Neil Gorsuch marked America’s 250th by naming the true source of American rights, and the Left won’t like it.
One of his liberal colleagues used the same milestone to lay out a very different wish list.
And Gorsuch’s warning lands squarely on one wish Sonia Sotomayor just let slip.
Three Justices Sent Americans Back to 1776 for Their Homework
The Federalist Society sat down with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for a set of interviews ahead of its 2026 National Lawyers Convention. The group built the gathering around a theme that fits the year perfectly: “250 Years of American Exceptionalism.” Fox News Digital got the first look at the videos.
All three justices landed on the same warning. A people who don’t know their own history can’t hang onto the freedoms that history handed them.
Gorsuch, President Trump’s first pick for the high court back in 2017, didn’t tiptoe around where those freedoms come from. He pointed to the Declaration’s promise “that every one of us has God-given rights,” then drove the point home: “they don’t come from government, they come from God.”
You won’t hear that line in many government school classrooms these days.
Gorsuch compared the founding ideals to “the air we breathe and the water a fish might swim in.” Americans take them for granted, in his telling, because they’ve never had to live without them. “They seem natural to us, but they weren’t in 1776,” he said.
And he described the whole country as a gift worth guarding. “Our country is a blessing from God, and that we owe great thanks for it, and we have great responsibility for it,” Gorsuch said.
Kavanaugh survived the confirmation circus Democrats staged against him in 2018 and a 2022 plot against his life. He kept his focus on the classroom. “I think our education system is absolutely fundamental to ensuring that in the next 250 years, we preserve this republic and improve upon this republic,” Kavanaugh said.
But he didn’t let the grown-ups off the hook. Kavanaugh said Americans should keep pushing for civics education “not only for our youth, but for all of us.”
Barrett went to the very bottom of the Declaration, where the signers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to one another. Some of those men lost their property to loyalists and kept their word anyway.
“We’re not passive observers in the American project. We’re participants in it. It is our project,” Barrett said. “Surely that’s the kind of commitment that it takes to have it keep going forward.”
Sotomayor Turned George Washington’s Front Porch Into a Grievance Session
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, picked an even more hallowed spot for her own anniversary remarks. She spoke for an hour at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, part of a multiday celebration of the 250th, in a talk the organizers billed as civics education.
Sotomayor sits on the board of iCivics, the education group the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded. So the subject should have been home turf.
But she couldn’t keep her politics in her pocket. Days after Democrats grabbed both chambers of Congress in the midterms, Sotomayor told the crowd she “saw the outpouring of voters” and lectured that “there’s no excuse for not voting.”
Then she warned the country would need “some hard work” to get back on an “even keel.” And she made clear she considers her own Court’s recent direction a temporary detour.
“There have been some systemic changes in my court’s jurisprudence in many areas of law,” Sotomayor said. “We’ll settle down, too. Not quite sure when. But we will. And a new order will be established that people will begin to understand.”
A new order. At George Washington’s house.
And then came the wish. “I dissent a lot. I’m hoping that the court will take back some of the crazy things that it’s done,” Sotomayor said, before passing it off as a joke and then adding “maybe not.”
“No, seriously,” she continued. “You know, I’ve spoken openly about this, there’s some opinions that I hope in my lifetime will get overturned. The immunity case is one of them.”
The Ruling She Wants Gone Is the Only Thing Standing Between Trump and the Lawfare Machine
The Supreme Court decided Trump v United States on July 1, 2024. The 6-3 majority held that former Presidents enjoy at least presumptive immunity for their official acts. Sotomayor dissented and claimed the ruling made Trump and his successors a “king above the law.”
That case grew out of Jack Smith’s January 6 prosecution. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith, and Smith rushed constitutionally dubious charges into a courtroom in heavily Democrat Washington, DC, hoping to drag Trump through a show trial and possibly into a cell before the 2024 election.
Smith’s taste for overreach goes back years. The Supreme Court unanimously tossed the corruption conviction his Justice Department unit won against former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in 2016. And investigators working under Smith grabbed phone records belonging to Republican senators, according to records Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley made public in 2025.
The immunity ruling built a wall in front of that whole operation. Sotomayor wants the wall gone.
Now think about the timing. Democrats take the gavels in both chambers come January, and the party’s socialist wing smells opportunity. Democrat lawmakers already introduced the Judiciary Act of 2021 to stretch the Court to 13 seats, a scheme to manufacture a permanent left-wing majority they could never win at the ballot box.
A packed Court would make quick work of the rulings that overturned Roe v Wade and ended affirmative action. The Second Amendment would sit next in line, right behind the immunity decision Sotomayor singled out.
Maybe she only meant she hopes future colleagues will see things her way. Maybe. But “a new order” is a strange phrase to drop at the home of a man famous for handing power back, not grabbing more of it.
Gorsuch Already Wrote the Warning Label
Gorsuch didn’t wait for the anniversary to sound the alarm. In May 2026, he and his former law clerk Janie Nitze published Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, a book aimed at kids and adults alike.
At the Nixon Library, Gorsuch cited figures showing only 13% of eighth graders reach proficiency in American history. He called the decline in civic education “utterly depressing.”
“The greatest danger America faces today is itself,” Gorsuch said on the book tour.
That danger doesn’t only live in eighth-grade classrooms with no history lessons. It also shows up when a sitting justice turns a civics talk at Washington’s estate into a pep rally for her side’s comeback.
The founders built this country on the Christian conviction that rights come from the Creator, not from five votes on a bench or a new majority in Congress. Three justices spent their 250th interviews reminding Americans of that.
And in his Federalist Society interview, Gorsuch left Americans with a warning borrowed from one of the greatest orators the country ever produced.
“Daniel Webster said it took 6,000 years for us to generate a system of government like this. Don’t expect that to happen easily or again.”
Sources: Fox News, “Supreme Court justices confront what it will take to keep America’s founding freedoms alive”; The Hill, “Sotomayor says she hopes Supreme Court will overturn presidential immunity decision”; Fox News, “Gorsuch highlights staggering decline in civic literacy that prompted him to author new book”; Richard Nixon Foundation, “From 1776 to Today: Co-Authors Justice Gorsuch and Janie Nitze on Civics, Courage, and the Next Generation”; Carolina Journal, “Gorsuch children’s book explores 1776 founders”; Bloomberg Law, “Gorsuch Pitches Kids Book to Right, Insisting Court Nonpartisan”