Politics & Power Quote by William J. Brennan, Jr.

Brennan’s line is a candid admission disguised as modesty: constitutional interpretation is never a neutral act, and the Court’s authority depends on pretending otherwise. By saying “the only way that we can,” he shrugs off the fantasy of time travel originalism. The justices are not ventriloquists for 1787; they are moral and political actors embedded in a living culture, with 20th-century anxieties about rights, pluralism, and state power pressing against 18th-century parchment.

The subtext is both defensive and strategic. Defensive, because critics of the Warren Court era often framed expansive readings of liberty and equality as judicial freelancing. Brennan counters: interpretation inevitably happens through contemporary eyes, so the honest move is to acknowledge that lens rather than smuggle it in under the label of “history.” Strategic, because the phrase “20th-century Americans” quietly democratizes the Court’s project. He positions constitutional meaning as something tethered to the nation’s evolving commitments, not to a small set of founding-era intentions that can be selectively invoked.

Context matters: Brennan is writing in a century marked by Brown v. Board, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, free-speech battles, and the civil rights revolution. The Constitution became less a blueprint for government mechanics and more a platform for contested claims about dignity. Brennan’s sentence works because it punctures judicial mystique while reinforcing legitimacy: it asks the public to accept that constitutional fidelity is not antiquarian worship, but a continuous argument between inherited text and present-day conscience.