In The Atlantic, Andrew Ferguson: Historians Should Stay Out of Politics (commenting on the Historians' Statement on the Impeachment of President Trump). A key excerpt:
The thesis of the petition goes like this: “President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president.”
When I first read the statement, I took that superfluous adverb, precisely, as a bad sign. No one knows precisely what the Framers had in mind when it comes to impeachable offenses, and if we did, we could be sure it didn’t involve transcontinental telephone calls, gaga theories about computer servers, Javelin anti-tank missiles, or the sovereign nation of Ukraine, none of which existed when the Framers were framing away. Trump’s abuses and the kinds of violations the Framers thought were impeachable may bear a general similarity, or fall into the same general category, but that’s a different matter. Precision, we see early on, is precisely what the historians are not after.
From an originalist perspective, I'm amused to see 2,051 historians (at last count) affirming that we can know "precisely" what the framers were thinking about a modern constitutional dispute. That's especially true as we have been lectured at length by historians (different historians, one hopes) that originalism is a fallacious methodology because we can never really know what the framers were thinking; because history is complex and nuanced, not susceptible to easy answers; because the framers believed a range of things in tension with one another; etc. Do the statement's signers understand that they are embracing a simplistic version of originalism — a version that would, I think, be rejected by most legal academic originalists? In any event, I'll try to remember this "statement" next time a historian claims that originalism is simplistic and ahistorical.
Posted at 6:16 AM