On this 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we recognize “the triumph of the American spirit,” the demand for revolution, and the powerful principles embedded in its elegant preamble. Remarkably, the Declaration’s celebrated freedom fighters, some of whom would later become presidents of the United States, demonstrated no revolutionary leanings toward freeing women from political, economic, or social subordination and subjugation. They championed slavery (it was legal in all 13 colonies) and were mildly indifferent at best to terrorism against Indigenous peoples. Merely a dozen or so among the 56 signers did not own enslaved Africans.

Yet this heralded anniversary of the Declaration demands a closer reading of the text. Because, on inspection, it’s clear that many of the grievances documented against King George III mirror the conditions under President Donald Trump, across both of his terms in office. Trump has “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good”; “obstructed the Administration of Justice”; “obstruct[ed] the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners” by refusing to “encourage their migrations”; “kept among us, in times of peace,” National Guard officers “without the Consent of our legislatures”; and “excited domestic insurrections.” The Declaration’s language accusing King George of “transporting large Armies of…Mercenaries to [complete] the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation,” eerily parallels this moment in America.

But it’s also clear that the backslide into tyranny is the result of a judicial assault on the Constitution. America’s political process in the decades after its founding, while imperfect, delivered a reconstructed Constitution, voting rights for women, and the civil-rights achievements of the 1960s. America’s tragic failings lie at the feet of the Supreme Court. To right these wrongs, we are due a Third Reconstruction—and with it, a new jurisprudence—that can endure against the current weakness of the judiciary. A new jurisprudence could protect against not only the demonstrated tyranny of the executive, but also the excesses of state legislatures, which now seek to suppress voting rights, deny women reproductive liberty, and strip away protections for LGBTQ Americans. A forward-looking constitutionalism would reflect on the purpose of the Supreme Court, as the constitutional-law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky argued in 2014. It would institute guardrails, such as term limits, to protect against the court’s worst inclinations; enforce a code of ethics to guard against cronyism; expand the lower courts, as President Jimmy Carter did, which provided greater access to justice; and diversify the pipeline of judges such that they reflect broader legal and geographic demographics.

The founders established the Supreme Court to play a crucial role in upholding the country’s constitutional system of governance. Under Article III of the Constitution, the court serves as the last word on matters of the rule of law, including those that ensure that “each branch of government recognizes the limits of its own power,” according to a government website. Importantly, the Supreme Court was created to be a final check “on democratic government by ensuring that popular majorities cannot pass laws that harm and/or take undue advantage of unpopular minorities.” So why has it done its job so poorly?

As early as 1871, the Supreme Court effectively neutered the first Reconstruction-era civil-rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which protected “all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights.” The case, which involved the gruesome ax murder of a Black family, could not have been riper for the Supreme Court to enforce the civil rights of Black people.

Instead, in Blyew v. United States, the Supreme Court sided with Kentucky, ruling that its state courts, which denied Black people the right to testify against white people, were the appropriate venue to adjudicate the case—and not the federal courts, where Black witnesses, including the children of the deceased, could be heard. That is, despite the Civil War and the ratification of the constitutional amendments that banned slavery and bestowed birthright citizenship, equality under the law, and voting rights, the Supreme Court granted its imprimatur to the enduring fixtures and badges of slavery.

As the US solicitor general, Benjamin H. Bristow, pleaded with the court, “appropriate Congressional legislation was provided for” to “remove an existing evil.” He explained that it was “unreasonable to suppose” that the Reconstruction framers intended only a “small portion of freedom” for Black Americans. A decade later, in the five consolidated suits known as the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court held that Black people, still newly freed from bondage, should “cease to be the special favorite of the laws” and take “the rank of a mere citizen.”

Other assaults on the promises of the Reconstruction era include the 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court case that upheld Virginia’s compulsory-sterilization and eugenics law, opining that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The decision opened the floodgates to eugenics in the United States and legitimized this ideology, which later was mirrored by Hitler’s Third Reich. In a pair of cases in 1922 and 1923, the court found that individuals of Asian descent were not eligible for US citizenship because they were not white; the unanimous rulings in Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind further institutionalized racism and violence against people of Asian descent. And in Korematsu v. United States, the court upheld an executive order that mandated the internment of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were citizens, during World War II.

Not even children could expect the protection of the Supreme Court against the harsh labor conditions of the early 20th century. In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) and Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. (1922), the court struck down federal laws that shielded children from coercive and detrimental labor practices, determining that Congress lacked the authority to enact such protections. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his dissent, “The single question in this case is whether Congress has power to prohibit the shipment in interstate or foreign commerce [of goods in which] children under fourteen have been employed, or children between fourteen and sixteen have been employed more than eight hours in a day, or more than six days in any week, or between seven in the evening and six in the morning,” in the manufacture of those goods.

However, one need not look to the past to underscore the role of the Supreme Court in ignoring evils, fragmenting democracy, and undermining the civil rights and liberties of the politically and socially vulnerable. In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines, the court eliminated caps on corporate donations in elections, giving the wealthy outsize leverage in future elections. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), it gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. And today the court is weighing in on the constitutionally protected right to citizenship for those born on US soil. These attacks are antithetical to the ideals and promises of the Declaration.