Conservatives love to say they’re “originalists” who’re just upholding the sacred principles of the Founders. So you often get disingenuous statements like these that need heavy decoding:

I believe that the Constitution 1 should be interpreted literally 2 and in keeping with the intent of the Founding Fathers 3 at the time of the Founding 4.

  1. Only through the 12th Amendment. Amendments 14 and 15 in particular don’t count at all. ↩︎

  2. Except for the 2nd Amendment and probably the 8th Amendment, too, while we’re at it. Those get read more…liberally. ↩︎

  3. But not the author of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) or the architect of the Constitution (James Madison), who together lost the court case (Marbury v. Madison) that created judicial review. We still love using James' silhouette as the logo of our weirdo legal debating society, though! ↩︎

  4. With exactly 9 justices as codified almost 100 years afterward in a law signed by Ulysses Grant, and not with any of the varying numbers that prevailed before that time. ↩︎