OUR ENDURING DEMOCRACY: A CONSTITUTIONAL PROMISE
The 2025 Presidential Inauguration takes place as the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a moment that calls for reflection upon our nation’s foundational documents and ideals.
Delegates from the thirteen American colonies convened 250 years ago to throw off the bonds of despotic rule and establish a union of states dedicated to preserving the rights and liberties of the people. The signatories of the Declaration of Independence did not know what the future held for themselves or the thirteen states but nonetheless strode forward to create a new nation promising freedom and opportunity.
Just a few years after gaining independence, our founders drafted the U.S. Constitution, the cornerstone of our enduring democracy. The very first words of the Constitution lay forth a promise to the American people, to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” America’s founders believed that a new nation built on a bedrock of representative democracy rooted in the rule of law offered the best hope for the survival of liberty.
Throughout our history, challenges have arisen that have tested our national resolve. Yet, the nation has persevered, guided by the sacred American principles embedded in our founding documents. From George Washington’s first inaugural to today, Presidents have reaffirmed America’s dedication to an enduring, permanent democracy as the best hope for securing that which we hold most dear, our liberty.
The Inaugural Ceremony, a tradition since 1789, embodies the ideals of liberty, equality, and self-government as articulated by the founders in 1776 and symbolizes our continuing commitment to these ideals. As we gather for the 60th Presidential Inauguration, we honor the Constitution’s promise to preserve liberty through a stable, enduring democracy for future generations.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States sets forth the founders’ purpose in establishing our constitutional republic. Among these intentions is a promise made to future generations of Americans to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” This constitutional promise reflects the founders’ commitment to the permanence of the Constitution and their wholehearted belief that the government they would form—a representative democracy rooted in the rule of law—offered the best hope for the survival of liberty. The Inaugural Ceremony, which has taken place every four years since 1789, whether in times of prosperity or turmoil, peace or division, demonstrates our renewed devotion to the continuity, stability, and perseverance of our democratic system. This year, as America prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Inauguration also calls to mind that our enduring democracy was born from a shared belief in our unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
From the dawn of America’s creation, our founders were guided by the understanding that their actions benefited not only their own generation but those to follow. They believed that their determination to form a union was as essential as their commitment to freedom—that unity, independence, and liberty were intertwined. Writing to his wife Abigail after the Second Continental Congress agreed to declare independence from the British Crown in 1776, John Adams emphasized the importance of unanimity amongst the colonies. “(T)he whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act. – This will cement the Union,” he wrote. While he anticipated difficult days ahead, Adams felt secure that “Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction.”
The unified colonies affirmed in the Declaration of Independence their belief that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” and asserted their right to form a new government that was “most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness … to provide new Guards for their future security.” They concluded the Declaration of Independence with an affirmation of their fidelity to one another, proclaiming, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Years later, emerging victorious from the American Revolution, these former colonies, now “Free and Independent States,” sought to establish that new government. Writing to the states at the end of the war, George Washington expressed his belief that “An indissoluble Union” was essential to the new nation’s future happiness. John Jay explained that our founders, who were “no less attached to union, than enamoured of liberty,” set out to form “a wise and wellbalanced government for a free people.” They deliberated to create in our Constitution a nation of laws and a representative democracy.
Writing in support of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton emphasized the revolutionary concept at the heart of the proposal. “The whole power of the proposed government is to be in the hands of the representatives of the people. This is the essential, and, after all, the only efficacious security for the rights and privileges of the people.” James Wilson, who had signed the Declaration of Independence and served as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention, echoed Hamilton’s sentiments. He extolled the brilliance of the Constitution’s “great principle”—an idea that Wilson observed had also been at the heart of the Declaration of Independence—that “the supreme power resides … in the people, as the fountain of government.”
The Constitution was truly a revolution in governance, joining the rule of law with individual liberty. “Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations,” President Barack Obama reminded Americans in his first inaugural address in 2009. In this charter—our Constitution—our founders created a democratic republic, a design of government that at its very foundation was established in the service of enduring freedom. As President George W. Bush noted in his second inaugural address in 2005, “Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law.”
