it’s part of why Roberts treated the government’s “evidence” for the domicile theory as strikingly thin — literally citing one funeral speech, from a source who arguably contradicted the point they were using it for.

That’s the beauty of “originalism”. It is an incredibly flexible bit of exegetical footwork that doesn’t really look for the plain sense meaning of the Constitutional text, even though it says it does. Quite the opposite!

Rather, it searches high and low through textual evidence of roughly contemporary documents for the usage of words that also appear in the Constitution. Then it layers on an interpretive structure developed in the last few decades of the 21st century- and pronounces it “the original meaning of the Constitution.”

And voíla! You now have an infallible Holy Constitution! And it says what we say it says! Even though you unenlightened peasants think it says something completely different! Because we found the key to interpreting one particular amendment in words written decades earlier by a judge in New England presiding over witch trials!

Or something.

Juridical sleight of hand, actually.

Which is just a fancy way of describing…… horseshit.

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