Amy Coney Barret, RBG’s replacement who is currently avoiding saying anything meaningful in her confirmation hearings, is a judicial “originalist.” What does that mean?
The idea is that when interpreting the Constitution, the authors’ original intent is what really matters. Hence originalism. The problem is that other interpretations don’t really disagree with that, they just take a higher-level view of the spirit of the law. Originalists instead fetishize the concept, focusing exclusively on the most narrow, most concrete details accessible to the founders at the time of…
