brainstatic:

God I wish some politician would come out and say it’s time to cut the umbilical cord to the founding fathers. We’re being crushed under our guns and our all-consuming free market ideology because some agrarian noblemen couldn’t imagine anything better. How much more do we owe these people, we keep trailing the world by more and more, because Germany doesn’t stop to think if Otto Von Bismark would approve of new legislation and Italian courts don’t dive into the writings of Julius Caesar to see if a new program is acceptable. America’s role in the world is something the founding fathers couldn’t have imagined. At some point you have to move on for the sake being a modern country.

But really our current concept of strict constitutional originalism is, like most of modern conservatism, a reaction to the civil rights era. There has always been debate over how literally the constitution should be taken, but only when the Warren court started declaring that the constitution held segregation to be illegal (among other things like Miranda rights) did conservatives come to the belief that not even the smallest implication could be extracted from the constitution. If you weren’t going by the direct words stated, you were a “judicial activist” and “legislating from the bench.” So we’re stuck forever with mediocrities like Antonin Scalia and Neil Gorsuch, who make sure we never do anything that would exceed the imagination of an 18th century slaveowner. They interpret the holy text as best they can, and by sheer luck, every single case leads them to the conclusion that best suits the needs of the modern corporate and religious interests of the Republican Party. Aren’t we lucky to have them and their wisdom that ensures we’ll always live in a world made by agrarian noblemen and never anything else.