On This Day: July 6, 1776 — Congress voted for independence on July 2 and adopted Jefferson’s language on July 4, but John Dunlap’s overnight broadsides, printed and dispatched to state assemblies and army officers beginning July 5, could still only reach as far as a rider on horseback could carry them. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper in America to print the Declaration’s full text, reproducing Dunlap’s broadside for a readership no courier could match. Within days, papers up and down the coast had reprinted it in turn, and a document meant for Congress and the army was suddenly being read aloud in taverns, town squares, and pulpits from Massachusetts to Georgia. The Declaration did not become common property of the American people because Congress voted for it. It became common property because it was printed, reprinted, and read until ordinary citizens could recite the case for their own independence as readily as the men who had written it.
Two hundred and fifty years later, almost to the day, the country marked that same anniversary with a national birthday party that heat, storms, and no shortage of political friction could not cancel. Half a world away, an entirely different kind of succession was on display in Tehran, where a slain leader’s chosen heir has not yet been seen in public. The contrast, unplanned as it was, landed on the same weekend Dunlap’s broadsides and the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the Declaration’s language out to the country at large.
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🎆 America’s 250th Birthday Sweats Through Record Heat, But the Party Goes On
The nation marked the 250th anniversary of its independence this weekend under a punishing heat wave that pushed heat indexes past 100 degrees from Washington to Philadelphia to New York, forcing weather delays and straining emergency services even as celebrations went forward in all fifty states. President Trump’s evening address on the National Mall, part of a “Salute to America” event billed as the largest fireworks display in the nation’s history, was delayed by severe thunderstorms that forced a temporary evacuation and re-screening of the crowd. He opened his remarks once the weather cleared by thanking the audience for waiting it out.
Washington’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department treated 51 people for heat-related illness in and around the Mall on Saturday, with 12 transported to hospitals, while D.C. spent the weekend under an extreme heat alert with temperatures feeling like 105 degrees or hotter. New York held its own “Sail 250” harbor parade and an Empire State Building light show, and a small fire broke out on the Brooklyn Bridge during Macy’s fireworks show, quickly extinguished with no injuries reported. Vice President Vance, speaking aboard the USS Kearsarge in New York Harbor, used his own remarks to argue that the country’s founding ideals remain strong enough to outlast any authoritarian threat, provided each generation actually reaches for them.
A quarter-millennium on, the republic still threw its party outdoors, in the heat, in front of anyone who wanted to watch, rather than behind palace walls. That is not a small thing. The Founders built a government meant to be visible and accountable to the people it served, celebrated in public squares rather than staged for a court, and a 250th birthday that survived thunderstorms, triple-digit heat, and no shortage of political division is itself a small testament to how durable that design has proven. National Guardsmen handing out water bottles in a hundred-degree line are not a symbol Washington or Adams would have recognized by name, but the impulse behind them, ordinary Americans looking after each other at a shared public celebration, is exactly the civic character the founding generation hoped their experiment would produce.
🕌 Sons of Slain Ayatollah Attend Funeral as Iran’s Chosen Successor Stays Hidden
Three sons of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prayed beside his coffin at a mass funeral in Tehran on Sunday, but Mojtaba, the son who inherited his father’s title, did not appear, extending days of public uncertainty over the new leader’s condition and whereabouts. State television showed Mostafa, Meysam, and Masoud Khamenei praying at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla, alongside the coffins of the elder Khamenei’s daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and 14-month-old granddaughter, all killed in the same February 28 airstrike that began the recent war between Iran and the United States and Israel.
People close to Mojtaba’s inner circle have told Reuters he suffered a disfiguring facial injury and serious leg wounds in the strike that killed his father, and no photograph or public sighting of him has surfaced since. The Islamic Republic is staging a full week of mourning, moving Khamenei’s remains through Tehran, the seminary city of Qom, and eventually the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala before burial in Mashhad. A ceasefire has held since the four-month war ended, and President Trump told Axios that ongoing peace talks with Tehran have been paused for a week out of deference to the funeral proceedings.
An entire nation is currently unable to confirm whether the man who now holds absolute power over it can walk, speak in public, or appear before his own people, because that power passed to him by blood and clerical decree rather than by any vote anyone cast. The American Founders rejected exactly this model of government on principle, not merely on preference, writing into the Declaration itself that just power derives from the consent of the governed rather than from inheritance or religious office. Whatever comes next for Iran’s theocracy, the spectacle of a country waiting to learn who actually rules it is a vivid reminder of why the Founders built a republic that changes leaders through elections rather than through funerals.
⚽ FIFA Reverses Course, Clears Balogun to Play Against Belgium
American striker Folarin Balogun will be available for Monday’s World Cup round of 16 match against Belgium after FIFA’s disciplinary committee took the unusual step of suspending the automatic one-match ban that followed his red card in the United States’ win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. FIFA confirmed the decision Sunday in a statement, and U.S. Soccer followed shortly afterward, saying it was “pleased” Balogun would be eligible to compete.
