Trump faces Supreme Court showdown as major rulings loom

The People’s Document

The centuries-long struggle to make the Constitution equal for all.

The effort to transform the United States’ founding document into a vehicle for egalitarian politics.

Commemorative print celebrating the passage of the 15th Amendment. (Getty Images)

It’s safe to say that there hasn’t been a time since the Civil War era when the US Constitution—its meanings, rights, and protections, its checks and balances and violations—was more consequential or contested in our political life. Thanks to the Trump administration, hardly a day goes by when a presidential order, a Justice Department prosecution, or a Homeland Security detention and expulsion doesn’t overstep the bounds or outright ignore constitutional norms and practices. And as we all know, even before Trump was sworn in a second time, there were serious questions about his eligibility for the presidency, given his participation in the January 6, 2021, uprising. Who would have thought that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, determining who might be barred from office for engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, would be at the center of a judicial reckoning? Or that birthright citizenship, Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, so foundational to securing and expanding our civil and political rights, would be under concerted attack and now awaiting a Supreme Court ruling demanded by Trump? How the Constitution will be interpreted by a right-wing Supreme Court, and whether its long-accepted rules for the wielding of power remain intact, are questions that now stare us in the face.

Books in review

Born Equal: The Remaking of America’s Constitution, 1840–1920

by Akhil Reed Amar

Buy this book

Sad to say, given the moment, relatively few Americans know much at all about the Constitution: the framework of governance it sets out, the interpretive conflicts it has spawned, or its lengthy historical arc, amendments and all. At best, they see the Constitution as an important part of the country’s origin story, tethered almost umbilically to the earlier Declaration of Independence, which few Americans know much about either. This may be why the Democrats’ efforts in 2024 to present themselves as the defenders of democracy and the Constitution didn’t work very well, and why, even in 2026, they are still struggling to do either.

One of Akhil Amar’s ambitions in his new book, Born Equal , is to help remedy these deficiencies. A distinguished constitutional scholar and professor at Yale Law School, Amar has been among the most prolific and influential interpreters of the Constitution and its history, writing multiple books as well as law-review articles, many crafted with a broad audience in mind. Even more impressive, he has now embarked on a three-volume “epic saga” of the Constitution that begins with the founding of the United States and will end with the present. Born Equal , which charts the Constitution’s history from 1840 to 1920, is the second of the series.

As one might expect given the subject, Born Equal is a long book, and it offers both more and less than its title suggests. More, because Amar often takes us back to the Constitution’s making and early history and provides a larger political history as well, organized chiefly around the fight over slavery and the coming of the Civil War. Less, because we don’t get to the crucial Reconstruction amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—until we’re 500 pages in, and because he spends remarkably little time on the important period between 1870 and 1920, especially with the making of the 19th Amendment, which established women’s suffrage.

Readers will find a lengthy and somewhat loopy narrative presented in a conversational style, apparently designed to keep the interest of nonspecialists, and a pretty familiar cast of characters whose surnames are quickly dropped: Elizabeth (for Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Frederick (for Frederick Douglass), Harriet (for Harriet Beecher Stowe), and so on, all the way to Abe (for Abraham Lincoln—a nickname that Lincoln hated for the same reason that the other figures would likely find this cringeworthy, as a sign of public disrespect). But through the book’s more than 700 pages—Amar says it would have been even longer if not for the opposition of his editor—there is an important and compellingly developed idea, one that has been at the heart, in shorter and longer versions, of his work: the idea of a “liberal originalism.” Unlike the more commonly invoked notion of originalism that many conservatives embrace, which focuses on the original text of the Constitution and the apparent intent of the founders, Amar sees an originalism based on “equality,” one connected to the Declaration of Independence and expressing the deepest aspirations of the founding generation. In Amar’s view, this liberal originalism shaped constitutional rhetoric across the Northern states between 1776 and 1860, with Lincoln eventually emerging as its true embodimen…