I thought it was really interesting how Trump is a weird corner case because he’s never held any offices listed. Almost all other presidents have taken the oath prior to being sworn in as president for one of the offices explicitly listed.
That Online Corpus of Founding Era American English seems like a pretty cool database. This is five years old (pre ChatGPT) and seems to have relied on manual search (which itself seems like a vast improvement). I wonder whether large language models are being built to assimilate the entire dataset to answer questions about “original meaning” nowadays and how close to useable they are. It would be even more compelling to have longitudinal versions that can identify when changes in meaning occurred. “Based on all existing written words, it didn’t mean X at that time and that meaning first appeard 60 years later.” Newspapers and legal rulings/documents seem like relatively convincing data sources that have been well curated and relevant to the task. Particularly since SCOTUS post-Scalia has become even more insistent about original meaning. I don’t think it works well post-hoc but it will be interesting for these things to be interpreted when presented as arguments in new cases.
After O’Connor died, there was a discussion on The Political Junkie podcast where they were talking about her autobiography and in particular, about Bush vs Gore and what they were actually thinking about that case. And it had more to do with the whole maze of where things go depending on which contingencies (i.e. what cases happen next between Bush and Gore).
So according to her it was more about the structure of the laws and government than the decision itself. Which I don’t think is something that Cannon is dealing with. Cannons is a trial court judge. The questions at the Supreme Court are more about structure and function of the government.