This amendment instructs the justices to treat their task as Marshall did, and as his contemporaries thought they should: as interpretation of an historical document, not husbandry of a “growing, evolving” one. Its intended effect is to restore the people’s right of self-government on those issues — school prayer, the death penalty, pornography, homosexuality, abortion, etc. — where their views have more in common with those of the framers than with those of today’s judicial mandarins. It is, literally, the status quo ante amendment to end all status quo ante amendments.

If any of the phrases in Section 1 sound familiar, it's because they're lifted from the writings of John Marshall, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. Click on their names or on the various words of the section to find chapter and verse.

The additional sections are needed to ratify those changes the courts made for us that we should have made for ourselves (e.g., the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation), and — if the amendment is to have a chance of success — to give proper constitutional authority to a great deal of what the federal government is now doing (Social Security, Medicare, the Federal Reserve, national parks, disaster relief, etc., etc., etc.). Section 5 addresses that latter challenge, by taking on the enumerated-powers/implied-powers conundrum — the main point on which the founding generation disagreed. Left open-ended here, the section would need to be drafted in such a way as to fill out the powers of Congress to meet the demands of the modern era, but without destroying all limits on federal powers.

Section 3 offers a way to respect the expectations of those who have come to look upon the federal courts as the ultimate guardians of their most basic rights, while tethering the definition of those rights to something more solid than five justices’ fancy.

Section 4 gives the courts a bit of much-needed guidance on law enforcement issues, drawing on the words of Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Cardozo, with an assist from C.S. Lewis and Désiré Cardinal Mercier.