original intent Archives - American Founding Principles

How Originalism Can Restore Constitutional Integrity

President Trump’s second term in office has been marred by activist judges placing injunctions, and partial or full blocks on his agenda. As tiring and counter-productive as their campaign against the will of the American people has been, judicial activism has been a problem for far longer than anyone alive can remember.

The 1857 Dred Scott case not only denied African Americans citizenship, it also struck down a law passed by Congress called the Missouri Compromise. The majority opinion of the court, at that time, used racial assumptions to read into the Constitution that which was not in the text. This judicial overreach inflamed sectional tensions and hastened the American Civil War.

US Senate’s Brain Hemorrhaging Clout

Adam Liptak, in his March 11, 2013 New York Times article, Smaller States Find Outsize Clout Growing in Senate, makes a logical argument, about smaller State’s having disproportionate electoral power in the Senate, based on false premises.

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Are all Laws Necessary?

If anyone were to take the time to read the Federal Register of Laws, in which all laws passed by Congress are recorded since its first session in 1789, and they read an average of 700 pages per week, it would take them over 25,000 years to read them all. This number becomes even more daunting every two years, since Congress passes an average of 2,000 bills during each session. In light of this impossible task, the old adage “ignorance of the law is no excuse” is completely unreasonable. As a matter of fact, this quantity of laws makes unwitting lawbreakers out of every person living in America. Consequently, to claim all these laws are necessary is either a gross exaggeration or an outright lie, because in many cases Congress has exceeded their constitutional authority in passing them.

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