The only substance those documents ever had were aesthetics. The founders themselves routinely violated them (the Sedition act and the Loisiana Purchase, for instance), contrived powers out of nowhere (Marbury v. Madison), only to arbitrarily decided those powers are meaningless whenever it suits them (by refusing to enforce rulings like Worcester v. Georgia). I don’t think anything the contemporary court had done is any more contrived than claiming the Sedition Act does not infringe the right to free speech in 1798. It has always been this stupid. It has always been a game of Calvinball for burger slave owners. This is the epitome of bourgeois democracy.

These documents are nothing more than totems, but they are (small r) republican flavored totems. The rough contours of republicanism still need to be observed. Things like “the first amendment” and “the second amendment” come from this thing which says we have elections every other year. Of course, the right doesn’t give a shit about free speech or equal rights to own firearms, but this framing is so deeply embedded in their worldview that I don’t think it is ever going away. If the powers that be decide to switch to some kind of hereditary autocracy or military junta or benevolent dictator for life or something, the right genuinely would fracture and grow a thousand-fold more incoherent. A lot of the right’s rhetorical power runs on inertia. On the white-washed fanciful history of the US received by over a hundred million people when they went to grade school. A lot of the military brass (though certainly not all) are true believers as well. The Liberals aren’t the only zealots of civic religion.

The two term thing specifically, they could get rid of that and easily justify it as a product of the 20th century. Running a sham election for a third term is a much smaller stretch than declaring a new republic. Micheal Bloomberg already did it in New York City.