After a quiet century or so, the scope of Congress’s power “[t]o lay and collect taxes” is once again in the news. The taxing power was at issue when the Supreme Court issued a decision that President (and Chief Justice) Taft would later call the worst injury to the Court’s reputation ever, Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust, striking down the Income Tax Act of 1894. That decision was largely reversed by the 1913 enactment of the Sixteenth Amendment. Today the taxing power is one of three grounds on which the federal government defends the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, particularly the individual responsibility requirement (IRR)—the portion of the Act requiring each individual to purchase insurance or pay a penalty tax.

William Eskridge, Jr., and John Ferejohn’s magnum opus on “small ‘c’” constitutionalism and the republic of statutes is an unusually wide-ranging work of legal and political analysis, one that defies comprehensive summary. In this Essay, we bore in on a central element of their thesis: the idea of entrenchment. In A Republic of Statutes, legal entrenchment is used to tether the authors’ normative theory of American constitutionalism to a positive political theory of law. Entrenchment purports to explain how superstatutes arise from successful social movements; further, it explains how these statutes, and the administrative apparatus built to implement the policies encoded in these statutes, become durable features of our American constitutional structure. Insofar as entrenchment does the heavy lifting in A Republic of Statutes, it is imperative that we have a clear picture of what entrenchment means. Such meaning, however, will be elusive.

There is a widespread intuition that the Constitution provides much less than a full blueprint of the structure and powers of the contemporary federal government. Even if we regard judicial doctrine as part of the “Large ‘C’” Constitution, the intuition still seems valid. In particular, it is hard to account for the extraordinary increase in presidential power that Arthur Schlesinger has described as the “imperial presidency,” and which is critiqued in Bruce Ackerman’s most recent work, simply in terms of formal amendments and judicial precedents. A reasonable starting point for inquiry is that some part of the path of constitutional change lies outside the ordinary legal process. This creates the theoretical challenge of how to understand the nature of what William Eskridge and John Ferejohn call the “small ‘c’” constitution in their monumental new work, A Republic of Statutes.

We can draw a rough distinction between standard and unconventional approaches to the study of constitutional change outside the formal amendment process enshrined in Article V. A standard approach is one that emphasizes the inescapable reality of the “living Constitution” and the common law role of the judiciary in adapting the Constitution to changing circumstances over time. Such a theory might also nod to “the Constitution outside the courts”—meaning how the executive and legislative branches have contributed to the development of constitutional meaning.

I. America’s Two Health Care Constitutions

The United States has two health care constitutions, and the old is the enemy of the new. The recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the latest step in the federal government’s incremental efforts over the past half century to construct and entrench a modern constitution of health security similar to those enjoyed by citizens in most other advanced democracies. At present, this constitution of health security is wobbly and uncertain, embodied in a pastiche of several statutes of various vintages, heavily reliant on private employers as the primary insurers for most Americans and only halfheartedly embraced by the American public. Yet for all of this present uncertainty and complexity, the PPACA stands as a potentially transformative policy achievement that may one day come to be regarded, as Social Security and Medicare are now, as a central component of the “constitution of statutes” that is the subject of William Eskridge and John Ferejohn’s splendid new book, A Republic of Statutes: The New American Constitution.