Sean Wilentz

Robert Sean Wilentz (/wɪˈlɛnts/; born February 20, 1951) is an American historian who serves as the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Quotes

• Over the past forty years the doctrine of originalism (along with its sibling, textualism) has been the cornerstone of the jurisprudence of the conservative majority that now dominates the [Supreme] Court. Concocted in the 1980s to roll back the constitutional precedents of the New Deal and Great Society eras, supposedly in the name of judicial restraint, originalism purports to divine the original intentions of the framers by presenting tendentious renderings of the past as a kind of scripture. This bad-faith invocation of the framers has become a ploy to justify overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating commonsense gun regulation, and more. But now this originalist petard is exploding in the majority’s face. No degree of cherry-picking or obfuscation can deny the historical record of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is unequivocal: if Donald Trump engaged, in any way, in the insurrection of January 6, he is automatically barred from holding any public office, federal or state.
  • "The Case for Disqualification", The New York Review of Books (February 22, 2024)

• The majority opinion in Trump v. United States, the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history, secures the monumental historic disgrace of the John Roberts Court. Since last winter, the Supreme Court has intervened directly in the 2024 presidential campaign by effectively shielding Donald Trump from being tried on major federal charges before the November election. No previous Supreme Court has protected a political candidate in this way. Far more ominously, in March the Court in Trump v. Anderson openly nullified the section of the Fourteenth Amendment that bars insurrectionists from holding federal or state office, discarding basic lessons about threats to American democracy dating back to the Civil War. Now, in Trump v. United States, handed down on the last day of its 2023–2024 term, the Court has seized the opportunity to invent, with no textual basis, "at least presumptive" and quite possibly "absolute" presidential criminal immunity for official acts, a decision so broad that it essentially places the presidency above the law.
  • "The ‘Dred Scott’ of Our Time", The New York Review of Books (July 4, 2024)
  • The article title is a reference to the Dred Scott v. Sandford of 1857 which ruled the American Constitution did not extend citizenship rights to people of black African descent.