I know it’s trendy to dunk on the Founders these days, but their foresight was really quite remarkable. That said, something they did not and could not foresee was the rise of a massive professional law-enforcement faction with an almost pathological aversion to accountability.
If you look back to the Founding era, you’ll see that government officials could and did get sued at the drop of a hat. This was absolutely routine, and absolutely the right way to organize things. We do the opposite, and I don’t have to tell you what a disaster it has been.
That we live in an era when self-styled “originalists” judicially amend democratically enacted laws in order to make it maximally difficult for citizens to hold power-abusing government officials accountable is, to put it politely, remarkable. See, e.g., cato.org/policy-analysi…
I wouldn’t say this is fully explanatory, but I do have a theory. cato.org/study/are-disp…
I mean, I just don’t know how else you can look at the text, history, and purpose of §1983 and see absolute prosecutorial immunity. Unless, y’know, you have a certain professional “perspective” that you bring to the table. /bench
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