![]() There are those who find legitimacy in what they call “the intentions of the Framers.” In its more doctrinaire incarnation, this view demands that Justices discern exactly what the Framers thought about the question under consideration and simply follow that intention. Justice Brennan said: 17īecause judicial power resides in the authority to give meaning to the Constitution, the debate is really about how to read the text. Meese by name, but the targets of his speech were unmistakable. Justice Brennan did not name the administration of President Ronald W. responded to the attorney general’s “original intent” incantations. Some months after Meese’s 1985 speech, Supreme Court Justice William J. One interpretation of this would be to roll back the clock so that the Bill of Rights would shield Americans only against repressiveness from federal government agencies, not from the states. ![]() This is striking, because the Bill of Rights, as debated, created and ratified was designed to apply only to the national government. Nor was it until 1947 that the Establishment Clause was made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. New York, that any provision of the Bill of Rights was applied to the states. Most Americans forget that it was not until 1925, in Gitlow v. ![]() Levy’s book, Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution, Meese called for a return to what he termed “the jurisprudence of original intention.” In Meese’s 1985 speech to the American Bar Association, he declared: 15 In both a 1985 speech and a 1989 review of Leonard W. He declared that Supreme Court decisions since 1925 which applied federal constitutional power to prevent state actions regulating speech or press or religious observances rested on “shaky” and “suspect” ground. AN “ORIGINALIST” VIEW OF THE CONSTITUTIONĪttorney General Meese, however, asserted that the 1925 Gitlow case was wrongly decided.
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