QUORA: ‘I grew up learning the Constitution was a living document. How has Originalism become so rampant throughout the Supreme Court?’

 QUORA: ‘I grew up learning the Constitution was a living document. How has Originalism become so rampant throughout the Supreme Court?’

With Constitution Day coming up on September 17th, I posted this answer:

The “Living Constitution” doctrine is a reactionary formulation instituted early in the 20th Century during the so-called “Progressive Era,” which was the beginning of the American Left’s assault on Americanism. According to Living Constitution doctrine, the U.S. Constitution is devoid of any timeless principles or philosophical foundation. The Constitution, this doctrine holds, can be interpreted in any way that’s politically expedient at any given time on any given issue. In other words, the Living Constitution is in essence no constitution at all. 

Progressives adopted this reactionary theory because they saw The Constitution, especially its protection of individual rights as defined by Enlightenment principles, as a roadblock to their statist designs (which, of course, it most certainly was and is). 

Of course, Originalism has its own problems, not least of which is that it prioritizes what the Founders’ were thinking over the objective meaning of what they actually wrote and voters approved. 

The questioner grew up “learning” a Leftist reinterpretation of America’s governing doctrine. You’ve been sold a Progressive “bill-of-goods.” In truth, The Constitution is rooted in deep philosophy concerning the relationship between the individual and the state. The American Revolution was primarily a philosophical Revolution. Rooted in the late 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment, that actual American Revolution took place in the minds of Americans during the period from the early 1760s up to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and War for Independence that followed. 

It is this philosophical Revolution that the Progressives’ Living Constitution aims to destroy, leaving the U.S. Constitution a hollow document and therefore no longer an impediment to statism. But in historical fact, one can only understand The Constitution in the context of the Founding principles, including the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

Here is some reading to point you in a different—and, in my view, correct—direction.

Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution by Thomas A. Bowden 

Originalism 's Misplaced Fidelity: "Original" Meaning Is Not Objective by Tara Smith

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty by Timothy Sandefur

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by  Bernard Bailyn

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

Related Reading:

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The U.S.Constitution: Nick Goldberg’s Scheme to Transform Our Liberty Document into a Democratic Socialist Manifesto

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

On a Revisionist's Proposal to Upend the Declaration of Independence

Man’s Rights by Ayn Rand

The Nature of Government by Ayn Rand

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty by Randy E. Barnett  

A New Textbook of Americanism: The Politics of Ayn Rand, edited by Jonathan Hoenig