The Economist is spot on: When people like the Tea Partiers (or Supreme Court INJustice Antonin Scalia) treat the Constitution like conservative Christians do the Bible, looking to it as both infallible and timeless, this is what happens:
When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and compromises—exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which today’s Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the tea-partiers.
With Nino Scalia, I think it's a product of his Catholic background, where priests need to interpret Scriptures in light of church tradition. So, St. Nino of Numbnuttery thinks he needs to interpret the Constitution in light of originalism.
And, it's not just Nino, but other intellectuals of the right:
Conservative think-tanks have the same dream of return to a prelapsarian innocence.
There is no such thing; governance, like Hobbes' state of nature, never was primeval.
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