Wilson’s “living Constitution” has been the dogma of Democrats for a century since. But what do they have to say for it in public today, in a public hearing in an election year? Jackson would seem to be the best test case. She has been a regular attendee at conferences of the American Constitution Society and other gatherings of the foes of originalism. Nobody doubts that the Democratic Party and the progressive movement have closed ranks behind Judge Jackson. Left-wing groups such as Demand Justice have poured effort and resources into her confirmation. The people who object the loudest to originalism are all foursquare behind Jackson’s nomination. Nobody did more to organize political resistance to putting originalists on the Supreme Court during Scalia’s lifetime than Joe Biden, and Jackson is his first and possibly only choice for the Court. You would expect her to carry his rebuttal onto the public American stage.

And yet, when senators ask Judge Jackson in a nationally televised hearing to explain how judges should read the Constitution, in a hearing for a job to which she can be confirmed entirely with Democratic votes, she sounds an awful lot like Scalia and the originalists.

Jackson has resisted the “originalist” label. But over and over, in response to Republican questioning, she has sounded exactly like an originalist. “I’m looking at original documents,” she testified. “I am focusing on the original public meaning because I am constrained to interpret the text. Sometimes that’s enough to resolve the issue.” “I do not believe that there is such a thing as a living constitution” that changes over time, she added. Instead, she would be “looking at the text at the time of the Founding” as a constraint on judicial innovation. She would focus on “what that meant to those who drafted it.”