This article was originally published by Cardozo Law Review.
This year, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. Paine was an immigrant who had arrived only two years before. The pamphlet went viral, a widely bootlegged bestseller with 120,000 copies sold in its first three months in print. It galvanized support for independence and argued that the collection of colonies should become a republic. Paine wrote: “[I]n America THE LAW IS KING.”
Is that still true? We are finding out.
Today our Constitution and the institutions of self-government face extraordinary pressure. In the first two months of 2026 alone, we saw an invasion of Venezuela without congressional authorization, a threat to use military force to seize Greenland from a NATO ally, and a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve Board, which Powell decried as an attempt to coerce the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates. We saw the sickening sight of federal agents killing two civilians in Minnesota in separate incidents, including, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration who was witnessing and protesting abuse, followed by a fusillade of lies from top officials who labeled him a “domestic terrorist” and “an assassin.” These events unfolded alongside the launch of a full-scale war in the Middle East, undertaken without congressional debate or authorization and with scant public explanation at all.
As Canadian prime minister Mark Carney put it in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, “[w]e are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
At the Brennan Center for Justice, which I lead, we work to counter abuses of power every day. We are deeply engaged in the broad campaign to counter the executive power grab, including filing or coordinating dozens of briefs in the flotilla of cases addressing executive authority. We are preparing to ensure that the 2026 election will be free, fair, and secure. In that effort, we work with election officials and law enforcement officers from both parties. We do so in the face of something unprecedented in our nation’s history: a coordinated campaign by the federal government to undermine elections.
All of this is vital work. But that cannot be all that we do. We must begin, now, to imagine a better future—a future after the wreckage. What will matter most at this moment is not just what we are against, but what we are for.
It is emphatically the time to begin mapping out the next reform agenda.
