It is notable that two important documents in our constitutional tradition—the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation—offer ways of understanding of freedom—the Declaration removes the tyranny of the Monarch and the Emancipation, the tyranny of the Master.

the constitution is a public and political document as much as a legal one and constitutional meaning is a public and political process. trump can say X but other political institutions, and the nation’s various publics, have to agree for it to mean anything