Columnist Fred Harrison writes: "The next 250 years of the American experiment can be our greatest chapter yet. If we stop looking outward for salvation, and we recover the habits of self-government."
Imagine discovering a priceless, meticulously engineered heirloom in your attic, covered in decades of dust. You would not throw it away simply because it had been neglected. You would restore it carefully and marvel at the genius of its design.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, that heirloom is our Republic. We have endured a period of institutional neglect, trading the demanding discipline of self-government for the easier habit of letting unelected officials manage more and more of American life.
But the brilliance of our founding design remains intact. The Constitution still gives us the tools of renewal, if we have the courage to use them.
There is profound reason for hope. The American story is not one of inevitable decline. It is a story of repeated renewal by citizens who remember that institutions, habits, and courage – rather than sentiment – maintain liberty.
To restore the Republic, we must first be honest about where we have strayed.
The Framers designed a fiercely practical system of separated powers to prevent the oldest enemy of human freedom: concentrated power in the hands of the few. They understood that liberty survives only when legislative, executive, and judicial power are divided, limited, and checked.
We have allowed Congress to abdicate its duty.
Rather than taking hard votes, elected representatives too often pass sweeping, vague statutes and hand the real lawmaking to agencies. That lets politicians claim credit for action while avoiding responsibility for the consequences. This is not self-government. It is lawmaking by evasion.
Into that void, the executive branch has expanded.
Administrative agencies now issue mandates, regulations, and guidance that often function like law, though they are not enacted by the people’s elected representatives.
The danger is not merely bureaucracy. The danger is government power operating at a distance from direct democratic accountability.
The judiciary has also drifted.
We have tolerated judges enamored with the so-called Living Constitution, treating our founding document not as a binding legal text but as flexible material the current preferences can reshape. When judges substitute their own moral judgments for the plain meaning of the law, they do not update democracy. They weaken it by moving decisions from the people and their representatives – to the bench.
We have also suffered from cultural amnesia. By that I mean a loss of living memory about what liberty has cost: the sacrifices of Lexington, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach, and the countless unnamed citizens who built schools, churches, courthouses, towns, and voluntary associations without waiting for permission from Washington.
But amnesia can be cured. The cure is remembrance, and our constitutional life already carries the mechanism for that cure.
When Alexis de Tocqueville toured this country in the 1830s, he did not find America’s greatness in centralized government. He found it in the townships, voluntary associations, churches, civic leagues, and jury boxes where ordinary citizens learned the habits of self-rule by practicing them.
Tocqueville understood that the American jury is not merely a legal institution. It is a political institution in the best sense: a place where citizens are taught to listen, deliberate, judge evidence, apply law, and take responsibility for justice.
The jury box forces people to look beyond private interest and participate directly in public duty. It is a schoolhouse of republican character.
That spirit was not theoretical. It was lived.
My great-grandfather, John Harrison, came from England and settled in Kansas as a wheat farmer. He and his neighbors saw that their children had no school. They did not petition Washington. They did not wait for a federal program. They built a school themselves and hired a teacher because they wanted their children educated; they understood the responsibility was theirs.
That is the America Tocqueville admired. That is the America we must recover: not a perfect America, but a self-governing America.
The genius of America does not live in the marble halls of a distant capital. It lives in the local courthouse, where twelve ordinary citizens shoulder the authority to decide facts, apply law, and hold the powerful accountable.
The Seventh Amendment that empowers those jurors has not been erased. The tools of renewal are still in our hands.
For nearly half a century in the trenches of civil litigation, one truth becomes clear: the courtroom is the great equalizer. It is the arena where a citizen without wealth or influence can stand against a corporation, agency, or institution and demand a public answer. That answer must be based on evidence, law, and truth, not status, power, or political connection.
The trial lawyer is therefore more than an advocate for a client. At his best, he is a defender of public accountability. Through the contingency fee, the courthouse remains open to the person who could never afford to pay by the hour. Through the adversarial process, claims are tested in public. Through the jury, power is brought before citizens rather than hidden behind bureaucracy.
When we force the powerful to answer to 12 ordinary citizens in open court, we strip away insulation and demand responsibility. Every jury verdict is a heartbeat of a living democracy because it proves that sovereignty has not vanished into agencies, elites, or abstractions. It still rests, finally, with the people.
The salvation of this Republic will not come from federal bureaucrats. It will not come from appellate judges legislating from the bench.
It will come from a return to the text and to the people. By “the text,” I mean the Constitution and laws as written, not as rewritten by preference. By “the people,” I mean citizens acting through legislatures, juries, local institutions, and voluntary associations.
We do not need a new system. We need the courage to use the masterpiece we inherited.
We must demand judges who read the text and apply it faithfully. We must revitalize state legislatures as the true laboratories of democracy, where people closest to local problems can address them. We must teach our children the blood-bought history of their inheritance so they view liberty with reverence, not apathy.
Most importantly, we must return with confidence to the public courtroom. The Constitution is not a self-operating machine. It requires citizens willing to understand it, lawyers willing to enforce it, judges willing to honor it, and juries willing to carry the burden of judgment.
The next 250 years of the American experiment can be our greatest chapter yet. All it requires is that we stop looking outward for salvation, that we trust the wisdom of our founding design, recover the habits of self-government, and proudly take our seats in the jury box.
The masterpiece endures. The question is whether we still have the discipline to understand it and the courage to defend it.
Fred Harrison can be reached at: Fred.Harrison@fjhlawoffice.com
