For the 250th anniversary of American independence, I’m going to do three things that Americans love to do: give an ode to the common law, speak ill of our political leaders, and express optimism about the future.

The common law. We do a pretty good job of keeping the spirit of the common law alive. In an age of statutes and regulations and historical illiteracy, we also have lawyers and judges who are trained to think in the ways of the common law and who know the basics of our legal history. That is why our courts can decide, as they did last week in Chatrie v. United States, that the government conducts a search when it gets your location data from Google, even though you “volunteered” to share the data with Google. New social realities, new rules, but wearing the same doctrinal clothes. Common law!

At common law, basically everyone born in England was an Englishman. Although the antebellum Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, rejected the common-law rule as it should have applied to black Americans, in the aftermath of the Civil War, we adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, which restated the common law rule: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” In recent years, there has been a weird and unsettling effort on the right, catalyzed by Donald Trump and abetted by smart people who should know better, to say that children of people who are in the United States illegally are not citizens by virtue of their birth here. I’m not going to explain their theory or why it is not just implausible but plainly wrong or why it’s shocking that it wasn’t unanimously rejected by the justices of the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara, decided just last week. But by the barest of margins, the Court reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalizes the rule of jus soli, which applies almost everywhere in the New World. Here is Chief Justice Roberts’s peroration, which is set off from the rest of the opinion by three asterisks, like this, “* * *”, so you know it’s the good part:

Again and again, the dissents cast the common law as “feudal,” “medieval”—a remnant of “the darkness of the middle ages.” Post, at 4–5, 45, 54, 64, 75–78 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); see post, at 1 (opinion of GORSUCH, J.); post, at 2, 4, 27 (opinion of ALITO, J.).

That was not the view of the Reconstruction Congress. Where the dissents see feudalism, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment saw emancipation. By the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, in fact, the tie created by birth was less a “duty” than a “right”—the foundation of the “ancient liberties” of “free-born subjects.” H. Muller, Subjects and Sovereign 16–18, 57–58 (2017). That is why Blackstone described the “privileges” owed to the “natural-born.” 1 Blackstone 361–362. That is why the colonists demanded the “rights of Englishmen” more than 250 years ago. B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 192 (1967). And that is why abolitionists lauded the “ancient and universal” rule of citizenship by birth alone as “an ordinance of Heaven.” Yates 36–37; see also M. Jones, Birthright Citizens 89–107 (2018).

Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 600 (Sen. Trumbull). We keep that promise today.

I’m going to combine the second and third items on my agenda for this post, speaking ill of our politicians and expressing optimism. We’re going through a very rough patch now. We’re being led at the national level by the most corrupt, the least attached to our civic norms, and, I’m sorry to say, the dumbest and least effective. I’d hesitate to say that I’d almost rather have effective malignant government that what we have now. Our other political actors have been feckless and cowardly in their refusal to exercise their powers to deal with the problem. And the opposition party seems to be a spent force with little to inspire Americans’ confidence. We have demoralized our people at home and undercut and embarrassed ourselves abroad. So if, at this 250th anniversary of our independence, we have reached the end of America as the leader of the free world and the end of the line for a government that at least nods to civic virtue—an end that our founders would have told us is inevitable in the long run—then I hope at least we can accommodate ourselves to it with more grace than most of the great states that came before us ever managed to do.

However, at least for the last two hundred fifty years, it’s never been a great bet to bet against America. This summer in Boston, the heart of revolutionary America all those years ago, it’s been great to see our own country through the eyes of the thousands, or maybe by the time it’s over, millions of visitors who have traveled here for the soccer, or for the Fourth of July celebrations, or for the tall ships coming to town in the next few days. I’ve heard countless variations on a theme: “I was worried about coming to America, and I was expecting a dystopian hellscape full of malign cops and ICE agents, mean-spirited, gun-toting, sedentary junk food eaters, and a lot of other doom and gloom. But the people were warm and welcoming! The police were there to help us! The trains even worked! This is the America we miss!” That’s the country I know and love, and if we can just get past this rough patch and agree never, ever to do it again, I have hope that we’ll have yet another new birth of freedom as we start our next 250 years.