Let me expand a bit on this. What is called "originalism" in the legal academy is something that doesn't really survive first contact with any serious historical examination of the period. It's a sort of academic bubble boy which can only exist in the controlled environment ... https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1317118735895961601

2/ of the legal academy. But the Civil War amendments - if we are talking about what they were conceived as at the time and the intentions behind them - do amount to a refounding of the constitution. They are not mere revisions like one might see most of the other amendments.

3/ Justice Marshall argued that the 1787 document was a morally deficient which has no moral or historical claim on us today. It is only with the Civil War amendments that we have an edifice that has any claim on us. Whether or not you believe that there's no question ...

4/ the Civil War amendments fundamentally change the constitutional order. They created a right to one's ownership of one's person and labor, a right to vote (though it's generally not construed as such) and creates a citizenship of the US and privileges tied to that ...

5/ citizenship which the federal govt is charged with vindicating. To the extent the contemporary judicial right accepts these amendments it sees them as narrow rule making revisions. What the constitution is "about", the storyline, remains fixed in the 1787 document.

6/ That version of the 1787 document is largely fictive or strategic. But privileging the original version over the revisions is at the heart of the project.