A fun story – and God knows we need some fun – with that title on The Free Press news website. It turns out there’s a writer, one A.J. Jacobs, who has had some success with two books detailing his efforts to live strictly according to the Bible, and strictly according to today’s myriad health care advice. I say “some success” when both books have been best sellers.

And now he’s attempting to live purely according to the US Constitution, although there is nothing in that document demanding he wear period clothes; he’s just doing that for kicks! At that link he writes of just one aspect – and no, it is not about walking around the streets of Manhattan carrying an 18th century musket, although it’s close:

It may not get much publicity, but there it is, smack-dab in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: Congress has the power to grant citizens “letters of marque and reprisal.” Meaning that, with Congress’s permission, private citizens can load weapons onto their fishing boats, head out to the high seas, capture enemy vessels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patriotic pirates were known as “privateers.” 
…
The Founding Fathers were big fans of privateers. Late in life, John Adams wrote glowingly about the 1775 Massachusetts law that first legalized them, calling it “one of the most important documents in history. The Declaration of Independence is a brimborion in comparison with it.” You read that right: in Adams’ opinion, a law authorizing patriotic piracy is much more important than that trifling tidbit about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Privateers vs “Pirates”, eh? The English language combined with politics once again proves its flexibility and pragmatic uselfulness. And here we are today complaining about the ideological purloining of words like “woke” and “gay” and “is”.

In keeping with the spirit of his project Jacobs has actually applied for Congressional approval to become a “Privateer”, including meeting a Democrat member of the House, Ro Khanna, to discuss this:

I explained that every American had the right to seek approval to “detain and seize any seafaring vessels considered to be operated by enemies of the United States.”
“Are you going to the Taiwan Strait?” Khanna asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, if you want me to.”
“Wow,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if it was a Wow, this is cool, or a Wow, this is what I have to put up with to raise money. “It has to be voted on by the whole Congress?”
“I think so.”

Now I think Jacobs is a Lefty and this whole project is having a bit of swipe at the Supreme Court currently being dominated by “Originalist” judges, probably in favour of the Left’s lodestone of having a “living constitution”.

Hence his definition of the term is incomplete and deliberately so. While Originalists (and “Textualists”, who are related but not the same) do want to interpret new laws against how they think the Constitution would have been applied to them had they been proposed in the past when it was written, they obviously also interpret them against the 27 Amemdments subsequently passed and demand that if Congress and the voters really, really want these new laws, that they get their butts in gear and modify the Constitution with more amendments to show that the new laws truly have the wide support that law needs.

Originalists are not going to do the job for them by just interpreting the Constitution’s applicability on the basis of current, perceived, demands of the “voters” – especially when that perception often turns out to be smoke driven by Leftist activist groups with loud voices, amplified through a compliant media.

But it’s a fun read and I may borrow his book to read at some point, The Year of Living Constitutionally