Better Late Than Never: Joe Ellis on Original Intent

Okay, it's May 23, and this article by Joseph Ellis, the well-known historian, appeared on May 7. So I'm a little slow sometimes.

But Ellis, whose speciality is the history of the era in which the Constitution was written and ratified, makes a very important point here. Rather, he makes two points:

First, the doctrine of original intent is just that, a doctrine, a teaching propounded by one side in an ideological debate. Original intent is not some privilege mode of understanding the Constitution.

Second, the key problem with original intent is that it is impossible to identify that intent. A few years ago I read a book by Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings, in which the same point was made. The essential problem is that the Constitution was adopted in a process involving a number of parties, and it is difficult to decide which of these parties, if any, had a particular set of intentions to which we ought to defer.

A good column by Ellis, and something which we should all consider, especially in light of the weird, biassed, and sometimes baseless statements coming from the Tea Partiers and others on the extreme right.