What all these projects have in common is that they reject the false dichotomy of respect for the founders versus a living Constitution. They don’t assume that just because conservatives talk a lot about the framers that liberals must do exactly the opposite. And all these projects believe in a liberal and inclusive constitutional tradition that connects the Americans of the past with the Americans of our own day.

If liberals want to reclaim the Constitution in politics as well as in law, they must abandon the shibboleth that all right-thinking liberals must oppose living constitutionalism to originalism. This is a false choice, and ironically, it frames the debate on terms set by movement conservatives in the 1980s.

It was conservatives, and not liberals, who insisted on drawing a clear distinction between originalism and the work of the Warren and early Burger courts. Liberals had been quite happy to draw on adoption history to explain how and why enduring constitutional commitments should be applied to present-day circumstances. As Frank Cross has pointed out in his article Originalism: The Forgotten Years, the trend of increasing citations to the founders in Supreme Court opinions begins with the Warren Court. And the great avatar of the living Constitution, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, explained and defended his constitutional commitments in terms of fidelity to the constitutional text and the founders’ design.