Daily Archives: 15 October 2026

Understanding our Constitution

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Professor Emeritus Michael Polelle, of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law, in his letter to The Wall Street Journal, disagreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s originalist view that the words of our Constitution should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

The problem is that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by an Athenian democracy where all citizens were lawmakers. … Legislatures appointed the Framers. It follows that the most relevant and practical frame of reference is what the Framers….

I disagree with Polelle. The Framers didn’t ratify the Constitution; they only wrote it. Their final draft, also, was flawed enough in the view of the population outside of and much larger than those Framers that the debates about it—the Federalist Papers and the less well organized Anti-Federalist Papers—extracted an agreement for the people to ratify that draft if a series of Amendments—the Bill of Rights—were passed by Congress and put to the people for additional ratification or rejection.

Then most of the States artificially expanded their franchise so a larger subset of We the People could vote on ratification. That ratification vote was on the basis their interpretation of the words of the Constitution, not the Framers’. And so was the subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights.

It’s entirely appropriate for our Constitution’s words to be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

Another Mistaken Response

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This one from NATO’s military boss, General Alexus Grynkewich. In responding to the Russian threat to Europe, he made this remark:

NATO could “match any enemy move up the escalation ladder….”

What about, instead, getting out in front (get higher, to stick to the metaphor) in the escalation sequence and by being in front—escalating farther and faster than Russia can respond—block any further escalatory efforts by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin? Surely American military leadership learned the blood-soaked folly of tit-for-tat reactive moves, which only extend the conflict and greatly increase the friendly casualty butcher’s bill.

He had this, too:

Grynkewich laid out a “block, blunt, and break” strategy for defeating an invading force. The alliance’s superior data and sensing ability means Mr Putin wouldn’t have the luxury of surprising the West.

This is incredibly naïve for so senior a military officer. I was stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, and one of things that we worried about and tried to train against was the ability of Spetznatz to infiltrate and lie low until the USSR decided to come over the fence. At that point, those infiltrated and secreted agents and small teams—4-5 agents—would act to sabotage key communications and radar nodes, interfere with Army crashout ops, blow or at least damage key bridges, and so on.

Today, the ability of Russia’s modern-day and evolved Special Operations units to infiltrate and secrete extends much farther than human agents. It includes smuggled-in and hidden until The Day drones (of which Ukraine has already demonstrated the catastrophic consequences) and malware inserted into key communications nodes and fuel, water, and electricity distribution infrastructure chokepoints not doing anything until activated on The Day.

Russia already is collecting a plethora of intelligence with its campaign of drone incursions and cyberattacks, which, far from being intimidation or warning moves, are in their essence reconnaissance probes.