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The Heritage Foundation’s clause-by-clause analysis, to be published next month, is an originalist manifesto and a showcase for aspiring Supreme Court nominees.
Sept. 9, 2025, 10:43 a.m. ET
With a preface by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and contributions from more than 30 conservative judges, the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank that has helped shape the Trump administration’s second-term agenda, will soon publish an 800-page, clause-by-clause analysis of the Constitution.
“The Heritage Guide to the Constitution” is a kind of judicial counterpart to Project 2025, the group’s blueprint for the executive branch. The new book urges lawyers and judges to view every provision of the Constitution through the lens of originalism, which has come to dominate conservative legal thought since the Reagan years and calls for constitutional cases to be decided based on the document’s original meaning.
The book, shared with The New York Times ahead of its October publication, also serves as a showcase for potential Supreme Court nominees should President Trump have an opportunity to appoint a fourth justice. Almost every judge who has been mentioned as a possible candidate for a vacancy on the court contributed an essay or served as an adviser to the project.
The book’s 18-member “judicial advisory board” included Judges James C. Ho and Andrew S. Oldham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Judge Amul R. Thapar of the Sixth Circuit, Judge Neomi Rao of the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Patrick J. Bumatay of the Ninth Circuit. All have been named as possible nominees for the Supreme Court.
When Mr. Trump was running for president in 2016, he broke with a tradition of candidates demurring about the identity of likely picks for the court by issuing lists of possible nominees, crediting the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation with helping to draw them up.
Mr. Trump has since soured on the first organization. “I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media in May, after losing a case testing the legality of his tariffs.
