Or at least Saturday voting. Granted, the Founding Fathers didn't actually seem to put much thought into the logistics of voting, but it's clear that leaders of our newly-formed democracy thought voting should be easy for people. Tuesday is a shitty day for modern voters, but when it was chosen in 1845, from what I understand at least, the idea was that you gave people all of Monday to travel if they needed to so they could vote on Tuesday. Sunday was out as a travel day because of church. But any way you slice it, the founders didn't intend for local polling places to put up roadblocks and frustrations so "some people" give up trying to vote. That so-called originalists are more interested in proving that there's no right to control your fertility through contraception and abortion in the Constitution than they are in making sure that democratic ideals are upheld is a good indicator of how "originalism" was invented strictly to rationalize oppression.


Really, if you're a true "originalist", you'd be committed to viewing the Constitution as a living document, as the Founders saw it. Originalism is opposed to a dynamic, flexible democracy of the sort that the Founders intended. Instead, it's a whitewash over an intellectually bankrupt human habit called "traditionalism". Traditionalism is intellectually bankrupt first and foremost because it rests on a single assumption that's demonstrably false, that people before us were smarter than us, even though they didn't have the benefits we had of more history to draw on (thus more hindsight), widespread literacy, or even better nutrition to keep the brain sharp. It's one of the hardest fallacies to eradicate, because liberals and conservatives to various degrees fall for the trap. For instance, many months ago I found myself in a conversation with a would-be writer who was suggesting that people nowadays are somehow less literate than they were in the past, the evidence being that writers like Shakespeare are, for us, pretty dense writers that are hard to understand. I pointed out, as politely as I could, that literacy was a luxury in Shakespeare's time, and many of the people in his audience couldn't read at all and yet somehow still managed to enjoy his plays. I don't disagree that there's eras of history where people wrote voluminous amounts of incredibly dense writing (Victorians liked to read and write, and so did the Puritans), but I also have to point out that they didn't have TV, and so that was the way they passed the time. But few of even the smartest Victorian writers would even be able to follow a time-jumping plotline on "Heroes", so I have to say that what we're often dealing with is a form of different dialects and reference points, but as a people, they were hardly smarter than we are as a people.