The real debate between liberals and conservatives on the Supreme Court, the true argument, when you drop out the legal jargon and hot-button culture-war issues, is the debate over whether or not the new amendments worked to redeem the document. Conservatives, fundamentally, act as though they did not. They act like the post–Civil War amendments were mere updates to the original slave document. We still have a white supremacist’s Constitution—we just have to count Black people as full people for the purposes of congressional representation, is all. Not much has changed.
