I am not going to defend people on the right who want to go against the Constitution. They are just as guilty, especially the Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John McCain, etc. types who are pure RINOs... I just find that this push against the Constitution and it's literal text comes more-so from the left side of the political spectrum...
It doesn't. That's just an American conceit, used by all sides, that "The Constitution has my back." Even when it doesn't.
The problem is that SCOTUS doesn't follow the literal text of the Constitution.
Yes, I'm upset about the way Scalia twisted the Constitution in
Heller, too. But that's just how it goes sometimes.
The reality is that there is no one single "literal" way to interpret the Constitution. While several sections are easy to read (e.g. no one has any questions over the length of the President's term), many of its provisions are deliberately left open (what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment"?) with the expectation that those aspects would change over time. In other cases, the literal meaning is ignored by those who proclaim to be reading it "literally." And of course, many of those who proclaim to be honoring the text often end up butchering it (notably Thomas).
They twist and contort things to fit their political biases. (commerce clause, general welfare clause, supremacy clause, etc.) and what you get as a result of that is nine people in robes controlling the whole country....
That's not even remotely correct.
The SCOTUS can't pass laws. It doesn't write legislation, only Congress can do that. It has no enforcement powers, only the Executive branch does. It can't appoint its own members. It can't kick one of its own members off the Court. It can only determine if legislation put before it is, or is not, Constitutional.
Also what people gloss over, even though it is an extremely important fact, is that the STATES were the creators of the Constitution and the federal government, and whatever powers the States did not specifically grant to the federal government via the Constitution still remain with the STATES.
Also what people gloss over is that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; that it was written because the STATES had too much power in the Articles of Confederation, and that the "strong state" approach failed almost immediately; and have no understanding of complex legal concepts like incorporation.
Where in Article 1 Section 8 is the power for the federal government to legislate on firearms?
It's from the Commerce Clause and the Taxing Power. This has been reviewed extensively by the courts, and it's rare that the federal legislature has actually been found to overstep its bounds. We also know that the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights expected the federal government to legislate firearms, as noted by the text of the 2nd Amendment.
And no, the "literal text" tells us nothing about the limits anyone intended to put on the Commerce Clause or Taxing Power. The did not look into a crystal ball, to see exactly what America would be like in the 20th or 21st century, and decide "oh
that's how should interpret it." No one put Madison and Jefferson in a time machine, zoomed them forward to the 1930s, asked them if
United States vs Miller was decided correctly, sent them back to the late 18th Century, and asked them to write an explanatory essay on the precise limits of that power. There is also no indication they wanted millions of people to be slaves to the opinions of a handful of long-dead politicians.
Nor is it even clear whose opinions, among those early politicians, is the "literal" one. Was it Congress? They disagreed with each other, about critical positions, from Day One. Was it the state politicians, who ratified the Constitution and the BoR? Was it the voters in those states, who may have advocated for or against it, or didn't care? And how did later amendments, (particularly 14th, 15 and 18th), change our interpretation and the role of federal government?
It's a similar issue, oddly enough, with interpreting documents like the New Testament in "literal" terms -- when the interpreters do anything but. They ignore inconvenient historical contexts; they have no interest in recognizing the diversity of opinions in the document itself; they ignore how social changes over time affect today's interpretations of an old document; and people point to it not to discover what it says, but to command control over what it says.
