As one commentator put it, “originalism” is really a family of concepts. One currently dominating concept is the semantic theory of originalism. For example, in the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, what the play’s words mean are not necessarily what we understand them to mean today but instead mean what Shakespeare and his audience took them to mean. This is the semantic content and meaning of the play. The meaning is affixed by the fact that there is a writing that was written and circulated at a specific time.
Likewise, it is said in the case of the Constitution its semantic content was fixed when it was ratified. The task of the courts is therefore to look at historic practices and understandings at the time the Constitution or its amendments were ratified to ascertain the “original public meaning.” Some originalists even argue this is purely a matter of empirical fact just like the determination of the meaning of a piece of literature written hundreds of years ago can be a question of fact.
But is the determination of what the Constitution means and how it should be applied centuries later to situations and problems never contemplated at the time of ratification really a question of fact? Perhaps you could claim it is a fact that the ratifiers of the Establishment Clause 230 pus years ago would have had no problem with a law requiring bowdlerized versions of the Ten Commandments being thrust in front of school children’s eyes.
To get there you might have to define, configure and survey what you mean by “ratifiers.” And further you might have to ignore the fact that taxpayer funded public schools populated by students subject to compulsory attendance laws didn’t exist at the time of ratification of the Establishment Clause. Then you might also have to account for the fact the clause was to be applied later to the states via the 14th Amendment. And then you might have to decide which “historical practices and understandings” do you look at–those at the time of the ratification of the Establishment Clause or of the 14th Amendment or both? If you do both, you might have to decide which group of ratifiers count more in fixing the what and when of the “original public meaning”?
In any case, there is something odd about a doctrine that asserts the “original public meaning” of the Constitution was permanently fixed at the time of ratification when that doctrine and its varying configurations themselves did not exist at the time of ratification.