When, in the course of human events, a people find that their government has drifted from the purposes for which it was made, it becomes their right, and their sacred duty, to say so plainly and to set about the work of renewal.
WE THE PEOPLE of the United States of America, guided by reason, compassion, and truth, declare our intent to renew this nation under principles worthy of a free and just society.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all human beings are created equal;
That they possess, by virtue of their shared humanity and their capacity for reason, certain unalienable Rights, which no government grants and none may rightly revoke;
That among these are Life, Liberty, Truth, Justice, Equality, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
That governments are instituted among people to secure these rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and not to hoard power, stoke fear, or silence dissent. That whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it, by peaceful and lawful means.
We reject every ideology that seizes power by dividing us, dehumanizing our neighbors, or bending faith into an instrument of rule, whatever flag or scripture it hides behind. We will not be ruled by those who cling to power by dividing us. Dictatorships cannot stand here. Not now. Not ever.
We honor the vision of our Founders, and we refuse to inherit their blind spots, their exclusions, and their silences. We carry their promise forward with our eyes open.
To justify this renewal, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
- Our laws and institutions have allowed racism, sexism, and xenophobia to persist in housing, hiring, policing, and sentencing, and have called the result neutral.
- Congress and the states have failed to guarantee food and shelter: in 2023, eighteen million American households were food insecure, and in January 2024 a record 771,000 people were homeless on a single night.
- Congress has left the federal minimum wage at $7.25 since 2009, so that its buying power has fallen by roughly thirty percent, and has not guaranteed paid sick leave or paid family leave, which makes the United States an outlier among wealthy nations.
- Our laws have left about twenty-seven million people without health insurance, and millions more drinking from water systems that violate federal safety standards or living without safe housing.
- Government has leased public land to oil and gas producers at below-market rates and extended them tax breaks while the climate warms.
- States have funded public schools largely through local property taxes, so that wealthier communities can spend more on their children than poorer ones.
- The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and states have since banned or restricted abortion and restricted transgender people's health care and participation in school sports.
- Courts and legislatures have jailed people for being poor or mentally ill, through cash bail, unpayable fines and fees, and the criminalization of illness; hundreds of jurisdictions have made homelessness itself a crime; and protest has been punished.
- Legislatures of both parties have drawn district lines to choose their voters, and in 2019 the Supreme Court held that federal courts cannot hear challenges to the practice.
- Since the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act's coverage formula in 2013, states once subject to federal oversight have passed stricter voter ID laws, purged voter rolls at higher rates, and closed polling places by the hundreds.
- The Supreme Court has held that corporations and unions may spend without limit to influence elections, so long as they do not coordinate with candidates, and officeholders have answered to that money.
- Political and media actors have knowingly spread falsehoods for profit and power, and public life has too often preferred comfortable myth to verifiable fact; one national broadcaster paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit over false claims about the 2020 election.
- Congress and the states have allowed guns to flood our communities, until firearms became the leading cause of death among American children and teenagers, while nearly every public school now drills students to survive a shooting, in the name of a freedom the dead cannot exercise.
- Our Constitution's design has twice this century let a candidate lose the popular vote and still take the presidency, and gives a voter in our smallest state roughly sixty-eight times the Senate weight of a voter in our largest.
Those who hold power have done these things. We, who watched and waited, share the duty to end them.
We have protested. We have pleaded. We have voted. We have waited. History will not wait with us.
We speak now with sorrow for those who bore these failures first and longest, and with honesty about our own share in the silence that let them continue. Those who profit from division do not speak for us. We are not silent. We are not complicit. We are rising.
Therefore, in unity and hope, we, the people, of every race, faith, gender, and creed, declare our demand for rebirth.
We call for a nation:
- Where truth is honored and lies carry a cost.
- Where freedom is real and not reserved for the privileged.
- Where justice is swift, fair, and equal under the law.
- Where every child is fed, every worker respected, and every voice heard.
- Where the Earth is cherished, not consumed.
- Where love triumphs over hate, and unity over fear.
We do therefore, by the authority of conscience and common cause, solemnly publish and declare:
That we claim our place as stewards of this democracy, not as its rulers;
That we reject the rising tide of authoritarianism in all its forms;
That we will pursue this renewal by peaceful, lawful, and public means, through deliberation, persuasion, and the adoption of a constitution fit for the century ahead;
And that we are bound together, by conscience, by history, and by shared destiny, to build a society that reflects the highest aspirations of our common life.
With fierce love for this country and boundless hope for what it can become, we pledge to one another our labor, our courage, and our sacred honor.
Let this be our generation's turning point.
Let this be the day we begin again, not with violence or vengeance, but with vision and purpose,
and a new birth of freedom.
In this cause, we are indivisible.
In this moment, we are unbreakable.
In this nation, we are reborn.