Originalism is the correct principle for interpreting the Constitution.

Thanks for taking the debate YYW. Suppose you see the word "HELP" inscribed on the sidewalk in front of an office building. It could immediately be asked, what does it mean? You consider the scenario and come up with all sorts of plausible answers. Perhaps the author was a kid having some fun while waiting for the cement to dry. Or perhaps, you speculate, the author was a criminal attempting to send their partner a secret message. Perhaps "HELP" is an initialism of some sort. Whatever the case, you are able to come up with all sorts of theories to explain the word's meaning. There is, however, an important point to notice about how we ascribe meaning to the word: the intention of the person who put the word there in the first place. If the word was written by a kid having some fun, the word obviously has a very different meaning than if it were written as a secret code between two criminals. The obvious conclusion here is that the intention behind the production of any text is somehow intimately related to that text's meaning. To further emphasize this point, consider the following possibility: you discover that the word "HELP" was not the result of any human affairs. Rather, suppose by chance a stream of water coming from a leaky pipe somehow etches the word into the sidewalk. It turns out that there was no intention whatsoever behind the word's existence. With this knowledge in mind, it becomes impossible to interpret the word's meaning because it no longer communicates anything. For communication to occur, some message, not all messages, must be conveyed. Without an intention behind the word's production, we would no longer be able to identify a particular message. We could no longer rightfully say the word means this or that. The logic I have outlined here applies to the interpretation of the Constitution because the Constitution is a legal document, and as a document, it is a vehicle of communication. It does not mean anything that interpreters would like to to mean. It has a specific meaning determined by the message it was intended to communicate. The Constitution is not a living organism. Originalism is the view that the correct interpretation of the Constitution attempts to identify the intention of the Constitution as determined by the moment of its production. This view thus makes two assumptions about the act of interpretation: 1) that there is something to be interpreted, and 2) that the something to be interpreted was there before you set to work. The question interpreters of the Constitution should ask is, what is the meaning of the Constitution as drafted and ratified, not what is the meaning I would like the Constitution to have. The reason the Constitution, as a vehicle of communication, cannot mean anything interpreters would like to mean is because then the Constitution would say nothing at all. It would be nothing more than a Rorschach test, molding and twisting to whatever meaning interpreters would like to ascribe it. This view, known as the Living Constitution thesis, is the primary alternative to Originalism, and it is utterly incoherent for numerous reasons. I have already pointed out the main problem with Living Constitution theorists: the Constitution is a document, and as such, it must communicate a single message, not all messages. If we assume that a document can say everything, that it can have various meanings that expand or change over time, then it would follow that the Constitution in fact says nothing. The only way that we can say an interpretation of the Constitution is right or wrong is if we assume that Constitution sends a message that does not change over time. If the Constitution's meaning changes over time, then no interpretation can ever be right or wrong. Only if the meaning of the Constitution precedes any act of interpretation can we say distinguish between different interpretations and evaluate them as right or wrong. This does not mean the Constitution's meaning will be agreed on by everyone. Obviously, the task of figuring out what the Constitution meant as drafted and ratified is a very difficult task, and there is bound to be disagreement. Thus, historically different efforts to interpret the Constitution may produce a different account of what the Constitution means, but the actual meaning itself (and the goal of these efforts) will remain the same: the original meaning. The main point I want to emphasize here is that just because the determinations of what the Constitution means change over time does not mean that the Constitution's meaning itself changes. When particular determinations of meaning give way to another, two implications necessarily follow: 1) that the second determination of meaning is more correct than the first determination, and 2) therefore both determinations of meaning are being judged and evaluated according to some metric that precedes both determinations. Thus, it is quite clear in the very act of determining that one interpretation is better or more correct than another that there must be something in relation to which both interpretations are measured, and this something must be prior to and independent of efforts to determine it. There has to be something you are trying to get right when you are engaged in the act of interpretation. For if there is not, then we can never say that one interpretation or determination of meaning is better or more correct than any other. Originalism is therefore the correct view of interpretation. Any other view is incoherent because it is impossible to say whether one determination of meaning is better or more correct than another determination. The Constitution was created with a purpose. And when something is not just found in nature but rather designed, to find out what it means you have to figure out what the designer had in mind.