Fraudulent document cited in SCOTUS petition?

[jimbogumbo]

Fora historians: does this seem accurate?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810

[nebo113]

Fora historians: does this seem accurate?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810

Thanks for posting this.   I am not a historian so was puzzled.

[Caracal]

Fora historians: does this seem accurate?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810

I don't have any real expertise with the actual document or controversy. I take issue with the idea that there is some way in which we can know what the "founding fathers" actually meant. There's a fundamental misunderstanding at work about the nature of the constitution. It wasn't some document that ever had a fixed meaning. It was a committee document and many of the people who wrote it were arguing about how to interpret it as soon as it was put into effect. This isn't my area, but I've read some very persuasive arguments that many of the founders thought of themselves as creating a sort of framework within which the meaning of the document and its language could be worked out. They certainly didn't believe that the Supreme Court would have the ultimate authority to decide what the constitution meant-ironically that doesn't appear anywhere in the constitution.

Parly the constitution is vague because the people writing it didn't think they needed to cover every possibility, but its also just vague because it was written by a small group of guys deliberating in secret without any staff and they just weren't always very precise. When they wrote that "the legislature" would be in charge of determining the details of elections to congress, I'm pretty sure they just wrote "legislature" because that's the lawmaking body and these would be laws. I doubt anybody even thought about whether that meant that only legislators would have any say. There wasn't really court oversight of legislatures in states either at this point, so that wouldn't have been something they would have thought much about. It would have been more precise to stay state government, but the constitution is often pretty inprecise, which is why the whole discussion about these people's intentions is absurd.

[Anon1787]

Fora historians: does this seem accurate?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/15/fraudulent-document-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810

I don't have any real expertise with the actual document or controversy. I take issue with the idea that there is some way in which we can know what the "founding fathers" actually meant. There's a fundamental understanding at work about the nature of the constitution. It wasn't some document that ever had a fixed meaning. It was a committee document and many of the people who wrote it were arguing about how to interpret it as soon as it was put into effect. This isn't my area, but I've read some very persuasive arguments that many of the founders thought of themselves as creating a sort of framework within which the meaning of the document and its language could be worked out. They certainly didn't believe that the Supreme Court would have the ultimate authority to decide what the constitution meant-ironically that doesn't appear anywhere in the constitution.

Can you or can't you know that the Framers "certainly" believed that SCOTUS should not be the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution?