The “Original” Fight of the Century

Julia Shaw / November 10, 2010

Twenty five years ago, President Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese sparked a national debate about the meaning of the Constitution that set the stage for the revival of constitutionalism in this country. On July 9, 1985, speaking before the American Bar Association, Meese issued a stinging critique of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in the areas of federalism, criminal law, and religion in the public square.

The Court, he argued, rejects the idea that the Constitution has a fixed meaning, thereby leaving the justices free to concoct mock constitutional principles to support particular policy preferences.  The result is a smattering of contradictory opinions dubbed “a jurisprudence of idiosyncrasy.”

A few months later, Associate Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan set out to correct General Meese in a speech before the Georgetown University Text and Teaching Symposium. To speak of the meaning of the Constitution makes no sense since the Framers’ intentions and meaning cannot be ascertained, and even if they could, the Constitution’s eighteenth-century vision of society has long since become outdated. We can only ask of the Constitution “what do the words of the text mean for our time?” (more…)