Balogun was sent off in the 64th minute against Bosnia and Herzegovina for a challenge on defender Tarik Muharemović that replay showed involved him inadvertently stepping on the back of his opponent’s leg, a call U.S. manager Mauricio Pochettino has publicly disputed as never having been a red card in the first place. FIFA cited Article 27 of its disciplinary code, which allows a judicial body to suspend enforcement of a sanction for a probationary period, in this case one year. The Royal Belgian Football Association called the reversal “astonishing,” noting that no team had successfully appealed a red-card suspension at this World Cup before now, and pointed out that only one prior instance, Brazil’s Garrincha ahead of the 1962 final, is known to have ended the same way. President Trump posted on social media thanking FIFA for what he called reversing “a great injustice.”
The ruling is a significant boost for a U.S. side chasing its first World Cup quarterfinal appearance since 2002. Balogun leads the Americans with three goals in the tournament and was the only player on the roster with more than one, and his return to the lineup against a talented Belgian side gives Pochettino his most dangerous attacking option back just as the knockout stakes rise. Belgium, for its part, says it is “investigating all potential options” in response to the reversal, meaning the closely watched round of 16 matchup may carry a subplot into Monday’s kickoff in Seattle regardless of how it plays out on the field.
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📊 Polling Snapshot: The President’s Approval Rating
- Job Approval: Approve 40.4% | Disapprove 57.6% — a wide 17.2-point deficit in the RealClearPolling average as the president marked the nation’s Semiquincentennial (RealClearPolling)
- The current spread is roughly two and a half times wider than the -6.4-point gap the average showed in mid-October, reflecting a steady erosion in the president’s standing since the start of his second term.
🗳️ McMorrow’s Exit Narrows Michigan Senate Field to a Two-Way Progressive Clash
Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign for the Democratic Senate nomination on Sunday, abruptly narrowing a marquee primary just a month before the August 4 vote and leaving moderate Rep. Haley Stevens and progressive Abdul El-Sayed to fight for the nomination alone. McMorrow announced the decision in a video posted to social media, thanking her volunteers and pledging to support whichever candidate wins, without offering an endorsement of either one.
The seat, vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, is one national Democrats view as essential to any hope of retaking Senate control this fall, and the race has split the party’s Michigan wing along familiar ideological lines. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has backed Stevens, a self-described “proud pro-Israel Democrat” who has also faced criticism for accepting corporate PAC money, while El-Sayed has drawn support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the strength of a wave of primary wins by candidates aligned with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism. Whoever wins will face Republican Mike Rogers, who is backed by President Trump and unopposed for his own party’s nomination.
Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 that a free society will always produce factions, and a party establishment’s preferred candidate colliding head-on with a movement candidate backed by outside progressive money is exactly the kind of internal contest he expected republics to manage rather than eliminate. What deserves notice is not merely which faction wins in August, but how plainly this race confirms that the energy driving today’s Democratic Party is migrating away from the center and toward a democratic-socialist coalition that a rising number of primary voters now find more compelling than establishment credentials. Michigan Democrats, not party bosses in Washington, will settle that question at the ballot box, which is precisely how the Founders intended such disputes to be resolved.
🏛️ Louisiana Democrats Rally Against New Congressional Map, Judicial Cuts
More than two dozen Louisiana Democratic elected officials gathered at Dillard University on the Fourth of July for an emergency summit organized by U.S. Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, denouncing the state legislature’s recently redrawn congressional map and a set of Republican-backed laws eliminating judgeships and a clerk’s position in Orleans Parish. Carter told the assembled crowd that Independence Day was a fitting moment to organize against what he called an attack on Black voting rights, rather than simply a day off for fireworks.
The new map eliminates one of the state’s Black-majority districts, the seat Rep. Fields currently holds, and Governor Jeff Landry’s administration separately suspended Louisiana’s recent congressional primary following the redistricting fight. Summit attendees also criticized new state laws cutting judgeships and a parish clerk position, framing the combined actions as a coordinated effort to weaken Black political representation ahead of the midterms. Organizers said Thursday’s gathering was the first in a planned series leading up to the fall elections.
The Constitution assigns the drawing of congressional district lines to state legislatures in the first instance, subject to override by Congress, precisely so that redistricting fights of exactly this kind are fought out in state capitols and, when necessary, in court rather than settled by whichever party currently controls the White House. Louisiana Republicans acted within lawful legislative authority in redrawing the map, and Democrats retain every right to challenge that map through litigation, the ballot box, or public advocacy of the kind on display in New Orleans. Both parties have drawn maps to their own advantage when they held the pen, and conservatives who want that practice to end everywhere should want it ended everywhere, not merely when the other side benefits from it.
