Originalist Sin

Can America liberate herself from sophistry?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Dec. 2, 2025 – The fatal flaw of parliamentary monarchy is that it dictates from a distant remove – from an inherited throne bolstered by a subservient court, with only limited input from the common people. That abomination is what made the American Revolution both necessary and inevitable.

But history reveals America’s War of Independence to have been an inchoate Civil War, with a fatally limited objective that postponed the real war of liberation until 1861. In order to prosecute the first war, anti-slave forces needed to compromise with slave power, which never went away.

First, pro-slavery forces arranged the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, then, Sen. Strom Thurmond initiated the Southern Strategy with his defection to what had been the Party of Lincoln.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America has been dragged down, and backward, into a sham monarchy, because the Supreme Court, which voted 9-0 against Tricky Dick in U.S. v. Nixon, has since been enfeebled by the legal heresy of Originalism, which is all that keeps Trump out of prison.

Kings, Crown Princes, and sundry others fancy themselves to occupy executive office because it is God’s will that they do so. They rule by divine decree, which is the precise opposite of government of, by, and for the people.

Attack American Free Enterprise

Itself the product of the notorious Powell Memo commissioned by Nixon in 1971, Originalism is among the first fruits of the Heritage Foundation’s Federalist Society. Originalism establishes the dictatorship of the dearly departed, by regarding the authors of the Constitution as gods, who speak only through an occult priesthood of originalists.

Lawyers read and interpret law, but originalists interpret the minds of dead men, the way rabbis, priests, kings, ayatollahs, and crown princes interpret the mind of God.

Not only are America’s founders dead, but they died believing the universe only to be some 8,000 years old, because that’s how old the Old Testament says it is. In their graves, America’s enlightened Founders are further away from 21st century America, than George III and the British Parliament were from them in the 18th century!

They would flip their powdered wigs to know we’ve been gaslighted by the disciples of a new Moses, Robert Bork, who drafted the legal theory that is the holy grail upon which the Church of Federalism rests.

Get Borked!

The messianic Mr. Bork is one of those rare mortals whose surname has been made into a verb. To get Borked is to have the U.S. Senate do the rare, right thing and reject overly partisan candidates for the Supreme Court.

The shameless Clarence Thomas is the epitome of Bork’s revenge, as are the disastrous Citizens United and the deceitful overturning of Roe v. Wade, done by people who swore it to be the settled law of the land, bold lies that saved themselves from being Borked.

Contrary to what the Speaker of the House believes, the universe is some thirteen billions of years old. Speaker Mike and his ilk are free to accept the Bible as the literal truth, and thus show themselves to be mired in intellectual adolescence. That he speaks, not only for the Republican party, but for an enormous segment of the population, is testament to how profoundly immature America has become.

Bullies, such as currently occupy and desecrate the White House, and Congress, get away with their malign schemes only because so many people know so little that they are vulnerable to the half truths and whole lies that comprise the MAGA religion.

Three-card monte dealers and Trump both feed on naive, unknowing innocents. The American people must learn why such people lie, cheat, and steal before they’ll demand a return to government of, by, and for the people.

Until then, the spiral downward continues, as if ignorant of the debt owed the Founders and untold number of others who raised the country to the peak she attained before the GOP abandoned Lincoln’s legacy in favor of a Southern Strategy, before Kennedy and King assassinations, before the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State by the national guard and state police.