OP-ED: America's Best Days Are Made, Not Given

The following is an op-ed by Rep. August Pfluger (TX-11):

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of patriots bet everything on the idea that freedom was worth fighting for. They had no guarantee it would work. They had no precedent to point to and no safety net beneath them. What they had was a creed, the conviction, stated plainly in the document they signed, that human beings are endowed by their Creator with rights that no government grants and no government can take away. That was the founding wager. Every generation since has had to answer the same test they did, and every generation has risen to meet it.

That is why the skeptics have always been wrong. This republic is still here, 250 years on, and still the nation the world watches when it wants to know which way things are going. Not because we got lucky, but because a nation built on God-given rights turns out to be more durable than any power arrayed against it. Americans have always found a way to prove that. They always will.

The men and women who put on this country's uniform fight for something bigger than any government can give them. As one who has served, I can tell you they fight because the idea at the center of this republic is worth defending. That idea is inseparable from its foundation: that our rights come not from government but from God, and that a nation built on that truth carries an obligation to prove itself worthy of the blessing. We did not inherit this to squander it.

Which is why what the Left did over the last decade cannot be dismissed as mere politics. It's no surprise that pride in our armed forces has fallen sharply, because that decline is overwhelmingly driven by the political Left. For four years, the Left tore down statues, rewrote the history books, and treated American greatness as something to apologize for rather than something to defend. They taught a generation of young Americans to see their own country as the villain in its own story. The flag became a symbol to be explained. Strength became something to be managed. They governed like American power was the world's problem, not its solution.

The American people looked at that vision and rejected it. Not because they are naive about this country's past, but because they understand something the revisionist project never could: a nation that cannot believe in itself cannot defend itself. Voters did not return a mandate to relitigate history. They returned a mandate to govern the future, and most of all, to secure it for the next generation.

The mandate voters delivered is being met. The Working Families Tax Cuts delivered the most consequential pro-family tax relief in a generation, making it easier for working parents to raise a family, buy a home, and keep more of what they earn. Trump Accounts mean that every child born in America enters the world with a financial foundation, a stake in this country's future before they are old enough to understand what that means. We ended four years of open borders and brought illegal crossings to zero. We clawed back billions in Medicaid and Medicare fraud that never should have been spent. And we made the largest investment in our military in decades, because the generation inheriting this country deserves to inherit its strength as well.

The Founders understood something that every generation has had to learn again: that freedom is not the natural condition of mankind, that self-government is hard, and that the only way to keep this republic is to fight for it every single day and hand it to your children stronger than you found it. Republicans are proving this generation is up to that fight.

That is the story of this country at 250. Not a nation that coasted on its founding, but one that has had to earn its place in history over and over again, and has done it every time. Because America's best days are made, not given. They are earned by people willing to fight for them and handed down to a generation that will do the same.

This country has always had enemies, foreign and domestic, who said the experiment would not last. Every single time, America proved them wrong. The next 250 years do not belong to the people who lost faith in her. They belong to the Americans who never stopped believing in her, who never stopped fighting for her, and who understand that freedom is not a relic of the past. It is a responsibility for the future.