On today’s Uncommon Knowledge, I ask Rick Brookhiser to consider a contretemps and a quotation.

The contretemps:

Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton insisted on establishing a national bank, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson labeled the measure unconstitutional, and, as the other founders squared off, some siding with Hamilton, others with Jefferson, President Washington queasily attempted to hold his administration together without taking sides.

The quotation:

“The theory of originalism,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has written, “[G]ives…[the Constitution] the meaning that its words were understood to bear at the time they were promulgated.”

What does it say about the originalism of Mr. Justice Scalia, I ask Rick, that even the founders themselves disagreed—on occasion, bitterly—over the meaning of the Constitution?

The author of What Would the Founders Do? and George Washington on Leadership replies here.