this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
84 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
10162 readers
60 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In no way I'd like to help Trump, but you US guys really should NOT re-re-interpret laws suddenly as they were intended 200 years ago.
When you've got an outdated document as the backbone of your whole legal system, you kinda have to re-re-interpret everything, no matter what. Originalists tend to be pretty conservative, it's just a method of thinking that allows conservative lawyers/judges/legal people to slap some legitimacy onto their interpretations. It's an alternative to the modern (centrist) interpretation of law in the US, which has in recent years allowed for things like gay marriage. However the flavor of conservatism is very "traditional" compared to the modern alt-right, meaning they are also often anti-trump.
Imagine if we made new laws that evolved with the time and retired old laws that are clearly anachronistic?
If instead of interpreting and discussing unclear text the legislators just said “we believe this is wrong, and thus - now we change it”.
That's the job of Congress.
But the Supreme Court can also down those laws too. That was what conservatives attempted with the Affordable Care Act .
Sorry if I was unclear; I was trying to say “imagine if you had a system that worked” 🫣
And I don’t mean that in any negative way, other than to say that the current system is visibly broken.
That is technically what the amendments are, but it's so much harder to push an amendment through congress than it is to just argue that the constitution already agrees with what you want to happen
Especially since the "originalists" are being quite disingenuous. They've wanted for quite a while to start a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite the thing from scratch. They don't really respect the founders as much as we think they do. They want to become the new founders, and force their great-great-grandchidren into boxes they make.
Agreed, and if they re-interpret the Constitution completely from the original meanings you might even revive slavery. Well, surely they can't, and that shows how arbitrary the originalist position is.