[Fedora]

All provisions of the US Constitution and of the various state constitutions shall be interpreted as meaning what the drafters and ratifiers of those provisions intended, whether in 1789, 1992, or any other time.

This is a good idea. A problem that will be encountered in trying to implement it is that activist judges are drawing from a school of legal philosophy ("legal realism", popularized at Yale by followers of Justice William O. Douglas) which relativizes the historical meaning of legal documents (for some good info on this see David Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, Chapter 2, which discusses how Hillary was exposed to legal realism at Yale); and to support their position on this in recent years they have drawn from deconstruction, a French theory of literature which similarly tries to strip written documents of any historically-fixed meaning. To counter the tendency towards judicial activism I suspect there will also have to be academic resistance to the legal realism and deconstruction which are used to rationalize the judicial activists' legal philosophy.

[Congressman Billybob]

I am richly aware of, and thoroughly disgusted by, the literary/judicial philosophy that you refer to. A fringe benefit of this amendment clause would be to tell the Larry Tribes of this world to seek another form of employment since they are no longer needed as molders of the Constitution in their positions as Professors of Constitutional Law (tenured and in a named chair, or otherwise).

In any war, the goal is always to shoot all of the enemy, until the survivors decide to surrender. I am hoping that the enemy in this case are sufficiently cowardly that the killing will be minimal and the surrendering will be wholesale. But that can't occur until we begin to fight.

John / Billybob