Constitution Day 2025: Our Troubled Soul, Battered by Domestic Violence
September 17, 2025
Our battered Constitution, the victim of domestic violence inflicted by current governmental officials who wield daily tortuous blows to its structure, vital principles and psychology, presents a slumping posture, worn down by abuse, robbed of its dignity, and traumatized by the indifference of former friends and allies who refuse to defend it and offer up lame excuses for their failure to provide aid and comfort. On the 238th anniversary of its adoption by the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 2025, our Constitution, the soul of the nation, is more troubled than at any moment in our history since the Civil War. Worse, remedies seem remote.
The essential vulnerability of the U.S. Constitution, hailed by English Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1878 as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man,” lies in the fact that it is not a machine that goes by itself. Its canny, even brilliant, governing mechanisms—separation of powers, enumeration of powers, and checks and balances—require at the helm men and women of integrity, lest the exquisite ballast be lost, as it has been, to executive usurpation and abuse of power, abject acquiesce in, and surrender to, a plebiscitary presidency by the GOP-controlled Congress, and a Supreme Court that provides judicial succor to the authoritarian values and principles of President Donald Trump.
The magnificent Bill of Rights, envisioned by its framers as an instrument to protect the great rights of mankind from governmental abuse of its authority, through a barrage of attacks by the Trump Administration on the essential liberties of the citizenry, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and due process of law. Trump’s ongoing assault on the independence of the judiciary, critical to the preservation of the rule of law, constitutes yet another effort to remove protections of Americans’ rights.
Many Americans, but still too few, have been rushing to the defense of the Constitution. Despite nationwide protests of Trump’s lawless acts that defy the Constitution, there is yet missing a breathless urgency among a majority of the people, the sort that raises to a fever pitch the fear inspired by the pending loss of constitutional government. We should recall Judge Learned Hand’s “Spirit of Liberty” speech, his reminder that liberty “lies in the hearts of men and women” and that while constitutions, laws, and courts are important, they cannot save us if it dies within the people. Hand’s words echoed Benjamin Franklin’s declaration that the framers had created a republic, and that its continuation depended on the people themselves. “A Republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”
The rising concerns of the second coming of McCarthyism—enemies lists, loyalty oaths, suppression of left-wing speech, and “naming names”—spawned in part by the Trump Administration’s reaction to the tragic murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, but which, in truth had preceded that horrific moment, has been manifested in threats and pledges from White House officials warning that they will crackdown on the “liberals” responsible for the death of Kirk, even though all evidence points to the actions of a single gunman.
For a short, painful moment on September 16, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, threatened to “go after” those who, while denouncing the murder of Charlie Kirk, nonetheless criticized his politics. She said the justification for targeting Kirk’s critics was their engagement in what she called “hate speech,” until conservative lawyers and journalists corrected her misunderstanding of First Amendment law and pointed out that criticism of Kirk’s positions was, indeed, protected speech under the First Amendment. If Kirk’s death is to mean anything to our nation, it must stand for his commitment to freedom of speech. The White House should protect, not repress, the essential constitutional right of free speech.
Fear and grief characterize Constitution Day 2025, but it could be the day we recognize a “Turning Point” in the life of America and renew our commitment to defending the Constitution. Members of the GOP majority in both Houses of Congress should reassert the doctrine of checks and balances and reclaim their constitutional powers. American citizens should, immediately, renounce violence and retribution as illegitimate and futile means of redressing acts of violence, for that path ensures nothing but an endless spiral of death and destruction. “There is no way to peace,” Gandhi said, “because peace is the way.”
-David Adler