Republicans want bad things. And we still have a democracy for now.
So, they predictably want to represent their bad things as good things.
One of these sheep outfits the republicans like to dress their wolf policies in is “originalism”.
They love to try to claim they’re some sort of all-American super-patriots because the founding fathers were AMAZING and wrote an AMAZING constitution and we should respect that!
It sounds pretty good, if you don’t scratch it and let the smell of the excrement escape.
These people do not care about, do not respect, anything about the founding fathers, really (even if some think they do). They use them for their own purposes, trying to steal their credibility.
That’s all they want. Like a beer company putting a picture of its bottle in the hand of a pretty girl in an ad, they are trying to get voters to equate ‘supporting the founding fathers’ with supporting them.
The whole idea is bankrupt to try to apply 1789 to today in some ways.
The world, our society, our needs, our resources, have changed.
the founding fathers wanted us to use rationality to create policies — not to use leeches as our healthcare policy because they did in 1789.
It makes absolutely, zero, sense to claim that we have to try to interpret everything just as it was.
One other way it’s a lie is to pretend that the issue is the legitimate issue of respecting what the constitution DOES say.
There is a legitimate issue that because the constitution is interpreted by people, its words can literally mean nothing if the people who interpret it decide they do.
And there are pressures for it to say things other than it does — that’s why we need it at all, to try to have rules limiting those pressures from getting their way.
But what Republicans do is equate that legitimate issue, with the false claim that every application of the constitutional principles that aren’t exactly the same as things were in 1789 that they don’t like — important qualifier there, that they don’t like, because they only apply this if they want the result changed — is equally violating the constitution.
What the founding fathers ACTUALLY said was that they wanted the country to keep adapting to new developments.
They didn’t WANT our healthcare policy in 2017 set by the circumstances in 1789.
But Republicans don’t look at what they actually wanted (and even if they did, it’s a very valid question whether we SHOULD slavishly stick to 1789 views on specific policies.
Again, we SHOULD stick to the principles of the constitution — NOT to the things that are not principles int he constitution, but have changed.
Another example — Republicans like like to say little more about their originalism than their attack that ‘liberal judges like to invent rights and say they’re in the constitution’.
You know what the founding fathers would say about Democrats doing that? Yes, you do, because you can read what they said in the 9th and 10th amendments.
Which say explicitly that there are all kinds of rights the people have, which are NOT listed in the constitution like free speech but are equally protected.
So it’s the founding fathers saying to find all those rights that aren’t listed. But when it comes to following the founding fathers on the 9th and 10th and finding those rights — crickets from Republicans. Republicans would like to pretend the 9th and 10th don’t exist, that there are no other rights (unless it’s one they want to find, like the right to use money in our elections).
The constitution is vague. Judges are going to have to invent what it means. The honest thing is to describe it that way and argue which interpretation is better. But it doesn’t sound as good as saying “I’m following the actual intent of the constitution, and that means if you disagree, you’re not”. Originalism is a false claim to try to give its side the ‘official’ stamp of being the ‘correct’ view that is the only one that follows the constitution. And that propaganda fools many.
In short, Republicans are all too good at this propaganda and we need to oppose it.
When they want to pass libertarian plutocracy and impoverish the American people, they name it “freedom”.
When they want to deny equal rights to gay people, they call the issue “family”.
And when they want to re-write the constitution to strip it of its protections for the American people, they call it ‘originalism’ and attack Democrats as being the people not respecting it.
Originalism has its sincere adherent. It has some amount of somewhat shoddy support. But its heart is nothing more than propaganda to justify interpreting the constitution to serve plutocracy.
Many people in the legal profession are led by the nose to support this, especially by the Federalist Society.
And they’re happy little soldiers, thinking they’re ‘protecting’ the constitution.
How many of them notice the wizard brothers named Koch behind the curtains, funding the society, along with others, because it’s promoting the destruction of the constitution to benefit them?
Originalism. An absurd notion to slavishly do things the same as 1789 in ways that make no sense, that violate the founding fathers’ desire for us to adapt, dishonestly applied by just throwing the label ‘originalism’ on any position they want, and trying to steal the credibility of the founding fathers for their evil corruption.
When a Republican wraps themselves in the flag to argue ‘originalism’, call them out.
Recognize what it really is — an attack to destroy the constitution made attractive by claiming to protect it.
The constitution really does have a weakness — it is a piece of paper with some ink on it that means nothing more than what 5 people say it does, who are appointed by a highly interested process to get people who will say it means what they want them to say, who are now farmed and indoctrinated their whole lives to follow an ideology. We do want to protect it and keep it followed. But originalism is the wolf attacking it in the name of protecting it.