Will misses the point of my graph, though that’s my fault, as I didn’t supply much of an explanation. My point was not that it’s a shame that 3 NLRB members don’t get appointed, or an NLRB order is vacated. Nor is it my view that the government should be as large as possible. My point was instead that the rules that the founders developed to address government structure reflect a different world, and hence are unlikely to be reasonable for our purposes.

The founders tried to establish what they called a “republican form of government,” in which most policy would be made through public deliberation and debate. Whatever the merits of such a position in the 18th century, it is completely wrong today. We live under what might be described as a bureaucratic-legal system. Nearly all policy is determined by the bureaucracy subject to very general control by elected officials and judges. This is inevitable in any large country. I can’t think of a single historical or modern example of a large country (aside from failed states) that does not use a vast bureaucracy to determine and implement policy. The only real exception is the U.S. federal government in its first few decades, and that is because in the early years local interests were not yet ready to yield power to the center, and a largely agrarian with mostly local markets did not need national regulation. It may be reasonable to believe that the U.S. government is too big today. But does anyone think the right size is 938 employees (actually the 1816 figure, the earliest I could find)?

Will says he’s “inclined to say that [originalism] provides a benefit by giving us a baseline set of institutions from which we can depart if we marshal sufficient consensus.” But we have marshaled such a consensus; it is reflected in 200 years of institutional development that has been ratified over and over by different configurations of political interests.

It is not my view, contrary to Will’s suggestion, that I know best how the government should be structured, and my views should be implemented by the Supreme Court. My view is that as between the originalist baseline (which Will is confident is correct) and the status-quo baseline, the status-quo baseline is a better one. My position does not require any special “confidence.” Will is just smuggling in a bias for originalism by arguing otherwise.