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Originally Posted by ratbastid
About some things, yes, they were very specific--loquitor's 35 year old president example is pretty hard to interpret to mean anything else. Other things are (deliberately!) vague and demand a contemporary mind to apply to contemporary times. And the existence of an amendment process tells us exactly how "strict constructionist" our SCOTUS was intended to be. Which is to say: not.
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if things were meant to be vague, there would be no reason to prescribe a change to the constitution. The founders would simply have inserted another clause allowing the central government to change things at will. they didn't do that though. They outlined specific enumerated powers. they also left, in no uncertain terms, that anything not assigned to the federal government was specifically left to the states or to the people (10th Amdnt).
"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." — Edmund A. Opitz