—is under relentless cultural attack from within our own institutions.

This cannot continue.

To restore America to its foundational strength, we must take decisive action.

We must reaffirm the teachings of the Founding Fathers and the founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—and recover their clear Judeo-Christian orientation regarding human dignity, limited government, and ordered liberty.

We must require every student to pass the U.S. citizenship test at three critical junctures: the transition from elementary to middle school, from middle school to high school, and as a condition of high school graduation. Civics ignorance is a national security issue.

We must purge woke indoctrination from public school curricula, restore robust vocational education in our high schools, and implement school choice nationwide so parents—not bureaucrats—decide what is best for their children.

And we must change state and federal policy to financially incentivize marriage and stable two-parent families instead of subsidizing fatherless households. The data could not be clearer: The collapse of the family is the greatest threat to opportunity and social mobility in America today.

This July Fourth, as we celebrate 250 years of American independence, we do not gather in despair. We gather in resolve. The same principles that summoned ordinary farmers and merchants to defy an empire still live in the hearts of millions of Americans. The same God who blessed our founding can bless our renewal—if we humble ourselves, remember who we are, and act with courage.

That belief is what inspired me to run for governor. I will fight every day to preserve the freedoms, values, and opportunities that made my own story possible. I know what this country is capable of. Minnesota can once again be a place where families thrive. The American story is not over. Its greatest chapters can still be written. But only if we choose, right now, to defend the inheritance we received and to pass it on, stronger and more faithful, to the generations that follow.

Happy 250th Birthday, America. Let us make the next 250 years even greater.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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