The Funniest part About the Oath Flub

[alcibiades_mystery]

Roberts is supposedly a "textualist," a strict constructionist. In other words, he's of the group that completely fetishizes the actual words of the U.S. Constitution, and considers those words to be fixed and transparent signifiers of a constant idea. For the textualists, it's not merely a matter of "interpreting" the "original intent." Rather, the original intent can only be interpreted using the fixed signifiers of the document, the text itself, the words themselves. For a textualist to screw up the actual text of the Constitution - a mere 35 or so words in this case - is just hilarious. I have no doubt that John Roberts is a smart cookie, but this ranks pretty high up there in terms of embarrassing flubs, especially given his theoretical position on the text of the document.