{"id":446,"date":"2026-07-20T11:05:48","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=446"},"modified":"2026-07-20T11:05:48","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:05:48","slug":"how-the-supreme-court-swiped-the-constitution-from-we-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=446","title":{"rendered":"How the Supreme Court Swiped the Constitution From We the People"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<p><em>This is part of Amicus and Slate\u2019s \u201c<\/em><em>By the People<\/em><em>\u201d series, which explores how the American people can reclaim the Constitution\u2014and the law\u2014from this monarchical Supreme Court.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=444\">Does Trump Enjoy the Presidency?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Popular constitutionalism reflects a simple ideal: The Constitution belongs not just to the courts, but to all of us. The American people can and <em>should<\/em> shape the meaning of the Constitution.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the Constitution\u2019s design, which protects democratic voice and freedoms, has enabled Americans to shape constitutional meaning since the founding. We do so through many avenues: voting, protest, political party activism, lobbying, filing lawsuits, and writing op-eds, to name a few. By voting for particular presidents, citizens help shape the federal courts, as well as executive branch policy; in electing members of Congress, they weigh in on questions of federal lawmaking; by myriad other political actions, they bring public opinion to bear on decisionmakers who must interpret the Constitution in their official acts.<\/p>\n<p>When pro-life voters turn out, they throw their weight behind a more restrictive reading of what counts as a fundamental \u201cliberty\u201d under the 14<sup>th<\/sup> Amendment. When pro-voting-rights groups lobby Congress, they reinforce a broad understanding of the 14<sup>th<\/sup> and 15<sup>th<\/sup> amendments. When someone donates to the American Civil Liberties Union to fund their litigation, or shows up at a Moms for Liberty meeting, they are actively engaging the Constitution\u2019s meaning.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>All these paths to influencing the Constitution are vital to our ability to function as a self-governing republic of equal citizens. Doing so keeps the Constitution at the center of our popular democratic culture, renewing our loyalty to the document and our sense of its relevance.<\/p>\n<p><em>Listen to the first episode of the Amicus podcast miniseries By the People here:<\/em><\/p>\n<div>\n<template><br \/>\n<iframe frameborder=\"no\" height=\"200\" loading=\"lazy\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"\" title=\"How the Supreme Court Swiped the Constitution From We the People\" width=\"100%\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/template><\/p>\n<div><noscript><br \/>\n<\/noscript><\/div>\n<p>View Transcript\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>But for popular constitutionalism to work, the people must have effective ways to influence constitutional interpretation in all three branches. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court\u2019s rulings have increasingly undermined popular constitutionalism, damaging those links between the people at large and the Constitution.<\/p>\n<p>In its substantive decisions, the court has read the Constitution in ways that distort democracy and diminish the people\u2019s power to influence their representatives. Ways that limit our equal ability to affect the actions of the president, Congress, and the courts themselves\u2014and by those pathways, shape how executive officials, legislators, and judges read the Constitution. Further, the court majority has emphasized methods of interpretation that shut out popular constitutionalism. The majority\u2019s emphasis on originalism and traditionalism denies the current people any legitimate role in constitutional meaning-making\u2014while perversely privileging those who wrote and ratified the Constitution and laws at times when most Americans could not vote or exercise political power.<\/p>\n<p>Our Supreme Court will not admit it, but they have made every effort to take constitutional meaning away from the people, by reading the Constitution to severely weaken our democratic safeguards. The court\u2019s modern distortion of democracy began decades before John Roberts became chief justice, as the court began overturning federal laws enacted to protect ordinary citizens\u2019 role in our democracy, while refusing to limit legislators\u2019 ability to draw their own constituencies for partisan advantage.<\/p>\n<p>Thirty years ago, in <em>Buckley v. Valeo<\/em>, the court equated money with speech and explicitly rejected political equality as a justification for limiting campaign finance, though it left corporate spending limits standing to protect ordinary voices from being drowned out. In <em>Davis v. Bandemer<\/em>and <em>Vieth v. Jubelirer<\/em>, the court pronounced partisan gerrymandering illegal in theory but proved unwilling to stop it in practice, leaving only the hope of future judicial intervention. Finally, beginning with <em>Shaw v. Reno<\/em> in the 1990s, the court initiated a conservative judicial project to narrow the Voting Rights Act by limiting the mechanisms available to ensure that minorities could influence the political process, such as the intentional creation of majority-minority districts.