Whether consciously or not, today’s Federalist Society conservatives are building on Franklin Roosevelt’s first and best judicial pick. It is customary in most circles to refer to the Court’s junior Republican trio—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—as Trump appointees, but in truth they are Federalist Society appointees, carefully groomed and vetted by this extraordinarily influential organization. Trump himself knows nothing about law and was indeed the most lawless president in American history. To him, law is simply an obstacle or a weapon. But most good lawyers and judges see law as a guide, a lens, a tool, an instrument for justice and community. The Federalist Society is part of this grand legal tradition and it has long championed originalism as the best way for judges and others to do constitutional law.

Meanwhile, the Court’s liberals are eschewing originalism, and they are losing badly. They are prioritizing not constitutional text, not its adjacent history, but rather existing Supreme Court precedent.

But purely precedent-based argumentation is misguided. For starters, each justice swears an oath to the Constitution, not to the Court’s caselaw. And the Constitution’s text could not be more clear: It, and not judicial precedent, is “the supreme law of the land”—no ifs, ands, or buts. Moreover, precedent itself authorizes deviation from egregiously wrong precedent. That is the lesson of 1937, 1954, and 1963—precedents on precedent, so to speak. A dissenter can of course invoke precedent, but the shelf life of a purely precedent-based dissent is shorter than that of a head of lettuce. Once a Court majority hands down its ruling, that ruling itself becomes a new precedent, and a precedent-worshipping dissenter must now change her tune in the next case. But an originalist dissenter need not fold her tent. The text says what it says and the history means what it means today, tomorrow, and forever. Most of Black’s biggest triumphs late in his judicial career began as dissents in his early days.