I watched some of the Alito hearings in awe. Alito is very impressive, a great speaker, coherent and logical – but he is damaged goods since his reason and logic has boundaries.
The evidence – the refusal to acknowledge that the constitution is a ‘living document’.
This is the latest meme to attack the very foundation of American Democracy by people who cannot accept the Constitution unless it is ‘Intelligently Designed’ and not Evolutionary.
Since the constitution clearly does change – there are amendments, the argument against it as a living document is not creationist – i.e. it does not pretend that the amendments are fiction, that would be crazy.
Instead, like Intelligent Design it tries to create a mechanism whereby things do change but they change because of an original, divinely inspired and complete design – the original Constitution.
This is the exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended and unlike the biblical history – we have thousands of sources to verify it.
The reason the constitution has amendments is not because it was perfect to start with but badly interpreted, but precisely because the people that wrote it knew the dangers of a frozen religious like document being the central pivot of government.
If you seriously think the constitution is not a living document, then you either:
Stupid: think that Black people should not be treated as human and are too stupid to sit on a supreme court
A constitutional creationist: think that scientific discussion of the Constitution is not possible because it is divinely inspired and therefore your application of reason only extends to areas that are not infected by faith.
A constitutional proponent of Intelligent Design: think that every amendment was because the founding fathers really meant what the amendment says, but people didn’t really understand not because there is progress.
Alito is in the last category, he thinks that the Constitution is a religion.