Rolling Stone no paywall – “Originalism, a framework with roots in the segregationist past and funded by right-wing oligarchs, helped lead to Donald Trump’s unconstitutional regime By Sean Wilentz, Sidney Blumenthal – June 1, 2025: “An obscure ideology most people have never heard of is dominating almost every aspect of American life. Nearly every important Supreme Court ruling by the conservative majority — from abortion to voting rights, from gun control to environmental protection — virtually the whole far-right agenda — has been foisted on the nation using this ideology as its justification. “Originalism” is not a household word. Yet is in an extremely important word — the key to the political movement that has transformed the country over the last forty years and culminated in the regime of Donald Trump. Originalism’s influence, once confined to the nation’s law schools, is now vast, reaching far beyond the Supreme Court majority’s politicized rulings. First and foremost, originalists — yes, they call themselves that —provide the intellectual underpinning for Trump’s “emergencies,” his lawless assault on law firms, universities, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Voice of America, indeed, the entire civil service. The grand alibi comes in the form of what the originalists present as the doctrine of “unitary executive,” a contrived theory of their own making that they pass off as something the Framers inscribed in the Constitution.

In justifying Trump issuing executive orders as though they were dictatorial decrees, the theory denies innumerable vital federal agencies and institutions the slightest independence. Most recently, on May 22, the Supreme Court moved to the brink of destroying that independence, trashing an 80-year old precedent in a preliminary ruling on the longstanding Humphrey’s Executor, and allowing the president more power to remove officials from independent organizations, and cloaking the pre-determined result in flimsy originalist explanations. As the “unitary executive,” Trump can threaten to place the Federal Reserve under his heel, which would likely trigger a worldwide Depression. The high court itself exposes originalism as the expedient fraud that it has always been. Left unchecked, originalism can be wielded as a tool to tear apart American democracy and menace the global economy…”