Constitution Isn’t ‘Evolving,’ Scalia Says

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says judges who read new rights into the Constitution are “impoverishing democracy” by taking issues out of public debate.

“My Constitution is a very flexible document,” he told an audience at a conference on James Madison at Princeton University. “You want a right to abortion? Pass a law. That’s flexibility.”

Judges who interpret the Constitution as an evolving document want to drive issues out of the democratic debate, he said. He joked that, if judges could interpret the Constitution’s goals as set out in the preamble without being bound by the document’s full text, “bye bye 4th Amendment. The best way to ensure tranquillity is to allow unreasonable searches and seizures. We will have a tranquil society.”