Jill Lepore

And so he's opposed to Griswold v. Connecticut from 1965.

And then he's going to be opposed to Roe v. Wade.

Like he's opposed to the idea that there can be a right to privacy can be found in the Bill of Rights that can guarantee reproductive rights.

So.

He says, you know, what we need to do is go back to the original intention of the framers of the Constitution.

They didn't mean for women to be able to get birth control, so therefore it's not in the Constitution.

And this theory of jurisprudence gets elaborated over the course of the 1970s and then institutionalized in the 1980s when Reagan is president and makes originalism, which at that point is called originalism, the official policy of the Reagan Justice Department.

And anyone being put forward to the federal bench has to be an originalist, like has to pass a litmus test, which they say this.

And partly that's because the reason originalism

rises in this era is that it's not just that liberals can't amend the Constitution, like the Equal Rights Amendment, which is passed by Congress in 1972, is not ratified.

So liberals are like, why are we going to bother trying to use Article 5?

It's not working for us.

We'll just go to the courts.

But social and fiscal conservatives are also finding it difficult, impossible to change the Constitution by Article 5 amendment.

They want to pass a right-to-life amendment, especially after a flurry of these right-to-life amendments.

They can't get that through Congress.

And they want to pass a balanced budget amendment, which they can get through the Senate but not through the House, the fiscal conservatives.

So they come up with this idea, which is,

Well, we want to change the Constitution, but we we've been saying for years we don't believe in judicial activism.

And we pose to the Warren court everything the Warren court's done really since Brown, like all the really the decisions of the 1960s, the civil rights decisions of the 1960s and the criminal defendants rights.