Bret Devereaux

In which a conservative legal scholar argues that originalism, which has served its purpose as a pretext for principled resistance to social progress, should be discarded, and conservative ideas of moral order pursued without reference to the Constitution https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/ …

And here I am, thinking "What ever happened to amendments?" The constitution isn't a death pact - it has an edit button! I'd love it for so many reasons if the ERA was adopted, but one of them is to remind everyone that you can change the damn constitution.

Also 'Common-good' constitutionalism as presented is the death of constitutionalism. Anything can be justified. We elect politicians to seek the common good. We have judges to enforce laws, which are, by design, written-down and unchanging things.

Well, in fact he's very clear about the specific kinds of things he thinks can be justified! It just so *happens* that they strongly resemble an integralist monarchy. But I'm sure he's just following first principles to their logical conclusions!

Scoring an Atlantic politics byline is 90% aesthetics and Vermeule clearly has the house style down

You can perhaps imagine how strange it looks to medievalists when someone like Sohrab Ahmari starts waxing longingly about like the late medieval papacy