A Redemptive Friendship
What Senator Lugar and a King’s Visit to Congress Offer for America’s Next 250
IDEAS FOR AMERICA'S NEXT 250
Just before the King of the United Kingdom addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress, I sat in the chapel at Pembroke College, Oxford, as the choir sang the Compline service. The liturgy celebrates the end of the day and prays for peace through the night as we are called into the new work of the following day. Pembroke was the home college of Senator Richard G. Lugar — Rhodes Scholar, six-term U.S. senator from Indiana, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom — and as I sat there, I found myself thinking about his example and what such a prayer service during his time there seeded in him.
Lugar’s politics were never showy. They were the politics of a man who took seriously the command to love his neighbor. His Christian faith wasn’t the kind that got worn on a lapel; it was the kind that showed up in who he was and how he spent a lifetime in public service, starting with local school board meetings. Long before he became a household name in foreign policy, Lugar served on the Indianapolis school board in the years after Brown v. Board of Education, working to integrate the city’s schools and implement busing. It was unglamorous, contentious work, the kind that made enemies on every side. He did it anyway, because he believed children made in God’s image deserved one another and a quality education.
As mayor of Indianapolis, he crossed cultural and racial lines to build economic opportunities in neighborhoods that had been written off, working hand in hand with community and faith leaders. And on the night of April 4, 1968 — when Robert F. Kennedy stood in an Indianapolis park and broke the news to a stunned crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis — it was the relationships Lugar and others like him had patiently cultivated that helped keep the city at peace while others burned.
That same instinct — that we belong to one another — eventually carried him to the Senate, and from there to one of the most consequential legislative achievements of the twentieth century. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which he co-authored with Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, did something almost unimaginable: it dismantled and secured nuclear weapons and materials scattered across the former Soviet Union at the moment Moscow could no longer guarantee they wouldn’t fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states. Thousands of warheads. Millions of pounds of fissile material. A safer world, built one careful collaboration at a time.
I mention all of this because I think Senator Lugar had figured something out that many of us, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, have lost track of in this era of disenfranchisement. He understood that the work of a free people is long, that it is done across difference, and that hope — real hope — is not the same thing as optimism.
Senator Lugar also understood that the institutions through which that work gets done are not self-sustaining. They have to be tended. And the institution he tended longest — the United States Senate — is one half of a body whose health, right now, ought to concern every American and every friend of America.
To see why, it helps to go back to where the whole experiment began.
The Revolutionary Quarrel, and What It Built
Almost two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of colonists in North America concluded — after the long catalogue of grievances that opens the Declaration of Independence — that it was their moral duty to throw off the rule of a tyrant king. They did not stop at separation, though. They built something new: a republic in which power would not be permitted to gather in any one set of hands. Three branches, each holding the others accountable. A federal system, with states and a national government in tension. Nothing quite like it had been tried before, and for the last 250 years, our nation has made meaningful, albeit not always linear, progress founded on this same framework. From our founding, we have consistently said, “We can do better.”
The first branch named in the Constitution — the very first article — is Congress. Not the presidency. The framers put the legislative power first because they believed that a free people governs itself through deliberation, and deliberation happens in legislatures. The presidency comes second. The judiciary, third.
For most of the past quarter-century, across administrations of both parties and majorities of both parties, the first branch has been doing something the framers would have found astonishing. It has been handing its power away.
Congress holds the power of the purse and the power to tax — these are the first enumerated powers of Article I. Yet over the past two decades, presidents of both parties have aggressively pushed those boundaries. President Obama famously said he had “a phone and a pen.” President Biden tried to forgive student loans, impose a nationwide eviction moratorium, and mandate vaccines through executive action. President Trump has used emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs that function as taxes on American consumers. Regardless of the intended policy impacts or personal politics of these orders, they are illustrative of how flashy executive action has usurped real policymaking that takes both vision and compromise.
In case after case, the Supreme Court has stepped in to remind everyone who actually has the power. The Court struck down Biden’s student loan plan, eviction moratorium, and vaccine mandates. And just this past February, in a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice Roberts, it struck down most of President Trump’s emergency tariffs. “The Framers gave that power to ‘Congress alone’ — notwithstanding the obvious foreign affairs implications of tariffs,” Roberts wrote. The decision reaffirmed the separation of powers between the legislative and the executive branches and upheld the basic right granted to Congress by Article I of the Constitution over the imposition of taxes, tariffs, and foreign commerce.
Notice what is happening here. The judiciary is, again and again, having to tell Congress: this is your job. Do it.
It is in that context — a Congress spending a generation surrendering its own authority, an executive branch eagerly consuming it, and a Court sternly rebuking both — that something profound happened.
A King’s Visit to Congress
On April 28, in a moment of real and acknowledged tension between Washington and London, with disagreements over Iran and Ukraine running hot — the great-great-great-great-grandson of King George III stood in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives.
