To the editor:

America’s 250th anniversary will mark an endurance born not of historical contingency, but of masterful political design. Our greatest inheritance is a structure of government, designed by the Founders to protect liberty by fracturing its own power — a genius clearest when contrasted with the system from which it broke: the United Kingdom.

The British constitution is an accumulation of parliamentary statutes and unwritten conventions. America is built upon a singular, written and supreme Constitution that one can fit in a breast-pocket. This created a durable framework, ensuring governance operates within a stable boundary, protecting rights from the shifting whims of temporary majorities.

In the UK’s parliamentary model, power is consolidated. The Prime Minister is drawn from, and commands, the majority in the House of Commons. The American design enforces separation. An independently elected President leads a co-equal and rival branch to Congress, enforcing negotiation and prudent compromise, and acting as a permanent check on concentrated power.

This separation is repeated within our legislature. Our House and Senate are co-equal bodies. In Britain, the elected Commons holds decisive power; the unelected Lords merely revise. For any significant American law to pass, it must secure approval from two distinct institutions — a system of double deliberation crafted for stability and consensus over impetuosity.

The Founders layered this with federalism, alien to the British unitary state. Sovereignty is constitutionally shared with 50 independent states. This fosters local self-governance and policy innovation, transforming the nation into a marketplace of ideas and a landscape of competitive opportunity.

The ultimate purpose of this apparatus was to secure pre-existing, God-given rights, not to grant them. Its role was to establish peace, private property and impartial law, then recede. This framework of ordered liberty caused the greatest unlocking of human potential since Ancient Greece, unleashing the capitalist energy and private enterprise that birthed our unparalleled prosperity.

Yet no political machinery, however brilliant, is self-perpetuating. Its greatest test is internal: the government’s inexorable expansion, its regulatory overreach, burdensome taxation, cronyism and the drive to redistribute private wealth — all aided by the quality of politicians, of whom Cicero might say, “were not born but excreted.” The system’s guardrails depend on a citizenry that loves hard liberty over an easy yoke, resisting the temptation to convert government from a guardian of rights into an administrator of resources, or worse, a parent.

By this enduring design, I have been granted its fundamental promise: the freedom to pursue my happiness, choose my responsibilities, shape my destiny and keep the bread of my labor. For the sovereignty and freedom it secures, my debt to this nation is immeasurable.

Nandan Pai

Plattsburgh