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=442\">It Could Always Be Worse\u2014and That\u2019s All Part of Trump\u2019s Plan<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Rather than protecting democracy, the Roberts court has further locked out popular influence. In <em>Citizens United v. FEC<\/em>, it granted corporations full political speech rights, virtually ensuring concentrated wealth drowns out ordinary citizens. Through and , the court extinguished all hope of federal intervention against partisan gerrymandering, effectively legitimizing the practice and allowing politicians to choose their voters without federal constitutional constraints. Finally, in <em>Shelby County v. Holder<\/em>and <em>Callais<\/em>, the court dismantled the Voting Rights Act\u2019s two most vital provisions. The power to create opportunities for racial minorities to elect candidates of their choice is now left entirely to the discretion of legislative bodies, which are majority white in every state except Hawai\u02bbi.<\/p>\n<p>The political branches claim to speak for everyone, but the court has effectively handed our democracy over to oligarchs, hyperpartisans, and one-party states. Ordinary Americans now face immense obstacles just to make their voices heard or to participate in competitive elections for their representatives, let alone shape constitutional meaning. For constitutional meaning to be legitimately popular, it must belong to everyone. Yet right now, it belongs only to a privileged few.<\/p>\n<p>The current Supreme Court majority twists the knife further by embracing a methodology that inherently rejects the current citizenry\u2019s voice. Originalism looks only to the past meaning of the Constitution at the time of the founding or at subsequent enactments. Traditionalism looks to \u201chistory and tradition\u201d as aids to interpretation, emphasizing centuries-old common law and long-past legislative enactments (as a recent series of landmark rulings on , , , and  illustrates).<\/p>\n<p>Those methods both explicitly and implicitly reject the current citizenry\u2019s role in the Constitution. Explicitly, they allow the present people to influence constitutional meaning only through formal amendment of the Constitution. While originalists and traditionalists will look back to an array of past sources to understand the Constitution\u2019s text, they deny any relevance for the current populace\u2019s views. The court claims to be interpreting what \u201cwe the people\u201d have understood the Constitution to mean, but \u201cthe people\u201d whose decisions the court engages reflect a much less inclusive democracy than the one we currently inhabit\u2014one where people of color, women, and the poor could not vote and participate on an equal basis.<\/p>\n<p>Further, because originalists believe the Constitution to have a fixed meaning discoverable through historical investigation, they privilege experts as the ones who are singularly capable of identifying that \u201ccorrect\u201d interpretation. Ordinary people, not trained in historical or legal research, have little hope of participating in that exercise. While \u201ctradition\u201d does not claim a fixed constitutional meaning, in practice the court looks to esoteric sources like Blackstone and old legal sources that are not easily accessed by laypeople. Neither method invites the average citizen\u2019s voice or participation.<\/p>\n<p>To be legitimately popular, constitutional meaning must belong to everyone. That means that the public must have egalitarian, accessible, and effective channels to influence the law and policy that interpret, reflect, and shape constitutional meaning. Methods of constitutional interpretation should make space for the current public, not just those who held power in a less democratic past.<\/p>\n<p>Democracy is the heart of our nation\u2019s constitutional regime, and its health underwrites the Constitution\u2019s own vitality. As the court saps the people\u2019s power, it weakens the Constitution itself. To revive it, we must return democratic power to all <span>Americans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=440\">By the People<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This project was decades in the making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[210,173,23,18,11,15,16,17],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-by-the-people","tag-campaign-finance","tag-john-roberts","tag-judiciary","tag-jurisprudence","tag-supreme-court","tag-voting","tag-voting-rights"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How the Supreme Court Swiped the Constitution From We the People - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=446\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How the Supreme Court Swiped the Constitution From We the People - 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