The various ways of thinking about Constitutional Originalism: The Founders' Originalism. A quote:
The three schools of originalism are... incomplete at best. The framers did not intend to enable democracy simply through the Constitution's open-ended rights provisions, nor did they mean to constrain it just through those provisions; both Balkin and his libertarian-originalist counterparts simplify their claims too much. Rather, the framers wanted to enable democracy, but they wanted to enable it specifically by constraining its excesses — and thus the presumption-of-constitutionality originalists also oversimplify the political theory of the Constitution. No construction like a "presumption of liberty" or a "presumption of constitutionality" can reliably be used in determining original meaning because the framers had to make compromises among the ends of government and the three grounds of legitimacy.
Instead of reading the Constitution through the lens of a single theory of original meaning, we should simply read it with an awareness of its compromises and philosophic inconsistencies. This may actually be what a more complete and true originalism would entail — that we interpret the Constitution without resort to any modern construction, be it a presumption of liberty, of democracy, or of constitutionality.
