Member-only story
Questions for Judge Barrett
If I was on the Senate Judiciary Committee, this would be my line of questioning to Judge Amy Coney Barrett:
Judge Barrett: Since you profess to follow the “originalism” line of constitutional interpretation, as you say, seeking the ‘original public meaning” of the Constitution, I would like to ask you about the original underpinnings of our Constitution, and our form of government.
As I am sure you know, our system of government was based on the philosophy of the “Social Contract,” as understood at the time, based on the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke and Rousseau rejected the idea, predominant in Europe, of rule by divine right. Instead, they argued for a government, as President Abraham Lincoln put it, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
“The problem” for the Constitutional Convention, as Rousseau put it, “is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.”
The “solution” adopted by the Framers, was our Constitution, which starts out by invoking the ideas of the social contract:
