The day before the Supreme Court made Trump a king, I visited the National Archives.
It was my first visit in more than a decade. What’s to see other than that Declaration of Independence?
A lot. After peering at the faded words of the Constitution in the Rotunda, I went downstairs.
There I found Records of Rights, an exhibit that highlights how Americans have debated about and fought for rights like free speech, religion, and equality.
The first thing you see is a rare copy of the Magna Carta that David Rubenstein paid $21 million for and then donated to the Archives.
Signed in 1215, it is the first document to put into writing the principle that the king and his government was not above the law.
It’s what separates us from the despots of the past – or at least, that’s what I was taught. We do not have absolute rulers in Western world. Every person is equal before the law.
Rubenstein should add a giant asterisk to the Magna Carta now, for the Supreme Court gave Trump something no English King or American President ever had: immunity from prosecution. He can literally shoot someone in Fifth Avenue, call it an official act, and walk free.
The rest of the Records of Rights depicts history in the style of American exceptionalism. There’s a section on how women won the vote. Civil rights gets a shout-out and marriage equality.
Inside, you’ll find this moving quote from Barbara Jordan, the Watergate-era congresswoman who grew under segregation in Texas.
“We, the people.” It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We, the people.” I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We, the people.”
The theme is progress, that notion that the long arc of history bends toward justice, to paraphrase President Obama paraphrasing Martin Luther King.
Yet, even in this temple to American democracy, there are discordant notes. In a panel on the 14th and 15th Amendments, passed after the Civil War and intended to give black Americans equal rights, there’s a mention of how the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Barbara Jordan became a member of Congress in the 1970s because of the Voting Rights Act. Now, Southern states can return to the discriminatory practices of the past without federal interference.
The centerpiece of Records of Rights is an interactive display table, where you can scroll through documents of our rights, neatly organized by categories including privacy, equality, speech, etc…
Included in the digital collection is a copy of Roe v Wade and a note that it was repealed in 2022. With it an absurd quote from Samuel Alito, of upside-down flag fame:
“the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.”
The Constitution doesn’t mention a lot of things (women, cars, the internet) but does talk a lot about enslaved humans and keeping British troops out of your house.
Records of Rights describes how the American people took these archaic documents and evolved them to meet the needs of a dynamic, free country.
The Supreme Court has crumpled up these documents, from the Magna Carta onward, and thrown them in the trash. With an absolute monarch at the helm, no right is safe.
Records of Rights is an exhibit infused with American exceptionalism, that we aren’t like Russia, Germany or other countries that have fallen into barbarism.
This is a dangerous and naive idea.
As Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, put it:
This is something that Americans often get wrong. We think that because we’re America, everything will work itself out. This is exactly what the founders refused to believe. They thought human nature is such that you have to constrain it by institutions. They preferred rule of law and checks and balances. They were the opposite of American exceptionalists.
The men who signed the Constitution loathed monarchs (that’s the whole point of America, remember?). They set up three equal branches of government to prevent the rise of tyrant, something that the Supreme Court has willfully overturned.
The curators of Records of Rights were smart to make the interactive table of documents a digital display, one that can be easily updated as the Supreme Court takes ours away.
