To my mind, the Eighth Amendment is the cleanest battle to be had with originalists. It’s the easiest place to drop out all of the legalistic claptrap and doctrinal fencing to get down into the guts of the thing. The framers wrote something down. That something is vague. Originalists say that we can understand what they really meant by looking at what they did. I say I don’t give a fuck about what those depraved assholes actually did. I will stipulate that the people who wrote the Constitution had a sense of humanity that was so underdeveloped they could eat sandwiches while watching a man
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