📬 Pritzker Leads Fresh Governors’ Push Against Postal Service Voter Rule
A coalition of nine Democratic governors led by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker sent a letter to the U.S. Postal Service this week demanding it withdraw a proposed rule implementing President Trump’s March executive order, which directs federal agencies to compile a citizenship list of eligible voters and would restrict mailed ballots to those on it. The nine-governor letter, joined by California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, argued the rule would “undermine trust in elections, needlessly complicate voting processes, arbitrarily disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, and undermine states’ constitutional role in ensuring free and fair elections.”
A federal judge has already blocked the underlying executive order as unconstitutional, ruling that only states and Congress, not the president, may set election rules, though the Postal Service had filed its proposed rule in late May, before that ruling took effect, and the case remains under appeal. The American Postal Workers Union has separately objected, with its president saying plainly that mail carriers’ job is to move mail, not verify voter eligibility, and a 2025 Brookings Institution study found mail ballot fraud occurs in roughly four cases per every 10 million ballots cast.
This is the same structural objection Original Intent raised when a federal judge first blocked this order weeks ago, and a change in which governors are signing the letter does not change the underlying constitutional problem. The Constitution gives the mechanics of federal elections to the states, subject to congressional oversight, and gives no role whatsoever to the executive branch or the agency that delivers the mail. Conservatives who want real safeguards against noncitizen voting, and there are good reasons to want them, should still want those safeguards written into statute by Congress, where they can survive a change of administration, rather than resting on the signature of whichever president currently holds office.
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🔍 What the Broadside Taught
Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, and adopted the language we now celebrate on July 4. But the Declaration did not begin governing anyone until the night of July 4 into the morning of July 5, when printer John Dunlap set the text into type and ran off roughly two hundred broadsides by candlelight. Those unsigned sheets, carrying only John Hancock’s name as president of Congress, were the version most Americans actually encountered first, dispatched by rider to state assemblies, committees of safety, and army officers in the field before most of the signatures we associate with the document existed at all. General Washington had it read aloud to his assembled troops in New York within days. The vote in the room mattered enormously. It became a founding act only once it was carried out to the people who would have to live and fight under it.
This week supplied an unplanned but striking contrast to that idea. In Tehran, the son who inherited supreme leadership of Iran after his father’s death in an airstrike has not appeared in public for days, leaving an entire nation uncertain who actually leads it or in what condition. No vote placed him there, no broadside carried his authority to the people he now rules, and no army was asked to affirm it by reading it aloud. Power simply passed by blood and clerical arrangement, the same model of government the American Founders explicitly rejected when they wrote that just power derives from the consent of the governed rather than from inheritance.
Closer to home, Michigan Democrats spent the same weekend sorting out a much smaller but structurally similar question: who gets to carry a party’s banner, and who decides. Mallory McMorrow’s abrupt exit left that choice to Stevens and El-Sayed, and ultimately to primary voters on August 4, rather than to Senator Schumer or any other party leader in Washington. It is a modest example next to a nation waiting to learn whether its new supreme leader can walk, but it rests on the same underlying premise Dunlap’s press served in 1776: that authority has to be actively conferred by the people who will live under it, not simply inherited or assumed by whoever happens to hold the title already.
The Founders were not naive about how messy that process could get. Madison expected factions, expected ambition, and expected disputes over district lines and party nominations to be fought out loudly, as they still are in Louisiana and Michigan alike. What he did not expect, and what the American system was built to prevent, was for any of those disputes to be settled the way Iran settles its own succession, by a family and a clerical hierarchy deciding quietly among themselves who inherits the power to rule everyone else.
Scripture itself drew the same distinction long before Jefferson put pen to paper. Moses instructed the people of Israel in Deuteronomy 17:15 that if they set a king over themselves, it must be one the Lord chooses from among their own brethren, not a ruler imposed on them by birthright or foreign claim. Even in a text written millennia before the idea of a republic existed, legitimate rule was tied to selection rather than simple inheritance. The American Founders secularized that same instinct into a constitutional structure, but the underlying conviction, that authority has to be conferred rather than merely passed down, is far older than 1776.
Two hundred and fifty years after Dunlap’s press ran through the night, the broadsides he printed are gone, but the principle they carried is not. Legitimate authority in America still has to be won from the people it governs, one election, one primary, and one contested map at a time. That is slower, louder, and considerably less tidy than a hereditary succession. It is also the entire reason the American experiment has now outlasted every government that operates the other way.
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776
Question: On the night of July 4, 1776, Congress ordered the newly adopted Declaration of Independence sent to a Philadelphia printer, who worked through the night to produce roughly two hundred copies that were dispatched to state assemblies and military officers beginning the very next morning, July 5. What is this first printed edition of the Declaration commonly called today?
A. The Dunlap Broadside
B. The Philadelphia Proclamation
C. The Liberty Print
D. The Independence Folio