All night long, there was a father who had been standing out that hotel who had walked the entire day proceeding just to try to get a few moments with this judge to try to free his children who were still being held.

162 years ago, a scene that ricochets through our current moment.

Ordinary people insisting on their own vision of what we are and what we do as a country

and then enacting that vision.

The voices and the stories that propelled America into its second founding have been largely

excluded from constitutional and legal history.

Excavating that past is crucial to answering this animating question of our time. Who gets to decide

what the Constitution means? For most of American history, it wasn't the Supreme Court.

It was the people themselves. It's your constitution.

In this episode, what it looks like to take that seriously.

This is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

And I'm Mark Joseph Stern.

Welcome to episode two of By the People, a series of podcast episodes and print articles exploring how the American people can reclaim the Constitution from this monarchic Supreme Court.

Go to slate.com slash by the people to join the conversation. We'll kick things off right after a break.

Dahlia, picking up from where we left off last week, you talked about learned helplessness.

What did you mean by that in the context of the Supreme Court and the Constitution?

We were talking about this very relatively recent, near universal acceptance of this idea that the Supreme Court is the sole arbiter of what the Constitution means.

In my conversation with legal scholar Larry Kramer, the man who well popularized the phrase popular

constitutionalism, Larry talked about various inflection points that got us there, the rights

fight against New Deal legislation put forth by FDR,

and then the Warren courts turned toward thinking about a multiracial, progressive constitution.

...