The irony must not be lost on anyone. King Charles thanked the American people for welcoming him “to mark this semi-quincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence.” He acknowledged, with characteristic British understatement, that the colonies had broken away over “no taxation without representation,” and then noted that there remains “a shared democratic value which you inherited from us.” He praised NATO. He spoke of the indispensable bond between the two nations.
And — this is the part I keep returning to — he was met with bipartisan praise when he spoke of checks and balances on executive power and when he called for peace in Ukraine, a place where as of this writing, the daily loss of life matches that of WWII.
Sit with that for a moment. The descendant of the king from whom America wrenched itself free came to Washington and reminded a divided Congress of the beauty of the system they themselves had built — a system of shared, checked, balanced power — and members of both parties stood and applauded.
If you had told the Continental Congress in 1776 that two hundred and fifty years later a King of Britain would address its successor, urging it to remember the genius of its own constitutional design, they would have called you mad. And yet here we are.
Moments like this do not come around often, and when they do, it is worth pausing long enough to ask what they are actually for. I think this one is for at least three things.
Three Things to Take From This Moment
First: we need each other, and there is something profound about a redemptive story arriving exactly two hundred and fifty years after a bitter divorce. The U.S.–U.K. relationship has not been a quiet one. It has involved a revolution, the burning of the White House in 1814 (a fact King Charles cheerfully reminded everyone of in his toast), and many disagreements since. And yet, over the past century in particular, it has been the engine of more good in the world than almost any other bilateral friendship in history. Two world wars were won. A postwar order was built. The Cold War ended without catastrophe — a peace, by the way, that Senator Lugar’s nuclear nonproliferation work helped to secure.
Second: there is hope in a redemptive story precisely when the story does not feel redemptive. This is the gift of the moment. Things have felt dark on both sides of the Atlantic. Citizens in the United States and the United Kingdom feel disenfranchised, talked down to, sorted into camps, and told their neighbors are the enemy. The institutions feel hollowed out. The center feels like it cannot hold.
And then — without a great deal of fanfare, in the middle of a tense diplomatic season — a king and a Congress sit down together and remember what they share. Faith, the writer of Hebrews tells us, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Redemption rarely announces itself in advance. It arrives, often, in the most improbable rooms.
Third: we, as citizens of these two nations, are invited into this hope. And here is where the distinction between hope and optimism really matters.
Optimism is a forecast. It says: things will probably work out. It is passive. It costs nothing.
Hope is different. Hope says: there is good worth working for, and I have a part to play. Hope honors human agency. It assumes — as the Judeo-Christian tradition has always assumed — that we are made in the image of God, that God is doing redemptive work in the world, and that we are invited to participate in it.
This is what Senator Lugar understood. As a school board member, he didn’t just wish his city’s children would be educated together; he did the patient, unglamorous work of making it happen. As mayor, he didn’t just assume Indianapolis would hold together on the night Dr. King died; he had spent years building the relationships across race and faith that made it possible. As a senator, he didn’t just pray nuclear weapons wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands; he flew to Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan with Sam Nunn and watched the warheads come down.
His hope had hands. It had neighbors.
That is the kind of hope this moment is asking from us.
Our Calling
If you are an American or a Briton reading this and feeling like you have been written out of your own country’s story, I want to suggest that the events of April 28 are not a curiosity. They are an invitation.
Two hundred and fifty years after our nations split in anger, we are being given a chance to celebrate and steward a friendship that has, again and again, helped save the world from itself. The system the founders built — the one King Charles came to honor — depends on citizens who refuse to give up on it. Congress will not reclaim its constitutional role unless we, the people who elect it, demand that it does. The U.S.–U.K. friendship will not yield its fruit unless ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic work together for a better future.
This is a calling. And it is, properly understood, a hopeful one — not because we are sure it will succeed, but because we are sure it is worth doing. We can do better.
Senator Lugar lived this. So can we. We can work across oceans to pursue peace in a violent world. We can encourage candidates and our elected leaders to disagree constructively, even in their own parties, to negotiate with an understanding of distributed power and a long view of history. And we can build and cherish friendships, in person, across different beliefs and generations in our neighborhoods and families.
The chapel at Pembroke is small and quiet. Sitting in it, you can almost feel the centuries of students who have prayed there before going out to do something difficult and worthwhile in the world. Lugar was one of them. He went out and loved his neighbors — across a school district, across a city, across an ocean, across the iron line of an old Cold War.
We are being asked to do the same.
It is the eve of America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday. The King has come. The Congress has stood and applauded the genius of its own design. The story is not over. And we — we are not spectators.
We are the next chapter.
Blair Milo is the director of the Sagamore Network, a collection of policy experts, advisors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and impact investors who form strategic alliances to solve big problems. She is a veteran of the U.S. Navy, former mayor of La Porte, Indiana, and served as Indiana’s first Secretary of Career Connections and Talent.