of putting out its invented “Constitution?" Some of the responsibility lies with progressive legal scholars, who are well situated to explain the Constitution to the public. It isn’t that they have failed; it’s that they seldom try. Conservatives don’t hesitate to speak directly to the public-and, often, to dumb down the Constitution. They purvey a simple myth: anyone who doesn’t support the far-right version of the Constitution is unpatriotic.
Enough of that. The Constitution belongs to all of us. It’s time to take it back from those who are trying to steal it in plain sight. Ours Constitution wasn’t written to rig the political game, but to allow us to play it without killing one another. It created a government and gave the government that power it needed to function. That seems elementary, but the right claims that the Constitution was designed to prevent America from abandoning the purity of the Anglo-Saxon past. Any innovative government program, the argument runs, must be unconstitutional, or the framers would have predic...