Narrator: What if the most profound changes to constitutional law don't happen in a courtroom? Imagine a president, at the height of his wartime power with a 90% approval rating, being forced to abandon his most extreme policies, not by a court order, but by a coalition of lawyers, foreign governments, and the ghosts of past injustices. Picture a right to marry for same-sex couples, once a fringe idea, becoming the law of the land after decades of setbacks and strategic shifts. Consider how the Second Amendment, for two centuries understood primarily as a collective right for militias, was fundamentally reinterpreted as a personal right to own a gun. These transformations seem like the work of landmark Supreme Court decisions, but that’s only the end of the story. In his book Engines of Liberty, author and legal scholar David Cole argues that the true power to make and change constitutional law lies not with judges, but with the relentless, strategic, and often unseen work of citizen activists.

Narrator: The journey to marriage equality is a powerful lesson in how to turn devastating losses into strategic victories. For decades, the gay rights movement focused on a "politics of protection"—carving out safe spaces and fighting basic discrimination. The idea of marriage was a distant, almost unthinkable goal. In fact, an early court victory in Hawaii during the 1990s proved disastrous. The Hawaii Supreme Court suggested that denying marriage to same-sex couples might be unconstitutional, but this legal win triggered a massive political backlash. Congress swiftly passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and dozens of states enacted their own laws and constitutional amendments to prohibit same-sex marriage.

The movement learned a crucial lesson: court victories are hollow without popular support. Activists realized they were in a marathon, not a sprint. In Vermont, lawyers Susan Murray and Beth Robinson deliberately held off on filing a lawsuit, instead spending years building a grassroots coalition. They trained advocates to share their personal stories, humanizing the issue for legislators and the public. This patient work led to the creation of civil unions, a critical stepping-stone.

The most significant learning came from the heartbreaking defeat of Proposition 8 in California in 2008, which banned same-sex marriage. Post-mortems of the campaign revealed that arguments about "rights" and "equality" were not persuading conflicted voters. Opponents had successfully framed the issue around fear, particularly about what children would be taught in schools. In response, the movement completely retooled its message for a 2012 ballot initiative in Maine. The new campaign, "Mainers United for Marriage," shifted the focus from abstract rights to the tangible values of love, commitment, and family. Ads featured straight, trusted messengers—like a 90-year-old World War II veteran speaking proudly of his lesbian granddaughter—to talk about family and fairness. This strategy of "losing forward," of learning from defeat and refining their approach, created the cultural and political momentum that made the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges not a radical leap, but the final step in a long-fought revolution.

Narrator: For nearly two hundred years, the prevailing legal consensus was that the Second Amendment protected a collective right for states to maintain a militia, not an individual right to own a gun for self-defense. The story of how that interpretation was completely overturned is a masterclass in long-term constitutional strategy, engineered primarily by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

The transformation began in 1977 at an NRA convention in Cincinnati. In what became known as the "Cincinnati Revolt," hard-line activists staged a coup, ousting the old guard leadership who saw the NRA as a sporting and marksmanship club. The new leadership remade the organization into a formidable, single-issue political lobby dedicated to one goal: defending gun rights. Recognizing that federal courts were hostile to their view, the NRA adopted a brilliant two-pronged strategy.

First, they set out to change history itself. They began funding a new generation of "revisionist" legal scholars, like Stephen Halbrook, to produce a mountain of academic work arguing that the founders always intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual right. This scholarship, once a fringe view, gradually became the "standard model" in law schools, creating an intellectual foundation for future court challenges.

Second, they pursued a state-by-state strategy to build a legal culture favorable to gun rights. Led by formidable lobbyists like Marion Hammer in Florida, the NRA pushed states to pass "preemption" laws, which stripped cities of the power to pass local gun control, and "shall-issue" laws, which made it far easier for citizens to obtain concealed carry permits. By 2001, thirty-five states had laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples, but forty-five states had preemption laws protecting gun rights. This decades-long campaign in statehouses and law journals created an environment where the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which finally recognized an individual right to bear arms, felt less like a revolution and more like an affirmation of a reality the NRA had already built.

Narrator: In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the Bush administration asserted sweeping executive powers in the name of national security. It declared a "war on terror," established a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay designed to be a "law-free zone," and authorized torture and warrantless surveillance. Civil liberties groups faced a monumental challenge. Unlike the marriage equality and gun rights movements, they had no natural, self-interested constituency. Their clients were often foreign nationals, accused terrorists, and the principles they defended—due process, habeas corpus, and the rule of law—were abstract.

Forced to innovate, these groups developed a set of powerful alternative strategies. One of the most effective was transnational advocacy. Because many Guantánamo detainees were citizens of allied nations like Great Britain, lawyers like Clive Stafford Smith of the organization Reprieve didn't just file lawsuits in U.S. courts; they went to London. They used the British legal system and media to pressure the UK government to advocate for its own citizens. Public outcry in Britain, fueled by images of hooded detainees and reports of abuse, eventually forced Prime Minister Tony Blair to demand the repatriation of British nationals.

Another key strategy was leveraging the power of transparency. The ACLU filed a massive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that forced the government to release thousands of documents, including the infamous "torture memos." This disclosure, combined with the leak of the Abu Ghraib photos, exposed the administration's actions to the world and made its claims of humane treatment impossible to defend. Finally, advocates invoked the ghost of Korematsu v. United States—the shameful Supreme Court decision that upheld the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. By framing the Guantánamo detentions as a potential repeat of that historic mistake, they cautioned the courts against granting the executive branch a blank check during wartime. These outside pressures, more than any single court order, are what ultimately forced the Bush administration to curtail its most extreme policies.

Narrator: The single most important lesson from Engines of Liberty is that the U.S. Constitution is not a static, self-enforcing document handed down from on high. It is a living text whose meaning is constantly forged in the fires of public debate and social action. The stories of marriage equality, gun rights, and the war on terror reveal that liberty is rarely won in a single, decisive court battle. It is the culmination of years, sometimes decades, of work by ordinary citizens in legislatures, in the media, in academic journals, and in conversations with their neighbors.

David Cole’s work challenges us to see constitutional law not as the exclusive domain of judges and lawyers, but as a participatory democratic process. The courts are powerful, but they are often the last to ratify the changes that civil society has already set in motion. This leaves us with a profound and empowering question: if the Constitution is truly powered by the people, what role will you play in driving its engine?