, 9 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
I would love to hear Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts--good originalists all--discuss what James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington would think about a sitting President who says something like this.
Or how about Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society. "Mr. Leo, what would the founders have said about a President who used tax money to bribe a foreign government to help him get elected, and then suggested, based on no evidence, that his main rival should be executed?"
After all, these men are great experts on the original intent of the founders, right? And they are also strong backers of our current president. So help us understand, oh great legal minds and historical sages, what would Hamilton do?
I'm of course being coy here, because originalism has almost nothing to do with actual principled jurisprudence and has always been about crafting an interpretation of the past that defends the economic interests of already powerful people.
And because Trump is doing an excellent job of protecting the economic interests of already exceedingly powerful people, none of these originalists will take a second to say the obvious thing...which is that Trump's behavior is a textbook example of an impeachable offense.
At least now we have full confirmation that originalism is 100% BS...because, for real...there's a lot of debate about what "the founders" thought about x, y, or z...but as sure as they thought private property was a right, they thought shenanigans like Trump's were impeachable.
And yet the staunch originalists who have stood up to defend the Constitution against their man Trump can be founded, AFAIK, on one hand? Maybe no hands?
You gotta know that right now, as we speak, there's some ambitious young writer at The Federalist banging out an essay on how the founders thought Presidents calling for the execution of their opponents and bribing foreign governments was totally legal and totally cool.
Look folks, Constitutions don't enforce themselves. The Constitution is like a muscle, if you don't use it, you lose it. As many historians have said, if you don't use the impeachment provision for what Trump has done, then you've essentially rendered it inoperable/non-existent.
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