This is part of Amicus and Slate’s “By the People” series, which explores how the American people can reclaim the Constitution—and the law—from this monarchical Supreme Court.

In 1991, former Chief Justice Warren Burger renounced the then-nascent push to reinterpret the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear arms. Appearing on PBS NewsHour, the conservative jurist condemned this campaign as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Burger, a Richard Nixon appointee, was no outlier: Across the partisan spectrum, leading constitutional lawyers agreed that the Constitution did not create a personal right to possess guns. A year earlier, Erwin Griswold, solicitor general for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, said that the pro-gun argument “exceeds the limits of principled advocacy.” Shortly before that, the far-right Judge Robert Bork—formerly Nixon’s solicitor general and attorney general—said that the Second Amendment protects state militias, not individuals. Bork, whose own nomination for the Supreme Court was famously defeated over his extreme right-wing views, deemed all state gun restrictions “probably constitutional.”

Less than 20 years later, the Supreme Court announced in D.C. v. Heller that Burger, Bork, and their contemporaries had it all wrong: The Second Amendment had guaranteed an individual right to bear arms the whole time. Of course, the constitutional text remained the same. What changed was the nation’s understanding of it. Over decades, gun rights activists transformed a position dismissed by Burger and Bork into a cornerstone of conservative constitutional identity. They built a political movement around their ahistorical, atextual interpretation. Buoyed by lavish funding from the industries that stood to benefit, these activists elected lawmakers who embraced their view, then elevated judges who would translate it into law. By the time Heller reached the Supreme Court, the individual-right theory did not appear radical to the conservative majority. It looked inevitable.

Second Amendment advocates like to frame Heller as a triumph of originalism, and SCOTUS certainly sold it that way. But in truth, it is popular constitutionalism all the way down. Yale Law professor Reva Siegel laid out this fact in a renowned law review article months after the decision came down, and her observation has only grown more prescient with time. The Republican-appointed supermajority has spent the past........

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