Amendments

It is not often that a sitting US President describes the Supreme Court of the United States as “not a normal court.” Words like “assault” and “attack,” which were not until long ago used primarily to define extra-judicial intrusions of individual states into the realm of civil rights, have now come to define actions taken by highest court of the land to describe its extra-constitutional verdicts and overturning of precedents.

When did the Constitution—and the final interpreter of its word and spirit, the Supreme Court of the United States—transform from being a judicial and moral arbiter of our civic conflicts to itself becoming a partisan actor in our political strife? How do we make sense of the modern constitutional tradition in an age when even the normative—or imaginary—line between politics and jurisprudence has ceased to hold? Is it time to rethink the democratic right to amendments in the constitution, granted by…