"The ultimate, and supreme "Binding Promise" is the United States Constitution."
The only problem with that single, clear, declarative sentence, Ken, is that there are two competing and ultimately unsatisfying interpretative schools, the biggest dilemma of contemporary constitutional jurisprudence: the conservative originalist tradition of "original public meaning" and the liberal or progressive tradition with its advocacy of a "living constitution" of evolving meaning.
The dilemma is a long way from being settled.
The evolving living constitution argument is intellectually dishonest. The fact that the original Constitution had and has a mechanism in it for making those changes that need to be made to it proves that it was meant to be and is "originalist". We now have twenty seven amendments to the Constitution. They were put there by the mechanisms prescribed in the original Constitution. Those mechanisms would not have been in there had the Constitution meant that it could be changed by a Federal District Judge in Lubbock, Texas or by the legislative branch or by the executive branch or by the Supreme Court of the federal government.
