On Immunity and Constitutional Originalism

            A quote often attributed to Mark Twain is, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The United States federal government has immunity in certain cases, and law enforcement has qualified immunity, and the Supreme Court decided that the President of the United States has immunity from prosecution for core powers. I thought of a similar saying, “There are criminals, damn criminals, and the government.”

            Originalists about the United States constitution idealize the time after the American Revolutionary War. At America’s founding, slavery was legal and women had few rights. Do originalists want to legalize slavery in more cases and abolish rights for women? Maybe the US Constitution originalists are not original, and original people want to return to the 1600s, 1500s, 1000 A.D., or 1000 B.C.

P.S. To clarify, I'm saying that I don't trust people to have immunity because immunity can be misused, and that interpreting the present through some idealized past time is folly, because choosing the past time to idealize is difficult. Why not idealize yesterday or last week? What parts of the past would be chosen to be "good," and who would choose which parts of the past were "good"?

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