J. Joel Alicea
Thank you, John, and thank you to The Heritage Foundation for inviting me to give the fourth annual Edwin Meese Originalism Lecture. It is a great honor to give a lecture named after Edwin Meese, especially on this 40th anniversary of his appointment as Attorney General. Mr. Meese is one of the most important figures in the history of originalism. Through both rhetoric and policy, he played a pivotal role in the rise of originalism within the federal judiciary and in American politics. As we look back on the many originalist victories over the last few years and look ahead to many more such victories for the rule of law in the years to come, we rightly thank and honor Mr. Meese for making this astonishing period in American constitutional law possible.

And it is an astonishing period in which we are living. Less than a decade ago, it was difficult to imagine a world in which six justices of the Supreme Court would place significant weight on the original meaning of the Constitution and five would be self-proclaimed originalists. When I began my Supreme Court clerkship in the summer of 2016, the notion that we were only a few years away from the overruling of Roe v. Wade,REF Lemon v. Kurtzman,REF and Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense CouncilREF would have seemed hopelessly optimistic. Yet here we are. Because President Trump and his allies in the Senate systematically appointed committed originalists to the federal courts in the face of determined and unyielding opposition, originalism is ascendant, and because it is ascendant, Roe, Lemon, and Chevron are no more.

The first three months of the second Trump Administration have witnessed an extraordinary change in the policies and operation of the Executive Branch, a peacetime transformation of government perhaps without precedent since the early days of the New Deal.  » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/originalism-the-administrative-state-and-the-clash-political-theories