Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the Framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War Amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the Framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly non-partisan "experts," an idea that Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no...