Three conservative Supreme Court justices are asking Americans to do something the federal government cannot do for them: learn how their own government works.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett sat down with Fox News Politics to mark the nation's 250th anniversary and delivered a message aimed squarely at the generations coming up behind them — civics education is the load-bearing wall of the American experiment, and it is cracking.
The justices urged Americans to study civics as the country reaches its semiquincentennial, according to Fox News Politics, tying the survival of founding freedoms to whether citizens understand the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights. The interview was first reported by Fox News.
A video clip from the conversation also circulated on Instagram in a post captioned with the names of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. The post does not carry the full interview; the substantive reporting comes from Fox News Politics.
The timing is hard to miss. The court's 6-3 conservative majority has delivered landmark rulings on abortion, presidential immunity, gun rights and federal agency power — decisions that have made the judiciary a political battlefield in a way not seen in generations. Polls have consistently shown that a large share of Americans cannot name the three branches of government or explain what the First Amendment protects, and both sides of the political divide have spent years arguing over what schools should teach about the country's history.
The justices' appeal lands in the middle of that fight. Civics, in their telling, is not a partisan cause — it is the precondition for every other argument Americans want to have. A citizen who does not know what the Constitution says cannot meaningfully defend it, and a republic that outsources self-government to experts and agencies has already begun to lose it.
The push for civic literacy comes as the court itself faces a volatile stretch. Democrats won control of the Senate in this month's midterm elections and will take the majority on Jan. 3, 2027, according to reporting by Fox News and other outlets. That has set off intense speculation about the futures of Justices Clarence Thomas, 78, and Samuel Alito, 76, the court's two oldest conservatives, and about whether President Donald Trump could confirm a replacement before Democrats take the gavel.
Alito told Fox News on Thursday that he has no plans to retire and is committed to serving through at least the current term, with major decisions expected in late June or early July. Thomas has made no recent public statements about retirement.
At the same event where the conservative justices made their civics pitch, Justice Sonia Sotomayor struck a different note. Speaking at a weekend civics education event at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, Sotomayor said she dissents a lot and hopes the court will take back some of what it has done, singling out the 2024 presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States.
"I'm hoping that the court will take back some of the crazy things that it's done. I'm only joking — maybe not," Sotomayor said, according to Fox News. "No, seriously. You know, I've spoken openly about this, there's some opinions that I hope in my lifetime will get overturned. The immunity case is one of them."
"
That is exactly the argument the conservative justices seem to be answering. Their message is not that the court will save the country, but that the country has to understand the court — and the document that created it — well enough to govern itself. Parents fighting school boards over what their kids are taught, veterans who took an oath to the Constitution, small business owners who deal with federal agencies every day: the justices' appeal is aimed at all of them, and at the millions of Americans who have never read the document they are asked to defend.
What the interview did not do is settle the fights ahead — over retirements, over confirmations, over the court's direction. It simply put the ball back where the founders put it: with the people.
Our Take
Give the justices credit for saying out loud what most of Washington would rather ignore. The American republic does not fall to a foreign army or a single bad law. It falls when citizens stop knowing what they are citizens of — when the Constitution becomes a document lawyers argue about on television while everybody else tunes out.
The Left has spent decades treating civics class as a place to run ideological boot camps, and the result is a generation that can recite grievances but cannot explain the First Amendment, the Tenth Amendment or why the separation of powers exists in the first place. That is not an accident. An electorate that does not understand its own rights is an electorate that can be managed. An electorate that does is a nightmare for the administrative state.
So here is the assignment, patriots. Read the Constitution. Read the Bill of Rights. Read the Federalist Papers, or at least the ones your kids will be tested on. Ask your school board what your district actually teaches about the founding, and do not accept vague answers. The justices can remind Americans of their duty, but they cannot do it for us. The 250th anniversary is not a birthday party — it is a pop quiz. It is not yet known how many of us will pass.
