Opponents of originalism make much of the supposed ambiguities in the Constitution. But is the text of the document really so unclear?

See ‘How to Interpret the Constitution’ Review: Judicial Values by Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute. He reviews the book How to Interpret the Constitution by Cass Sunstein. Excerpt:

"“In deciding how to interpret the Constitution,” Mr. Sunstein writes, “we have to think about what we are most firmly committed to, and about what we are least likely to be willing to give up.” He reveals how he would apply this methodology in his own case by listing his 10 “fixed points,” or constitutional outcomes that resonate with his own sense of rightness and justice. They are “clearly correct” propositions in the author’s view and include the contentions that “the Constitution does not forbid maximum hour and minimum wage laws” and that “the First Amendment should be understood to give very broad protection to political speech.” Of course, you might believe exactly the opposite. That, to Mr. Sunstein, is equally legitimate. One begins to wonder at this point how much “interpretation” exactly is going on.

Consider Mr. Sunstein’s claim that judges and justices should interpret laws in a manner that improves the constitutional order. Why shouldn’t we just allow legislators, who figure nowhere in Mr. Sunstein’s philosophy, to make legitimate changes to legislation when needed? We have mechanisms for improving our nation’s laws, and we have one for improving our Constitution. The Republicans who revamped our constitutional system in the aftermath of the Civil War by devising the Reconstruction Amendments—banning slavery, guaranteeing the equal protection of the law and enforcing individual rights against the states—understood that they couldn’t simply project their moral and political views onto the unamended law. They had to change the Constitution.

Like most nonoriginalists, Mr. Sunstein evades the key insight that gives originalism its appeal. It begins with a phrase from the Constitution that refutes Mr. Sunstein’s premise that the document doesn’t contain instructions for its own interpretation. “This Constitution,” it proclaims, “shall be the supreme law of the land.” The Constitution is a legal document, even if its provisions are sometimes more ambiguous at first glance than we would want a law to be. And laws have the crucial characteristic sometimes known as “fixation”: They remain unchanged until changed by authorized means. Constitutional interpretation must be constrained by this basic principle of legal reasoning.

Mr. Sunstein presumably teaches his students how to reason within the confines of statutes and recognizes there that the principle of fixation is part of what makes laws binding. Yet he insists either that the Constitution is not law in the same sense (contradicting its plain instruction) or that constitutional litigation is, for some unspoken reason, not bound by the conventions that make law distinct from politics. Practically speaking, this is simply claiming that judges—who are trained as lawyers, not philosopher-kings—should usurp from elected officials the capacity to change existing law."