I'm delighted to pass along this item from Prof. McConnell (Stanford), one of the leading American originalist scholars:
I most often agree with my good friends and casebook co-authors Will Baude and Michael Paulsen on matters of constitutional interpretation. But not about the attempted disqualification of Donald Trump for running for President. My friends published the opening salvo in the current debate with their 120-plus page article arguing for a "sweeping" interpretation of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. The word "sweep" is in the title of their article, and "sweeping" was repeated over a dozen times. At every point when they faced an interpretive ambiguity, they opted for the most expansive interpretation.
I responded with a brief post on this site arguing against such a sweeping interpretation, on the basis of both democratic theory and originalist evidence. I later elaborated on those themes in an essay in Public Discourse, citing evidence that the Amendment was interpreted narrowly in the several years it was actually enforced.
A few days ago, Baude and Paulsen published a new post in which they suggest that my advocacy of a "narrow" interpretation violates the originalist norm that constitutional provisions "should not be interpreted with a thumb on the scales in favor of either a 'narrow' reading or an 'expansive' reading," but simply given the reading most plausible in light of its terms and original understanding.
