 This proposal about the scope of public reason has been subject to two main challenges. First, some doubt that there is a coherent way of drawing the distinction between constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice on the one hand, and matters of ordinary political legislation on the other (Greenawalt 1994, 685–86). Almost everything the government chooses to do (or not to do) would seem to have an impact, even if indirect, on the basic rights and liberties of citizens, or else on the distribution of resources in society. Second, assuming a satisfactory answer to the first question is possible; we can ask why public reason should be restricted in the way Rawls proposes? Why not extend public reason to all instances where citizens exercise political power over one another? Rawls offers no well-developed answer to this question, though a number of possible arguments can be found in his work. These arguments appeal either to the special importance of the basic structure of society, or to the basic interests of citizens, or to the importance of public reason being complete, that is, of being capable of generating at least one determinate answer to important political questions. But some deny any of these arguments, or some conjunction of them, can in fact justify restricting the scope of public reason to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice (Quong 2011, 273–289. But see Neufeld 2022, 59–60; and Watson and Hartley 2018, 62–87 for defenses of the narrow scope view).