Democracy Needs Originalism.

Whichever clause is used, Justice Samuel Alito's opinion for the Court in Dobbs employed the correct methodology for identifying rights not specified in the Constitution - to determine not what judges prefer they should be but what history shows they in fact were. The 15th Amendment, which barred racial discrimination in voting and was drafted with language about states and congressional power similar to that of the 14th Amendment, underwent its own judicial constriction in defiance of original meaning as the Court extended its "state action" doctrine to that amendment in James v. Bowman (1903). Egregious contortions of the Constitution in major cases are limited to the era before the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, which gave the Court five justices who subscribe to some form of originalism. The scenario of the Court reaching some of these conclusions might seem far-fetched in our time, but that was how the Court viewed same-sex marriage when such a claim came before it in 1972. [Extracted from the article]