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the intent question is a problem.
you cannot determine it. not really: generally claims about intent are nothing more than projection.
the sources of the problem are obvious enough: 1) that the constitution is written and so made up of sentences that exceed the intent of the writers--they are not unrelated to intent, but intent dissolves into that which exceeds it. a banal example--an email or this post--you can read it and speculate about my intent in writing it, but you have no way of knowing whether your speculations link to anything. you can generate an interpretation of what is written that would be informed by a project of delimiting intent, but the result is still an interpretation that would be evaluated as any other interpretation would be--as such it s a move within the interpretive game, not a meta-move that puts a stop to that game on the basis of claims presumed definitive.
second: in the particular case of the constitution, the material that you would have to have recourse to in order to make any claim about intent at all is sporadic/incomplete--and this deliberately. you would think that there would be more complete and detailed accounts of the processes of fabrication had the intent been to route interpretations of the document through the intent of the framers themselves. it would seem to me that any move rooted in the (untenable, absurd) notion of "original intent" woudl effectively raise the proceedings of the consitutional convention to the status of meta-law. that is not and was not the way in which the american system of law has functioned since 1787. it is a wholesale reworking of the tradition, passed off as an attempt to rescue it.
and since all claims concerning intent are projections at one level or another, claims about intent are nothing more than moves in the game of political power as it currently exists. as such, teh criteria for evaluating such claims are not the content of the arguments but the politics of the folk who make them. because the claims are nothing more than a device elaborated as a function of a conflict over power.
another way: legal language is an aspect of normal language and changes along with it. like it or not. you can't simply wish this away. reverting to claims concerning the "precision and vagueness" of the constitution is simply a recapitulation of the same arguments about intent at another level.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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