Understanding Every Principle | #4: One Law for All
The Motto Carved in Marble Has Never Been More Contested
This is the fourth article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. The previous articles examined Principle 1: Safeguard Our Democratic System, Principle 2: Limit Terms for Accountability, and Principle 3: Protect Election Integrity. Today, we examine the principle that holds the whole system together from the inside.
Principle 4: One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.1
Walk up the steps of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington and look above the main entrance. Carved in marble, in letters two feet tall, are four words: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. They have been there since 1935. They were chosen deliberately, as a statement of what the building and the institution inside it are supposed to stand for. They are not a description of where American justice began. They are a description of where it was supposed to go. The distance between those four marble words and the justice system that most Americans actually experience is one of the most important questions in American democratic life, and right now, that distance is growing.
Why This Principle Comes Fourth
This is the fourth article in a nine-part series examining the Centercratic Party’s governing principles. The fourth principle is this: the law applies equally to all, and independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.1 It is the last of the four Democratic Guardrails, the structural protections that must hold for any of the other principles to mean anything at all. You can have free elections, term limits, and protected election integrity, but if the law bends depending on who you are, those safeguards become tools of whoever controls the bending.
The rule of law is the foundational pillar of the nine-pillar framework that grounds this entire series.2 Scholars Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, in their landmark work on how democracies consolidate and collapse, identified it as the first and most essential arena: all actors, including the government itself, must be genuinely bound by general laws that protect individual freedoms. When that condition breaks down — when powerful actors can ignore the law with impunity, when courts become instruments of partisan preference rather than impartial arbiters — democratic governance does not just weaken. It becomes theater.2 The stage looks the same. The script keeps running. But the thing it was supposed to be is gone.
The Two-Tiered Problem
Most Americans do not need a political science framework to recognize what unequal justice looks like. They have been watching it for years.
The National Center for State Courts has tracked public confidence in the justice system for more than a decade. Its 2025 survey found that the share of Americans who believe courts provide “equal justice to all” has fallen from 62 percent in 2014 to just 44 percent today.3 The most common explanation offered by respondents in focus groups was striking in its consistency: they described a justice system with two tiers: “one for those with influence, connections, and power, and another one for everyone else.”3 That is not a fringe view. It is the majority view, and it has been growing for years.
Meanwhile, Gallup’s global survey found that confidence in the American judicial system dropped to a record low of 35 percent in 2024, one of the largest single-country declines for judicial confidence recorded anywhere in the world since 2006.4 And separate AP-NORC polling found that 7 in 10 Americans believe Supreme Court justices are guided more by their own ideology than by the Constitution.5 These numbers describe a credibility crisis, not a minor dip in approval ratings. A justice system that most people believe is rigged is not protecting rights. It is providing cover.
What Is Happening Right Now
On January 20, 2025, one of President Trump’s first acts after taking the oath of office was to issue full, complete, and unconditional pardons to nearly all of the approximately 1,600 people charged or convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol.6 Among those pardoned were individuals who had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers, and leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy, planning the forcible obstruction of the peaceful transfer of power. In November 2025, Trump extended pardons to dozens of political allies facing state criminal charges for their roles in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.7
The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan election law organization, stated plainly what these pardons communicated: those who helped subvert an election to benefit President Trump would be rewarded rather than held accountable. That signal, the organization noted, did not just erase past convictions. It created an incentive structure for future behavior.7
The pardon power is constitutionally granted and has been used throughout American history. But the rule of law depends not just on the existence of legal authority but on whether that authority is exercised in a way that treats all citizens by the same standard. When pardons flow to political allies who attacked the government, and when the stated rationale is that the prosecutions themselves were unjust, the message is not that justice was restored. The message is that justice depends on which side you are on.
The administration’s posture toward the courts has been equally direct. According to a Washington Post analysis published in July 2025, Trump administration officials defied court orders in approximately one-third of more than 160 lawsuits in which judges had made significant rulings against administration policies.8 The Protect Democracy Project documented that in the first six months of the administration alone, courts in at least 12 separate cases found that the administration had violated court orders, including cases involving individuals deported without due process, congressionally appropriated funds improperly withheld, and federal employees wrongfully terminated.9 In March 2025, Thomas Homan, the administration’s border czar, said publicly of a federal judge’s order: “I don’t care what the judges think.”10
Chief Justice John Roberts, in his year-end report for 2024, had already warned that “violence, intimidation, and defiance directed at judges undermines our Republic.”11 According to the U.S. Marshals Service, 564 threats against federal judges were logged in fiscal year 2025 alone, surpassing the total for all of 2024. And the number in 2026 was already at 197 by early in the year and still climbing.12
In state legislatures, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that in 2025, lawmakers introduced at least 117 bills attacking the independence or powers of state courts, with 15 enacted across six states. Measures included bills that would strip courts of jurisdiction, gerrymander state supreme courts, allow legislators to ignore judicial rulings, and impose civil penalties on judges who apply diversity or equity principles in their decisions.13
Both parties deserve honest accounting here. The Democratic Party’s record on equal justice is far from clean. In cities it has governed for decades, the criminal justice system has often applied the law most harshly to the people with the least power and the fewest resources to fight back. Prosecutorial discretion, bail systems, and sentencing practices have created real disparities that progressive governors and mayors have acknowledged but only partially addressed. The principle of one law for all demands honesty about those failures, not just the current administration’s. Equal justice is not a partisan complaint. It is a standard that applies in every direction.
What the 45 Percent Are Saying
Among the 45 percent of Americans who identify as political independents, the largest political identity in the country, the issue of equal justice cuts through the usual partisan noise.14 Independent voters are not, on balance, either pro-prosecution or anti-prosecution, either reflexively deferential to authority or reflexively suspicious of it. What they are is consistent in their demand that the rules apply the same way regardless of who is involved.
The NCSC survey found that in 2025, even state courts, which outranked all other government institutions in public trust, were trusted by only 62 percent of respondents, and that the two-tiered justice concern was raised as prominently by Republicans as by Democrats.3 Among independents, the polling is even more pointed: 68 percent describe their political independence as a desire to “think for myself, independent of what parties and candidates tell me to think”. And when they apply that standard to the justice system, what they see is a system that thinks about politics first and justice second.14 A bipartisan majority of Americans, according to the Protect Democracy Project, believe that the president should not be able to ignore court rulings he disagrees with.9 That is not a left-wing position. It is the position of citizens who understand, without needing to be told, that a law that applies only when the powerful agree to follow it is not really a law at all.
The Centercratic Position
The Centercratic Party’s fourth principle rests on two sentences: the law applies equally to all, and independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.1 Those two sentences contain four specific commitments.
The first is equal application. No person, not a president, not a political ally, not a wealthy donor, not a corporation, not a federal agency, is above the law. Pardons, prosecutorial discretion, and enforcement priorities must be exercised in ways that can survive the simplest possible test: would this decision have been made the same way if the person involved had no political connections? When the answer is clearly no, the rule of law has been bent, and the Centercratic position is that bending is not acceptable regardless of which party does the bending.
The second is judicial independence. Courts must be insulated from political pressure, from threats, from attempts to pack or restructure them for partisan advantage, from defiance of their orders, and from the rhetoric that treats judges as enemies when they rule against the current administration. The Centercratic position holds that attacks on judicial independence are attacks on the rule of law itself, whether they come in the form of impeachment threats, funding cuts, legislative court-stripping, or public intimidation.10
The third is due process for everyone. The administration of justice must provide fair procedures to every person, not just those with resources to hire good lawyers. Deportations without hearings, detentions without charges, and enforcement actions that bypass the procedural protections the Constitution requires are not efficiency measures. They are violations of the equal protection that the rule of law exists to guarantee. The guarantee does not depend on citizenship status, political affiliation, or whether the president likes the outcome.9
The fourth is accountability without exception. Those who break the law must face consequences regardless of their relationship to power. This applies to rioters who attack the Capitol, to corporate executives who commit fraud, to law enforcement officers who abuse their authority, and to government officials who defy court orders. Selective accountability, punishment for enemies, pardons for allies, is the most direct possible way to communicate that the law is a tool of power rather than a constraint on it.
What Happens When This Fails
History is not short of examples. The specific feature that distinguishes functioning democracies from systems that look like democracies is not just whether elections are held or whether courts exist. It is whether those courts are genuinely independent and whether those laws apply to everyone. Once a powerful enough actor demonstrates that the law does not apply to them, and faces no consequences for that demonstration, the constraint dissolves for everyone with enough power to follow the example.
The World Justice Project, which tracks the rule of law in 142 countries, has documented that rule-of-law scores decline much faster than they recover. Countries that lose judicial independence typically spend decades attempting to rebuild it, not years.15 The United States is not in that position yet. Courts are still functioning. Judges are still ruling against the administration. Lawyers are resigning rather than participating in strategies to defy judicial orders. The system is under stress, but it has not broken.
The question the 2026 midterms will begin to answer is whether enough Americans are paying attention to vote for the people who will defend these institutions, not just the ones who will use them.
The Marble Still Means Something
EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW is not a description of where American justice has always been. It is a commitment about where it is supposed to go, a standard that the country has never fully met and has always been obligated to pursue. The gap between the carving and the reality is not a reason to abandon the principle. It is the reason the principle has to be defended, loudly and consistently, by people who are not satisfied with watching it erode.
The 45 percent who belong to neither party have not given up on equal justice.14 They have given up on the two parties that keep treating it as a partisan weapon rather than a shared foundation. What the Centercratic Party offers on this principle is not a political position. It is a refusal to accept that the rules only apply when they are convenient for whoever holds power. That refusal is not ideology. It is the basic precondition for living in a country governed by laws rather than by whoever can avoid them.
Tomorrow, this series examines Principle 5: Debate with Facts and Dignity, and why the way we argue matters as much as what we argue about.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
2 Chapman, Paul J. Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
3 National Center for State Courts. State of the State Courts: 2025 Public Opinion Poll Findings. December 2025. https://www.ncsc.org/resources-courts/state-state-courts-2025-public-opinion-poll-findings
4 Gallup. “Americans Pass Judgment on Their Courts.” December 16, 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-courts.aspx
5 Associated Press / NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “New Poll Shows Majority of Americans Believe Supreme Court Justices Put Ideology Over Impartiality.” PBS NewsHour, June 26, 2024. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-poll-shows-majority-of-americans-believe-supreme-court-justices-put-ideology-over-impartiality
6 White House. “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Presidential Proclamation, January 20, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/granting-pardons-and-commutation-of-sentences-for-certain-offenses-related-to-the-events-at-or-near-the-united-states-capitol-on-january-6-2021/
7 Campaign Legal Center. “A Stress Test for the Rule of Law: What the Election Subversion Pardons Really Mean.” January 4, 2026. https://campaignlegal.org/update/stress-test-rule-law-what-election-subversion-pardons-really-mean
8 Washington Post. “Trump Officials Accused of Defying 1 in 3 Judges Who Ruled Against Him.” July 21, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-court-orders-defy-noncompliance-marshals-judges/
9 Protect Democracy Project. “The Trump Administration’s Conflict with the Courts, Explained.” October 2025. https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-trump-administrations-conflict-with-the-courts-explained/
10 The Guardian. “Trump’s Defiance of Court Orders Is ‘Testing the Fences’ of the Rule of Law.” March 23, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/23/judges-trump-court-rulings
11 Roberts, John G. “2024 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.” Supreme Court of the United States, December 31, 2024. Reported in: The Fulcrum. “Retired Federal Judge Warns of Rising Threats to Judicial Independence.” January 10, 2026. https://thefulcrum.us/justice/retired-judge-warns-of-threats-to-judicial-independence
12 Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Statement for the Record, January 7, 2026. https://www.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2026.01.07-Statement-for-the-Record.pdf
13 Brennan Center for Justice. “Legislative Assaults on State Courts in 2025.” January 25, 2026. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/legislative-assaults-state-courts-2025
14 Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean
15 Legal Reader. “Judicial Independence Is at Risk: Why Protecting the Rule of Law Is Critical for Our Democracy.” March 25, 2026. https://www.legalreader.com/judicial-independence-is-at-risk-why-protecting-the-rule-of-law-is-critical-for-our-democracy/