It’s a surprise to see a New York Times columnist call for a restoration of the Constitution in Exile. It’s an even bigger surprise to see that the columnist is Linda Greenhouse.

For years, liberal legal commentators have been fond of accusing conservatives of pining for the restoration of the “Constitution in Exile” — a return to pre-FDR conservative constitutional jurisprudence that would (by their telling) roll back the New Deal, the Great Society, and more or less every other major liberal legislative triumph of the twentieth century. But while Jeffrey Rosen, Linda Greenhouse, Jeffrey Toobin, Cass Sunstein, and others often invoked phrase, few if any conservative legal thinkers have actually employed the phrase affirmatively, other than one federal judge in a magazine article fifteen years ago.