For in the end laws are just words on a page — words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

...what troubled me [about Republican policies in my first year in the Senate] was the process — or lack of process — by which the White House and its congressional allies disposed of opposing views; the sense that the rules of governing no longer applied, and that there were no fixed meanings or standards to which we could appeal.

The irony, of course, was that such disregard of the rules and the manipulation of language to achieve a particular outcome were precisely what conservatives had long accused liberals of doing.

With words, with rules, with procedures and precedents — with law — Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjugation in ways that mere violence never could.

I wondered if, in our reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy.

...procedural rules of our government help ... define our democracy just as much as elections do.

...for all our disagreements we would be hard pressed to find a conservative or a liberal in America today ... who doesn't subscribe to the basic set of individual liberties identified by the Founders and enshrined in our Constitution and our common law...

We also understand that a declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough.