Americans' rejection of tyranny endures as it has since 1776
Visitors look at the original copies of documents including the Constitution at the National Archives in Washington in 2001. Credit: Getty Images/Alex Wong
Step back from the briquettes, let the food sizzle and enjoy how far this nation remains from having a monarch.
Pressured by a rebuke from the nation's highest court, the Trump administration this week backed off its fight to put a politically-charged Census question about citizenship on the ballot.
The bottom line is that the Constitutional requirement for a census every 10 years prevails. Right at the legal deadline, the Commerce Department announced it was ordering the census forms printed despite an earlier presidential wish they be delayed.
No head of state with the powers of a king would have tolerated this setback. His whims would be law. This, despite well-argued concern for many years about an imperial U.S. presidency bereft of checks and balances.
It isn't just the courts that regularly check our executives and lawmakers. The U.S. remains a federal system in which states and localities retain power.
During the Obama administration, Tea Partyers dressed as colonists to protest taxes and broad federal-government power. They had a big impact in Congress if only to obstruct the plans of their foes and create pressure for what they saw as smaller government.
Some "red" states rejected Medicaid expansions. Republican state attorneys general sued, with some success, challenging Obamacare and executive actions such as deportation exemptions for immigrants brought here illegally as children.
Now, Democratic elected officials nationwide are trying to use the same tools against the Trump administration, as they resist immigration crackdowns and relaxation of environmental rules.
The Congress under Republican majorities carried out deep and extended probes into the circumstances behind a fatal attack on a U.S. embassy in Libya. This exposed a fiasco and led to an FBI probe of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails.
Both Clinton and Republican Jeb Bush lost the presidential race to Donald Trump in 2016, cutting short the ambitions of two families that seemed aristocratically entitled. More recently, when Ivanka Trump showed up at the G-20 in Japan, nobody mistook her for the equivalent of royalty.
The House of Representatives under Democrats these days has an array of open investigations of the executive branch. The Senate, under Republicans, took a slap at a foreign monarchy, the Saudi royal family, by voting against an administration arms sale based on a dissident's murder.
When Trump tweets a whim that smacks of being unconstitutional, it tends to get smacked down. Last November he vowed to sign an executive order changing the 14th Amendment clause on birthright citizenship. Nothing has happened.
For that matter, the First and Second amendments also are alive and well.
For perspective: The Roman emperor Hadrian got his legions to build a border wall in what is now the United Kingdom. Trump, President of a great democratic republic, is still sputtering on a much longer one.
We may have an unhealthy weakness for celebrity worship, or thinking in memes, or for conducting extreme conversations on line, or electing the power-hungry.
But 243 years after the Declaration of Independence, the longing for all-powerful domestic tyrants has never blended into the American DNA.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
