one basic takeaway i’ve had from reading, at this point, a couple thousand pages on the writing and ratification of the constitution is that those bamas didn’t even agree amongst themselves what the Constitution meant at the time of ratification https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1316003676918513664

ah yes, the ignorant take is that “the constitution was a political document that sought to build a working mechanism for self government while satisfying a large number of mutually exclusive interests” and the smart take is “no it’s not” https://twitter.com/jlandmesser1983/status/1316013150899068930

mine isn’t an argument about legislative history, it’s an argument about the political disputes around ratification as well as the subsequent decade of american politics. https://twitter.com/mario_a_loyola/status/1316076953405919234

“the full structural implications of what the words meant” was contested from the moment the ink was dry to the moment it went into effect to the moment actual officeholders tried to exercise those powers.

everyone claims fealty to some original meaning, and what it means for something to be an “original meaning” is constructed and reconstructed again and again, generation after generation.

And as much as Americans might want to have some approach that provides a definitive rule for what is constitutional and what isn’t, that just isn’t possible. Instead, we have and will always have contested “original meanings.”