Gordon S. Wood Quotes
Original intent is a necessary fiction that jurists have invented to get a handle on the Constitution.
Gordon Wood, Historian, C-SPAN, In Depth, September 5, 2010
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Cummings was arguing against a Constitutional amendment. His alternative led to Roosevelt's court packing schema.
This quotation is particularly important because it summarizes one of two opposite schools or thought regarding judicial interpretation of the Constitution that politicians have been arguing about since the Supreme Court first sat. The other is Original Intent where only the original intentions of the writers and ratifiers of the Constitution should be considered—assuming that it can be determined.
Powell was the Secretary of State and Addington kept advising the administration that as long as the President was acting in defense of the country in his capacity as Commander in Chief, he did not have to obey any existing laws that had been Constitutionally passed which in the opinion of the President restricted or limited the President or the executive branch. Addington was an attorney and Assistant to the Vice President, but he was given much responsibility for administration policy. Powell the Secretary of State of the Administration could not have disagreed more and although most politicians including Republicans disagreed with the Addington thesis, Powell was one of the few Republicans to criticize the Addington position.
He uses the term, “Non-interpretivism”, in a judge’s decision to indicate a judge who does not accept the interpretation of the Constitution as written and intended by the framers. His bias is a conservative one and this is how he views decisions that he does not like. When liberals see an opinion with which they do not agree, they also very often accuse the judge of activism and not adhering to the framer’s intentions. Generally it is a question of “whose ox is gored?”
See John Marshall's later (1803) use of the concept and term "repugnant." {606483}
When people see the process as unfair and insensitive to minority rights and issues— rammed through by one group which wants to dictate how the rest should live, they never even reach the point of considering carefully the actual language and making compromises with that. They just oppose the constitution in toto usually by finding the 2 or 3 most egregious clauses and harping on those with no attempt to improve them and rejecting the entire constitution.
The president was asked if he supported the Supreme court's school desegregation decision:
Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian and university professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