Since the first inaugural in 1789, presidents have reaffirmed the Constitution’s promise to “secure the blessings of liberty” in a ceremony that occurs every four years and demonstrates the remarkable continuity of our government. President Washington declared in his first inaugural address in 1789, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered … deeply, … finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” His successors have reminded citizens of this immense responsibility with words and deeds reflecting a shared conviction that maintaining our representative democracy, and achieving the perpetuity envisioned by the founders, is a solemn responsibility borne by all.
An early test of the nation’s resolve occurred after the bitterly contentious election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson sought to refocus a divided nation on our constitutional foundation and the rights of all Americans that our Constitution serves to protect. Recognizing the raw feelings of the campaign, he expressed confidence that all Americans would “arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.” He continued, “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail … that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Jefferson’s words and actions helped to ensure the nation’s first peaceful transition of power from one political party to another and set an enduring precedent that continues to serve as a shining beacon to democracies around the world.
More than 100 years later, Theodore Roosevelt observed that rapid industrialization had brought both social challenges and prosperity to Americans. Maintaining that the best hope for future happiness and freedom is secured in a government that derives its authority from the people, Roosevelt reflected in his 1905 inaugural address on the immense promise that the American experiment holds for future generations. “Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. … Our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.” Finding inspiration in the words and actions of our founders, President Roosevelt acknowledged the challenge of living up to their ideals. “We know that self-government is difficult,” he said, but the authors of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution “did their work,” leaving a “splendid heritage we now enjoy” to pass on to “our children and our children’s children.”
Those ideals would soon be tested by several generations of social, economic, and political upheaval. In 1941, as war swept Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt emphasized unity in defense of freedom. Observing the encroaching threat to democracies across the globe, Roosevelt spoke resolutely: “We know [democracy] cannot die—because it is built on the unhampered initiative of individual men and women joined together in a common enterprise—an enterprise undertaken and carried through by the free expression of a free majority.” As he continued, he repeated the ever-present American refrain of concern for future generations. “A Nation, like a person, has something deeper, something more permanent, something larger than the sum of all its parts. It is that something which matters most to its future—which calls forth the most sacred guarding of its present,” he observed. “In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America.”
Four years later, the United States emerged victorious from World War II, having defeated the authoritarian governments that had imperiled democracy. But the founders’ promise would continue to be tested. The United States soon entered the Cold War, when encroaching communism threatened the principles of liberty and self-determination. Yet, the nation’s commitment to democracy did not waver. “Americans courageously supported the struggle for liberty, self-government, and free enterprise throughout the world,” Ronald Reagan observed in his second inaugural address in 1985. That resolve “turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom.”
At the end of the 20th century, the information revolution propelled the ideals of democracy and self-determination to all corners of the world. The United States had helped to hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain and end the Cold War, and President William Jefferson Clinton took comfort in the promise that our system of self-government offered for future generations. In his first inaugural address in 1993 he pronounced, “Our Founders saw themselves in the light of posterity. … Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility.”
Nearly 250 years after the nation’s founders declared their independence, our shared devotion to the cause of liberty secured by this enduring democracy lives on. Every four years, on Inauguration Day, the nation observes a ceremony that embodies the ideals of liberty, equality and self-government as articulated by the founders in 1776. In his inaugural address in 1961, President John F. Kennedy reminded us, “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. … Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” President George W. Bush echoed this sentiment in his second inaugural address in 2005. “When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, ‘It rang as if it meant something.’” President Bush reminded his fellow Americans that “in our time it means something still.”
It is fitting that the United States Capitol, known as “The People’s House,” provides the backdrop for the Inaugural Ceremonies in which the chief justice of the United States administers the oath of office to the president. “The vitality of our tripartite system of government … is manifested by this ceremony taking place as it does on the steps of the Capitol,” Senator Everett Dirksen explained in 1969, “in the midst of the people who are the real rulers of this great country and whose leaders and representatives exercise their authority ‘by the consent of the governed.’ This is the true and enduring significance of the Inaugural Ceremony to the American people.”
As we participate in the 60th Inaugural Ceremonies, we remember the parting words of President Washington in his farewell address, published nine years after the framers signed the Constitution. “The unity of government which constitutes you one people … is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize.” This inauguration day the nation honors the Constitution’s promise—enshrined in the Preamble—to preserve liberty through a stable, enduring democracy, under the rule of law, for future generations.