Drawing on six decades of American legislative history; from the doomed Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the landmark Social Security Amendments of 1965 to the federal policy dismantling underway today, the pattern is the same: rights do not sustain themselves. With 7,000 Social Security Administration positions eliminated, nearly one million disability determinations backlogged, 250 Civil Rights Division attorneys gone, and fifty years of disparate-impact enforcement rescinded, what is being lost is not being lost through repeal. It is being lost the same way it was lost before — quietly, technically, and incrementally, justified as efficiency while the human cost accumulates out of public view. The collapse of Reconstruction is not ancient history. It is the instruction manual.