The Founders said no, but today Congress and the courts aren’t so sure

If the passage of time were a reliable guarantor of increasing human freedom, we would expect history to look a little different than it does. In school, we would have learned that the Englishmen of Charles I’s reign were better off than their Elizabethan grandparents; that the colonists implicated by the Declaratory Act had fairer prospects than those who had been governed with what Burke called “salutary neglect”; that the Germans of 1935 possessed an advantage over those of the Bismarcksche Reichsverfassung. That we did not learn any of this should tell us something. As Thomas Jefferson had it, “the …