It’s not often that you see a US senator declare that “we’re not a democracy,” let alone to paint that as a good thing. Yet that’s exactly what Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) did in a pair of tweets spanning Wednesday night and Thursday morning, arguing that “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that,” Lee writes.

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On the American right, there is a long tradition of arguing that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy,” a distinction its proponents trace back to the founders. It centers not on whether a nation holds competitive elections but the extent to which it puts constraints on majorities from restricting the rights of minorities. Democracies, on this definition, allow for untrammeled majority rule; republics put in place rules that prevent legislators from using their power in tyrannical ways (think the Bill of Rights).

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The spin offered by Lee and others on the right, historically speaking, originated as arguments for curbing democracy in the ordinary sense of the word — the ability of majorities to enact popular policies (that conservatives disapproved of). Warning against “the tyranny of the majority” serves as a justification for minority rule.

Quite a lot more in the article.

But there’s something even more odd about how conservatives like Barrett apply originalism. Because they seem to believe that the “original meaning” of every word and phrase just happens to be a conservative meaning. And where they can’t find the meaning that they want, these dedicated preservationists have a second approach … throw it out. Throw it all out. Like the entire 14th Amendment.

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As far as the 14th Amendment goes, it includes what are now referred to as the Citizenship Clause, the Privileges Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause. In short, it says that everyone born in the United States is a full citizen, with the full rights due to a citizen, and can’t be deprived of those rights unless they’re given due process of law. All of this makes the 14th Amendment integral to questions of citizenship, and foundational for Civil Rights legislation. It’s such an important amendment, that legal scholars have called it “the second Constitution” for its attempts to tear out the elements of slavery built into the original document. Among other things, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rests entirely on the authority granted to Congress by the 14th Amendment.

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Back in 2011, The Atlantic took a look at this question and how conservative Republicans became “14th Amendment deniers.” For some Republicans, the 14th Amendment was viewed as being only intended to help those who had been directly enslaved, and not applicable to future generations. This view has become common in right-wing media, and sorry as that sounds, it’s not even the most radical view. The even uglier approach has been to outright challenge the validity of 14th Amendment because members of Confederate states were not seated in Congress when the amendment was proposed just after the end of the Civil War. Because of this, say the deniers, the Congress itself was illegitimate, and so anything it recommended—including the 14th and 15th Amendments—are illegitimate.