Original Intent: the Battle for America (1)

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The video above is taken from the documentary film "Original Intent: The Battle for America". This documentary addresses the debate over the meaning of the US Constitution and the original intent of the Founders. Politicians and judges often debate whether the Constitution should be interpreted according to what the Founders' words meant, literally, when the document was written or whether we should make our own decisions with reference to what principles we think the Founders were trying to protect when they wrote the Constitution.

In this clip we see former President George Bush explain several times that he will appoint judges that "strictly interpret the Constitution" and don't allow their personal opinion to shape their interpretation. (He is naturally overlooking the fact that being an originalist is also a personal opinion that is being used to interpret the Constitution.) We then see Justice Antonin Scalia explain that "There is indeed no reason to have a Constitution except to establish a fundamental framework that cannot be departed from"

Whether the originalists have it right or wrong, their attitude of reverence and strict adherence to a document written roughly 200 years ago is drastically different from the democracy of ancient Athens.The Athenian democracy had a smaller jurisdiction both geographically and in population, than our own. This allowed for, and in fact demanded, much more active citizens. In order to facilitate this sort of government, the citizens had to be free to make decisions, and so their rules were less restrictive in this sense than our Constitution is. The Athenians would certainly not have held reverently to a 200 year old document if the various citizen bodies found it out of date and absurd. The issue of what exactly a word meant 200 years ago, would not be an issue, because they would not have been bound by such documents. Even the judiciary branch of Athenian democracy relies far more on the common man than our own, as decisions were often made by panels or large juries (because large juries are harder to bribe) rather than by individual judges or a relatively small number of judges like our Supreme Court.