Last month, I pointed out an interesting aspect of Judge (and soon to be Justice) Sotomayor’s defense to her statement that she “would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She defended this statement by insisting that her words should not be interpreted literally, but should instead be understood to communicate what she intended communicate (which, of course, is not what the words actually communicated). She said:

If you listen to my words, it would have the same suggestion: that only Latinos would come to wiser decisions, but that wouldn’t make sense in the context of my speech either, because I pointed out in the speech that eight—nine—white men had decided Brown v. Board of Education. And, I noted in a separate paragraph of the speech that no one person speaks in the voice of any group. So, my rhetorical flourish, just like hers [Justice O’Conner’s], can’t be read literally. It had a different meaning in the context of the entire speech.

Judge Sotomayor offered this explanation with such regularity and apparent sincerity that one would actually be led to believe that words can only mean what their author intended them to mean. A novel concept, indeed!

It seems that Originalism has found a defense from another unlikely advocate: the Obama administration. The Obama administration has gone on offense after a YouTube compilation video caught fire when Matt Drudge linked to it on his site. Among many clips of Obama speaking on different occasions was one in which he explained that he was a “proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan.” The title of the clip is, “SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance.”

Well, the White House is firing back via a response from former ABC news correspondent Linda Douglass. In it, she criticizes the compilation video on very interesting grounds. Countering the suggestion that President Obama’s health care plan will eliminate private insurance, Douglass says:

Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. You know, the people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.

The truth is that the President has been talking to the American people a lot about health insurance reform, and what is at stake for them. So, what happens is that, because he is talking to the American people so much, there are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time and they take a phrase here and there—they simply cherry pick and put it together—and make it sound like he said something that he didn’t really say.

Let us assume, for the moment, that Linda Douglass is correct. The gist of Douglass’ argument is that President Obama has never said anything that would indicate that he wants to eliminate private insurance. The video appears to show him in his own words, but what we really see is a bunch of clever edits of multiple clips spliced together so it appears that the President has said something that he has never said. We will therefore stipulate that the President has never publicly stated that he wants to eliminate private health insurance.

But for our purposes, let us assume even more in order to make the President’s argument as compelling as possible. That is, we shall not only assume that President Obama has never publicly stated that he wants to be rid of private health insurance, but we will go further and assume that President Obama genuinely does not want to eliminate private insurance. We will, of course, have to ignore the uncut video of him saying, with his own words, that he is a “proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan.” Yes, friends, what I am asking you to do is, for a brief moment, behave as the left tends to behave, and ignore plain, dispositive facts. With these assumptions in place, I want to examine what Douglass’ (and the White House’s) objection actually is.

The objection is that, despite a video that seemingly reveals otherwise, it is not true that President Obama wants to eliminate private health insurance. His words have been taken out of context, moved around, and spliced together, making it appear that he said something that he really did not say. Is this not an objection grounded in Originalism? I think it certainly is. And I think the following assumptions are essential to Douglass’ objection:

1. The President’s words have a fixed meaning. If this were not so, then it would make no sense to say that it is untrue that the President’s words mean that he wants to eliminate private health insurance.
2. The fixed meaning of the President’s words is not set by those listening to/reading his words. If this were not so, then it would make no sense to object to the video editor’s particular interpretation of the President’s words.
3. The fixed meaning of the President’s words, whatever it be, is accessible to the public at large. If this were not so, then it would make no sense to suggest that someone is deliberately misconstruing the President’s words.
4. The President’s interpretation of his own words is authoritative. If this were not so, then it would make no sense to suggest that the President’s interpretation of his own words is true, while the interpretation made by the person who created the video is false.
5. The President’s intended meaning is the only legitimate meaning of the words he speaks/writes. If this were not so, it would make no sense to criticize someone for taking his statements out of context in order to splice them together in a way that leaves a “very false impression.”

If these assumptions are not true, then Douglass’ objection falls flat. It is common to hear the left argue that the words in the Constitution have no fixed meaning. “The Constitution,” we are often told, “is a living, breathing document, the meaning of which must change to adapt with the times.” An important thing to note is that the change advocated by most proponents of this argument is not achieved by amending the Constitution, a process that adds words to the document to update its meaning. Rather, the change is achieved by reinterpreting the words that are already there. Changing the Constitution by this method runs contrary the the five assumptions above. Thus, if the previous assumptions are true, then there is a glaring inconsistency between the standard by which the Obama administration wants us to understand the President’s words, and the standard by which that same administration wants us to understand the words of our Framers.

A question that is now prominent on my mind is this: if cutting up various words of the President and splicing them back together results in an illegitimate interpretation of his words, then why does it not follow that cutting up various Amendments in the Constitution and splicing them back together similarly results in an illegitimate interpretation of the Constitution? This is, of course, what happened in Griswold vs. Connecticut, the decision that gave us a sweeping, undefined Constitutional right of privacy–a right that we have since learned is “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” (Roe v. Wade). The President insists that we interpret his words according to their original meaning. Is it really too much, then, to insist that the President afford our Framers the same courtesy?