The Constitution became a little simpler with last week’s decisions on guns and abortion, as the Supreme Court’s conservative wing pared back decades of legal rulemaking and declared the founding document means pretty much what it says — and only that.
In the dual rulings, the high court tossed out nearly 50 years of abortion precedent and more than a decade of appellate court experimentation with the Second Amendment.
Instead, the justices laid out a basic test: If it would have been unrecognizable to the people who wrote and ratified that part of the Constitution or to the generations who came soon after, it probably can’t survive.