NightlyPoe said:
Again, you are misunderstanding Originalism. Its goal is to understand the meaning of the words and intent when they wrote them. It's not to bale out legislatures when they write sloppy statutes. The goal is to limit the different interpretations via attempting to figure out what they would have meant at the time. To take one challenging term from the Constitution, that isn't quite as strongly debated at the moment. Impeachment is said be reserved for "High Crimes and Misdemeanors." Well, what does that mean? To a modern audience, it would sound like a rather high bar. "High" being the operative word. You might think that it means major crimes. But to the people who wrote it, the word "high" referred to the person committing the crime. It basically meant a breach of public trust in some manner and how a person in such a "high" position of power has special duties to carry out his charge faithfully. Therefore, to the Framers (George Mason to be exact), the term High Crimes and Misdemeanors would have lowered the bar for impeachment. So, while the words can be interpreted either way by a reasonable observer, the origininalist judge will try and discover the meaning of the interpretation at the time it was written and how it would have been believed to have been commonly used at the time. Incidentally, I'll also add that Scalia led a very successful campaign to dissuade his colleagues from using legislative history in their opinions. In other words, Scalia very much relied on the text first and foremost. |
Actually it can be. There is a part in the Immigration and Nationality act that interchangeably uses "3 months" and "90 days", despite the two terms not being interchangeable. When one of the courts looked at it, they then had to go back through the legislative history to clear up the ambiguity.
Which is the main point I want to make here. There is a difference between statutory interpretation and constitutional interpretation. Using those interchangeably is not correct. There is a "process" courts follow in how they interpret statutes. Actually, Machiavellian's comment about contracts is really on point for that. When interpreting a contract, the court is only supposed to look to the "four corners" of the contract. However, if there is an ambiguity, they are allowed to look at parole evidence which would normally be inadmissible as a rule of evidence. Statutory interpretation is similar in that if the plain language of the statute says something, it matters little to what the intent was. Courts will only look at intent (along with other things) if there is ambiguity. This is a balance of powers issue and why courts interpret statutes in this fashion.
Don't really want to get into constitutional interpretation though. It's not black and white and I think pinning judges to certain theories is dishonest to the actual process. Not saying you are doing that though, just a thought.
