the whole system is held together with load bearing institutional loyalty and good faith it’s a wonder it took this long to collapse

This was essentially the point that I was going to make. I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made that a right to “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the foundational principles of our nation but that means so many different things to different groups of people, many of which are mutually exclusive to one another. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what most people believe that phrase to mean. It only matters what is explicitly defined in law and, by extension, what can successfully be defended in court.