I bring this book to a close with a reflection on constitutional time, and return to a phrase that continues to resonate in discussions of Hong Kong’s legal order: “remain unchanged for fifty years.” To “remain unchanged” is to engage in a suspension of time, to create a temporal hiatus whereby a system, an idea of who one is, and a way of life is preserved. I approach Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (released in 2004), in which a writer conjures up a place where nothing changes in the science fiction stories he creates, as an exploration of the potential finality of the Basic Law and Hong Kong identity, and of what it might mean to suspend time through a constitutional document.

In this concluding chapter, I consider how the development of a particular attachment to the founding has shaped constitutional development in the United States and how an alterative grounding in the constitutional thought of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson might provide intellectual resources for a renewed democratic constitutionalism in contemporary American politics.

Missouri’s application for statehood was immediately and universally recognized as a moment of crisis for the Union. The resolution of the crisis would come in the form of a compromise that came to structure antebellum responses to intersectional conflict over slavery until its collapse in the Civil War. But in moving toward this compromise, these congressional debates generated important components of a constitutional imaginary that would be invoked to navigate constitutional debates over slavery in the following decades. Three elements are evident in the congressional debates over Missouri’s admission that provided building blocks for future constitutional development; the notion of a chronological gap between an authoritative founding and the contemporary moment, the idea of compromise, and the deployment of a founding spirit as a basis for deriving constitutional meaning. This chapter traces the complex interactions of these elements within the Missouri debates, showing that while they failed to consolidate into a singular constitutional imaginary they provided the context within which the history discussed in the following chapters unfolded.