Most of us associate Independence Day with celebration, from grandiose fireworks displays to backyard barbecues. The 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, however, comes at a time when celebration alone is not enough. We have to remember what the first Independence Day was all about: refusing to accept an unaccountable monarch’s abuses of power and creating the foundation for a government that is run by and for the people.

The Declaration of Independence, at its core, was a watchdog report. Our nation was founded on a promise of accountability — and 250 years later, we must ask ourselves whether we’re keeping this promise.

After years of being subject to the whims of a singular ruler, our founders dared to ask the question: What does it look like to create a government that answers to the people it’s meant to serve? And thus, the framers signed the Declaration of Independence. Our nation’s most foundational text is literally a 27-count public accounting of one ruler’s abuses of power: taxation without consent, a military turned against civilians, obstruction of accountability institutions, and more.

We find ourselves on the precipice of returning to the very form of government Americans rebelled against 250 years ago. Following this document, our founders then created the Constitution, outlining how the government should work and who it should work for. Rather than consolidate power in the hands of a few, it deliberately separated power across an executive branch that represents the nation as a whole, a legislative branch that represents the interests of individual communities, and a judicial branch that upholds the Constitution over any one party or politic.

Our personal freedoms, financial stability, community safety, and more depend on these accountability mechanisms working the way our founders intended. If an executive can singularly plunge our nation into a war that everyday people don’t want, we pay the price in lost family members and skyrocketing costs. If our judiciary decides to prioritize partisanship over the Constitution, we lose our ability to shape our own futures.

That is, unfortunately, exactly what we’re seeing play out today, and there is no shortage of examples. The Declaration of Independence may have centered on accountability, but in its first year alone, the Trump administration illegally fired nearly a quarter of the government’s inspectors general — the people tasked with combating waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies — and defunded the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), which ensures these federal watchdogs have the resources they need to do their jobs effectively. Meanwhile, it decimated our merit-based civil service, replacing nonpartisan federal workers with partisan lapdogs.

Just as Americans rebelled against soldiers patrolling our communities in the 1700s, we have once again had to fight back against the deployment of the military to........

© Common Dreams