"Originalism," "Strict Construction," "Textualism" etc.

I hear a lot of conservatives these days espousing the virtues of "strict constructionist" judges who adhere to "originalism" and "textualism."

As an initial thought, "originalism" is easily dispensed with, because unless you have a time machine, you don't know what the drafters of the constitution originally meant to accomplish. An endless citation of contemporaneous statements, writings, etc., does not change that basic fact.

"Strict construction" and "textualism" are a bit more complicated. When reading a statute or rule, one can construe it either broadly or strictly. It either means only what the words explicitly say, or it means both what the words say and the broader message they carry. The late Justice Scalia was the most famous proponent and practitioner of "textualism" or "strict construction."

But what is it?

The fine example used by people often is the "ambulance in the park" one. Doug Masson recently cited to an interesting commentary on this distinction.

 Does an ordinance that says that “no person may bring a vehicle into the park” apply to an ambulance that enters the park to save a person’s life? For Scalia and Garner, the answer is yes. After all, an ambulance is a vehicle—any dictionary will tell you that. If the authors of the ordinance wanted to make an exception for ambulances, they should have said so. And perverse results are a small price to pay for the objectivity that textual originalism offers (new dictionaries for new texts, old dictionaries for old ones). 

In other words, textualism will offer perverse results when applied uniformly. Thus, justice requires an application that is not uniform. Thus, it is not textualism, but rather an interpretation of what the broader goal of the words may be, notwithstanding the absence of any explicit explanation of that goal.

In sum, I have less and less patience for those who claim adherence to the Constitution when it serves their immediate purposes, yet refuse to admit that they are interpreting it; they claim to merely be doing what it says.

A 220+ year-old document is subject to conflicting interpretations, and those who claim that their philosophy is guided by a strict adherence to its text are deluding themselves.