I don’t quite agree with the invective against originalism. Originalism as the specific, Federalist society “ethos”, is somewhat full of shit. But there is a core element of truth to both originalism and textualism (which is often lumped into the same basket, even though it is a different concept.) It is fairly obvious and good jurisprudence to weigh legal decisions on the text of the laws underlying the case, whether it be a statute or a national constitution. Some democratic authority passed that text, and unless it is inherently incompatible with constitutional principles, plain textual meaning should be respected. E.x. if the government passes a law for the “Regulation of Chicken Eggs”, it is probably not reasonable to conclude it also covers duck eggs–the legislature could have easily said “eggs” alone if they intended it to be expansive. But likewise if they said “Regulation of Eggs”, then it would be fair game to assume any agricultural egg product would be covered–textualism would hold that when the plain text is so obviously clear, even if the intent was different, the intent doesn’t matter. If they intended “Regulation of Eggs” to only apply to chicken eggs…they could have simply put the word chicken in there, so whatever proof of intent exists, it is secondary to such a plain text reading.
The concept of investigating the “original intent” or “original meaning” (these are actually two separate philosophical branches of originalism) of either a statute or a constitution, is (in its best formulation) intended to mean that you should investigated the original intent when the plain text does not clearly apply to the situation at hand in an unambiguous way, for clarity. That isn’t actually all that controversial–and if you think through the consequences of things, it is actually fairly appropriate for the intentions of the democratically elected legislature to be important in such determinations.
Where things go kind of off-kilter, is while yes, historically the Supreme Court has always given some deference to intent, the “movement” “Originalists” argue for a hyper-focus on such arguments to the exclusion of what was more of a historical norm up until the 1950s–in which judges use a mixture of textual analysis, intent analysis, and the context of the way the laws had been used and developed over time. There isn’t actually much real historical precedent for what I would deem the “slavish” devotion to Originalism that developed in the 1950s. It should also be understood where this theory came from, the modern conservative movement Originalism was a direct response to Brown v. Board, and was developed specifically as a political tool to undermine civil rights judicial rulings that conservatives disliked. That’s really it.
There isn’t actually anything wrong with citing a jurist from 17th century England in a Supreme Court case, while the occasion for pre-independence English common law jurists to have direct / immediate relevance to a constitutional matter, we do actually explicitly inherit the “common law”, in fact many State constitutions explicitly spelled out they inherited English common law from before independence. While you certainly can’t rely on such things over actual text of our constitution and its amendments, and I would also argue you shouldn’t roll back to a jurist’s interpretation of something from the 17th century when there is a lot of precedent and legal practice of doing things differently for hundreds of years since then, I reject the idea a judge’s opinion is invalid immediately because of citing a 17th century English judge. There is still some good reason for such citations being situationally appropriate.
Another key issue with movement Originalism is historically, jurists would delve somewhat into legislative intent when it was very clear, but in most cases of note it is actually not meaningfully possible to delve legislative intent. For the simple reason that a legislature is a body of multiple men, let’s say some article of the Constitution was drafted by Madison, revised by eight other men, and then ratified by dozens of other men. Whose “intent” prevails? If you can find intent from one out of those dozens of men, should you assume it was the collective intent? For that reason while legislative intent should never be ignored, it was often just a part of a large style of jurisprudence, and I think that only in cases where the intent truly is patently obvious and undeniable, should it prevail over long standing precedent and practices that are being followed by people alive today.