[Stares in historian.] https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1316003676918513664

Has Amy Coney Barrett ever read interpretations of the constitution from, say, 1910? Or 1850? Does she think those past jurists just got the Constitution wrong but she won’t?

I believe “hubris” is a term one might use to describe the idea that I, in 2020, can discern the stable and unchanging meaning of a 1787 document, a meaning that past jurists have argued about since the founding.

Anyway, originalism is intellectually incoherent for numerous reasons. It makes an excellent rhetorical cover for far right judicial activism, however. https://twitter.com/sethcotlar/status/1315365756796727296

Hamilton clearly thought it was acceptable for social media companies to harvest and sell the data you produce as you use the internet and not just their sites alone, but only if you anonymize the data using ISP numbers. I think he said that in an 1804 letter to Fisher Ames.

Also, by “arms,” the writers of the 2nd Amendment meant AR-15s, but not nuclear tipped missiles or tanks equipped with anti-aircraft guns. I think Gouvernor Morris wrote that in his diary.

When the Constitution was written, the biggest city in the US had a population of 30,000 and you could walk across it in 15 minutes. 20% of the population was enslaved. “The nation” stretched only 300 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean. Most of North America was Indian Country.

50 years after the Constitution was written, John Fanning Watson, who was born in the 1780s, took his first ride on a railroad and was blown away by the dizzying speed of 10-15 miles an hour! He couldn’t even count the fence posts as he sped by!

IMO, an originalist jurist makes as much intellectual sense as a flat earth engineer or a creationist biologist. It should be disqualifying.

This thread, BTW, was written on a Ouija board by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton who spent the night at my house. And if you doubt that, then you are a religious bigot!

Behind all of this outraged snark is a very basic point that every undergrad history major knows. There is no such thing as a stable, unchanging interpretation of a historical text or event. Every interpretation is, itself, a product of its historical moment.