This paper explores the discontinuities in the current constitutional order as both conservatives and liberals insist on "taking the Constitution away from the Court." It does so by focusing on the turn to popular constitutionalism by prominent liberal legal scholars, illustrating how elements that were most prominently associated with conservatives have been used to criticize and even hold at bay aspects of a potentially conservative constitutional vision. In fact, popular constitutionalism shares many of the featuresâas do calls for judicial minimalismâthat were expressed in conservative critiques of the Warren Court. Yet left constitutional scholars have turned to these very features to prop up the legacy of the Warren Court against its conservative critics. This is a result, I suggest, given popular constitutionalists situation in "political time"âthat is, after Ronald Reagan's 1980 election and subsequent conservative electoral victories which sparked a debate about constitutional fundamentals that shapes our current constitutional discourse. While popular constitutionalism is part of a broader scholarly turn in constitutional theory which has happily gone beyond the Court in examining the contours of American constitutionalism, popular constitutionalists have drawn on these elements to insist upon the terms of progressive and New Deal constitutionalism as the equivalent of a "new" Constitution or a foundational "settlement." If conservatives challenged the "liberal order" of the Warren Court years and the New Deal "breakthrough" on some issues, liberals have sought to preserve this order against what many of them deemed a conservative or "collaborationist" Court. But, as the prominent conservative critiques of the Court indicate, the Rehnquist Court has been "liberal" as often at it has been "conservative." In fact, arguments about the Rehnquist Court, and now the Roberts' Court, are often proxies for arguments about the continued legitimacy of the New Deal breakthrough. Yet, in defending the New Deal order these scholars have attempted to merge the Great Society and the Warren Court as natural developments of the New Deal, which might be best seen as attempts to prop up a fractured constitutional order, uneasily pushing it in new directions, while holding conservative constitutional understandings at bay. In a curious inversion, I argue that left liberal defenders of the New Deal order have already broken with parts of its legacy, while conservative critics of the Court adhere to elements of the New Deal breakthrough. Given these discontinuities, our constitutional politics cannot be readily characterized as liberal or conservative. It is not simply that the Court itself embraces these discontinuities, which may well be why both the left and the right seek to "take the Constitution away from the courts" at particular moments. While the Court may reflect the current "political regime," such a descriptive understanding does not capture the particular shape that constitutional argumentsâincluding Supreme Court opinionsâhave taken in the wake of the New Deal breakthrough. Nor does this understanding explain the arguments put forward by popular constitutionalists in relation to the success of conservatives in partially altering the constitutional landscape. The connection between these two is the focus of this paper. In tracing out these incongruities, this paper begins by examining the turn to popular constitutionalism, rooting it in earlier progressive thought... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]