A Time to Rise Up

The American system of government was built on a delicate balance: three co-equal branches meant not to support, but to check and restrain one another, guided by a constitution flawed in its construction, but altered over time to do more protect liberty and ensure justice for people living in this land.

At the heart of this system is a profound principle: that those elected to represent the people must vote according to the will and needs of the people who elected them, not the demands of their political party, the greedy desires of the wealthy corporations, or even their own political ideologies and beliefs.

This vision depends on trust.

We trust that our elected leaders will act in service to the people.

We trust that courts will interpret the law with impartiality and integrity.

We trust that no branch will dominate the others, and no party will attempt to crown a king.

We trust that government will protect the rights of the many, not the privileges of the powerful.

But history reminds us: that trust has been broken before; and as we watch, it is breaking again now.

Again and again, our elected leaders have enacted laws that prioritize power and wealth over people because a president has demanded it of them, and again the courts have endorsed those choices, legitimizing systemic cruelty and cloaking injustice in the language of legality.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court declared that Black Americans could not be citizens, reflecting a Congress committed to preserving slavery.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court upheld racial segregation, giving legal cover to white supremacist policies passed in Southern legislatures after the Civil War and allowing the eventual denial of WWII GI Bill benefits to Black veterans in northern covenant cities and suburbs.

When Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the Court upheld it, and when Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II, the Court affirmed their incarceration and the seizure of all their belongings in Korematsu v. United States (1944).

When the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their land by congressional decree, the Court blessed these removals in decisions like Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Later, Congress empowered the removal of Native children and the complete stripping of parental rights in the establishment of residential schools under the guise of "civilization" and again the courts blessed the action.

Repeatedly the courts have allowed political gerrymandering to extend whiteness and wealthy privilege.

These were not isolated errors. These were coordinated failures across all three branches, moments in our national history where checks and balances collapsed under the weight of racism, Christian nationalism, and greed.

And today, we find ourselves at such a moment again.

A major law has just been passed. It was not written in response to overwhelming public demand. It does not reflect the will of the people. It reflects the will of a party. Nearly unanimously, one party has passed legislation that will strip essential resources like healthcare, food, housing from the most vulnerable citizens of this nation.

Medicaid access will be slashed, cutting off care for children, the elderly, and disabled people.

Nutrition assistance will be reduced, even as hunger spreads and inflation rises.

Bureaucratic barriers will push working families further into poverty.

These are not “policy choices.” They are acts of cruelty disguised as governance. They are the deliberate choice and design of a political party who seeks to reverse nearly 200 years of efforts by the people to extend protections to workers and to protect more vulnerable members of our nation like children. The very programs they target claiming they are abused by nonworking people provide food assistance to many active duty military families not only working for this government, but pledging to die to support the very Constitution they now ignore.

The courts are not protecting the people. They are preparing to uphold these laws. Recent judicial rulings show a clear trend: long-standing rights are being rolled back, voting protections weakened, and federal safeguards dismantled. The judiciary has become a partner in partisan policy making, reinforcing inequality while appearing neutral.

What we are witnessing is not simply poor leadership but the erosion of representative democracy itself. The checks and balances we rely on have been hollowed out. Elected officials no longer vote according to the needs of their constituents. They vote in obedience to their party. And the courts, instead of guarding the Constitution, have become tools of a single political party and the ideology they endorse.

Again, this is not new. It is the same movement that led men to attack a fort in Charleston in 1861. Again and again, they seek to revert to a nation where the only ones visible in public are white and born with a penis.

Throughout history, movements of ordinary people have confronted these failures and demanded something better that what the wealthy and privileged have sought. Wealthy white men dumped tea in Boston harbor, but it was the people who demanded to be included in the vision and dream of what this nation could become.

The civil rights movement forced legislative and judicial action after years of silence.

The labor movement won protections that Congress first resisted and industry opposed.

The disability rights movement claimed space and rights through direct action and community organizing.

The LGBTQI+ rights movement declared that no people should be forced to love secretly as they had been for centuries.

In each case, our governmental system did not correct itself. Instead change happened because the people rose up.

Now, we must choose.

Will we accept a future where healthcare and food are rationed by the wealthy, where company stores, 80 hour work weeks and no worker protections is again normal business?

Will we allow party loyalty to outweigh public service, where the wealthiest once again gather in back rooms to decide what is best for all of us?

Will we let the courts bless cruelty, endorse the construction of new camps to hold those the government calls bad, and call it order?

Will we stand by as they determine that any word of disagreement with this government means we are eligible for deportation, even though our people have lived on this land, in this nation for years, decades, centuries, or millennia?

Or will we resist tyranny again?

Because when elected officials forget who sent them, when courts cease to protect our rights, then it falls to the people to remind them. We must reassert that our justice is not partisan, our nation is not here to enrich the wealthy, our dignity is not a luxury, and our government exists to serve the many - not the privileged few.

This law will cost lives. It will deepen inequality. It will starve children and abandon elders; and it will force people into places of desperation. By denying care to those who need it most, they hope to bully us all into a place where we will accept their inhumanity. If they pass this law, the next one will take this cruelty even further.

This is not a budget decision. It is a moral failure.

There is nothing “pro-life” about forcing children to live with hunger pangs.

There is nothing patriotic about denying medicine to those who need it.

There is nothing just about abandoning our sick, our poor, and the aging ancestors.

We must say so now, loudly, clearly, publicly, and relentlessly. Our laws have failed before.

The arc of justice does not bend on its own. It never has. It bends when we bend it, with our voices, our organizing, and our refusal to be silent even when the voices of those elected to represent us are sewn shut.

We the People must rise...