Claudine Schneider: Happy Birthday, America. Will it be happy in 2025?

When it comes to secular holidays in the United States, it’s hard to beat the Fourth of July. The country turns out for picnics, parades and mosquito bites at dusk as families await the fireworks.

There is much to celebrate this week. We are 248 years old and the longest continuous democracy in the world. But with a new Supreme Court decision handing over dangerous amounts of power, allowing the president to follow whatever rules he chooses simply by declaring them to be “official actions,” we must take a sober look at what this means for our democracy.

In four months, voters will determine if the great American experience can continue. This election could be our last chance to defend it.

I am a former Republican member of Congress. Many of my Republican colleagues and I are working for democracy’s survival. We are celebrating independence from a corrupt, repressive monarchy, and we must prevent a return to power of corruption and repression in the White House.

We all want to repair democracy’s foundation, the Constitution. The Trump years have subjected it to a stress test that has revealed several cracks. However, there is greater urgency about several current crises.

Donald Trump foretold one while running for the presidency against Hillary Clinton. The Justice and State departments were investigating whether she mishandled classified documents. (Years after the election, the State Department concluded she had not deliberately done so. Justice Department officials said they found nothing significant and conducted the investigation mostly to appease Trump.)

“Folks, folks, folks, she shouldn’t be allowed to run,” Trump told supporters in 2016. during a rally in Reno “If she were to win this election, it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis. In that situation, we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and, ultimately, a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”

Trump was correct: We should not have a sitting president under felony indictment. Yet he shows no signs of dropping out of this year’s election even though he’s been convicted of 34 felonies and stands indicted on dozens more.

A second constitutional crisis is in the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices are carelessly destroying America’s trust in the court’s integrity while handing the president unprecedented new authority to violate the law under the fig leaf of pursuing “official actions.” Meanwhile, two justices have refused to recuse despite serious ethical violations related to gifts from billionaires, and the court’s conservative majority is unabashedly helping a presidential candidate avoid criminal trials before the election.

A third constitutional crisis is taking place in Congress. Republican opposition makes it impossible for Congress to perform its constitutional duty to check and balance the Supreme Court’s abuses.

In addition, no one has enforced the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause against the scores of congressional Republicans who participated in Trump’s attempted coup. Nearly 150 voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2021. Some helped Trump round up fake electors. Most are still in Congress, and many are running for reelection in November. The Constitution says they should be banned from public office.

Now, Congress’s nearly 300 Republicans have allowed Trump to take effective control of the legislative branch even though he has no legal authority to do so. Trump has put them to work for his campaign. At his urging, House Republicans conducted a bogus impeachment investigation of Biden and scuttled a bipartisan immigration reform bill because it would have benefited President Biden.

Finally, we should be prepared to fend off the election challenges MAGA Republicans are already preparing. ABC News reports, “Trump has been ramping up his election denial claims and predictions … firing off baseless accusations that a plot is underfoot to steal the 2024 election from him.” The same allegations set the stage for Trump’s coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021.

On America’s 248th birthday, let’s celebrate our democracy and the Constitution. Then, let’s work to guarantee that the world’s oldest democracy gets one year older in 2025.