Sen. Feinstein finds the Founders’ views on the Constitution ‘troubling’

During Monday’s Senate Judiciary hearing on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Senator Diane Feinstein displayed either abject ignorance of the Constitution, or she outright fibbed.

During her committee performance monologue, Feinstein stated:

Judge Gorsuch has also stated that he believes judges should look to the original public meaning of the Constitution when they decide what a provision of the Constitution means. This is personal, but I find this originalist judicial philosophy to be really troubling. In essence, it means that judges and courts should evaluate our constitutional rights and privileges as they were understood in 1789. However, to do so would so would not only ignore the intent of the Framers, that the Constitution would be a framework on which to build, but it severely limits the genius of what our Constitution upholds.

If Feinstein finds “originalist judicial philosophy troubling,” then she is troubled by the views of Jefferson, Madison and other Founders.

In “Of the Study of Law in the United States,” James Wilson, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and one of the six original Supreme Court Justices appointed by George Washington, had this to say about interpretation of the Constitution :

The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.

In a letter to Henry Lee, the man known as the father of the Constitution, James Madison — and someone who should know a thing or two about it — wrote:

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

In a letter to Wilson Nicholas, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.

And to William Johnson, Jefferson wrote:

On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

Finally, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, a statist in the mold of Hamilton and Marshall and no friend of republicanism and small government, wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution:

The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes, for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted, which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the Constitution.

Of course, Feinstein doesn’t really care about the Constitution. But she’s not alone. As I’ve written many times, politicians — with only a handful of exceptions — do not care about the Constitution and generally see it as an impediment to their objective.

What she truly finds “troubling” is that it impedes — in whatever small sense — her from her objective to steal guns from Americans or enslave them in other ways.

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