The Grievance Audit Scorecard: We Graded the Republic Against 1776. It Got a 54.

The Sixth and Seventh Amendments still promise it, but in practice the jury has all but vanished: roughly 2% of federal cases reach one, as plea bargaining and its "trial penalty" price the right out of reach. Civil forfeiture sues property to skip jurors entirely, and agency tribunals decided their own cases in-house until 2024. The box still sits in the courtroom; almost no one is allowed to fill it.

The government cannot produce an agreed count of its own agencies — estimates run from 115 to 430-plus — and issues over a million binding regulatory restrictions, roughly nineteen rules for every law Congress passes. For forty years agencies even interpreted the limits of their own power, until Loper Bright ended that in 2024. A "multitude of new offices" is no longer a fear to be warned of; it is the architecture we live inside.

A permanent force of 1.3 million in peacetime is exactly what the Founders warned against, and the war power has drifted from a Congress that last declared war in 1942 to a presidency that wields it across both parties. But in 2025, when troops were sent into American cities, the courts pushed back all the way to a 6–3 Supreme Court. The leash frayed — and the courts re-gripped it in public. Strained, but holding.

This is the one the republic mostly got right: civilian control is real, and in nearly 250 years there has never been a coup. The fractures are the caveats — the civilian-Secretary-of-Defense rule waived twice in five years across both parties, a separate justice system for those in uniform, and an offshore military-commission court now two decades old. A genuine success, thinner than it used to be.

No soldiers are billeted in American homes; the Third Amendment answered its grievance so completely it fell asleep, with barely a single case in 235 years. The only deduction is that the deeper principle — the home shut against the state — migrated to the Fourth Amendment, where tens of thousands of untracked no-knock raids a year now test it. The specific promise is kept; the spirit is under new management.

Congress wrote in 1871 that "every person" who violates rights under color of law "shall be liable." The courts grafted on an immunity found nowhere in that text, shielding officials unless a near-identical case already exists — while ensuring such cases are rarely allowed to be written. It is the grievance's exact machinery: protection from consequence, built by the branch that was supposed to prevent it.

For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the Revolution's founding demand is honored. But for roughly four million citizens — in Washington, D.C., and the territories — it is flatly unmet: they pay federal taxes and have no voting member of Congress, a condition sustained less by constitutional necessity than by the partisan math of who would gain by fixing it. The slogan rides on D.C.'s license plates for a reason.

The Constitution gave the trade-taxing power to Congress and pointedly withheld it from the president. Across three statutes Congress handed much of it back to the executive, which pushed that power to its limit in 2025 — until the Supreme Court struck the emergency tariffs in 2026 on "power of the purse" grounds. Reclaimed at the edge, still delegated at the core.

No one dissolves Congress or cancels elections; the machinery the king attacked is untouchable. The modern threat is subtler — representation hollowed by partisan gerrymandering that lets officials pick their voters, a practice the Supreme Court declined to police in 2019 and that both parties openly worked in 2025. The building still stands. The question is who really decides who lives in it.

For the courts the Constitution names, the grievance is answered and the independence is real — life tenure is why Article III judges could tell the executive "no" throughout 2025. But most people who face "a judge" in a federal proceeding face an executive-branch employee: the roughly 700 immigration judges are Justice Department staff, and about 100 were fired in 2025. One bench is armored; the other answers to the boss.

In 2025 the government invoked a 1798 statute to fly roughly 137 people to a Salvadoran prison, then argued the transfer itself had placed them beyond the reach of U.S. courts. Judges have pushed back — finding due-process violations and asserting continuing jurisdiction — but the tactic the colonists knew on sight is a live case, not a museum piece. The ocean is the same width; the writ's reach across it is the open question.

On this grievance the Founders were the pro-immigration party — they attacked a crown for obstructing naturalization to keep the colonies weak. Today a record 11.6-million-case backlog echoes that obstruction. But unlike a colony under a distant king, a self-governing nation has every right to set its own immigration levels, and this audit takes no side on what they should be — only on the fact that the machinery is jammed.

No one revokes a state's charter; the forms of self-rule stand in all fifty states, answering the literal grievance. But federal power has expanded to touch nearly everything the Founders reserved to the states, checked now only at the edges by a handful of federalism doctrines the Court still enforces. The list of federal powers is still a list — it has just been read very generously.

The clearest pass on the card. The last five grievances describe a king burning his own towns and hiring foreign armies against his people — and the modern United States simply does not do this to its citizens. The one honest echo, the military's reliance on private contractors, is deployed in wars abroad, not at home. A government that does not wage war on its own people has kept the promise that matters most.