A Crisis of Close Reading: Invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798

In March 2025, Americans witnessed what may become the defining constitutional showdown of our era. President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants, then appeared to defy a federal judge's order to return the deportation planes. When the judge questioned this action, Trump called for his impeachment, prompting a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Beyond the immediate political drama lies something more fundamental. How we read the Constitution—and who gets to decide what it means—is on full display and exposes tensions in American democracy that literacy scholars have been investigating for decades. This tension isn't designed into the text. It is created instead by how we read the text.

The Illusion of Autonomous Literacy

British anthropologist Brian Street distinguished between two models of literacy: the "autonomous" and the "ideological." The autonomous model treats literacy as a neutral, technical skill divorced from social context. Reading this post as a strictly autonomous text, the reader would violate protocol by clicking on a link, because the click would take the reader beyond the four corners of the text. The ideological model recognizes that literacy practices are always embedded in power relations, cultural contexts, and ideologies. Failure to contextualize a text constitutes a partial or "technical" exercise, subordinating the reader to the text.

Constitutional originalism—the interpretive philosophy dominant in today's Supreme Court—is a great example of what Street would call autonomous literacy. Originalists claim to read the Constitution objectively, focusing narrowly on the text's original public meaning available to anyone living in 1798 from the plain meaning of the words. Justice Scalia famously declared, "The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted." This approach presents itself as politically neutral: Judges are merely technical readers uncovering what the words already mean.

This autonomous model of constitutional literacy creates a dangerous illusion. As we've seen with the invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime measure never intended for peacetime use, ostensibly neutral readings can be weaponized for contemporary political purposes. The administration's technical focus on whether the judge's order was verbal or written, whether planes were in U.S. airspace or international waters, exemplifies autonomous literacy's fixation on mechanical linguistic details while ignoring larger contextual questions.

The "Living Constitution" as Ideological Literacy

In contrast, those who advocate for a "living Constitution" approach practice what Street calls ideological literacy. They acknowledge that constitutional interpretation inevitably involves value judgments shaped by contemporary needs and evolving understandings of justice (an ideology). This approach recognizes that reading is never neutral but always situated in historical, social, and political contexts. Literacy is always a contested array of cultural practices embedded and enacted in power relations.

When Chief Justice Roberts issued his statement that "impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision," he wasn't citing explicit constitutional text but invoking constitutional norms and traditions, which are inherently extra-textual and ideological. Roberts, who presents a hybrid ideological approach to reading—one that reads beyond the words to their social and institutional context—offers a rare lesson in Constitutional reading.

According to Wikipedia, Roberts "has been described as having a moderate conservative judicial philosophy, though he is primarily an institutionalist." His judicial philosophy is "seen as more moderate and conciliatory than Antonin Scalia's or Clarence Thomas's," with Roberts appearing to "want more consensus from the Court."

Unlike Scalia, Wikipedia notes that "Roberts has not indicated any particularly enhanced reading of originalism or framer's intentions as has been plainly evident in Scalia's speeches and writings." Within the conservative bloc, Roberts is often grouped with justices who are "more hesitant to overrule precedent" (along with Kavanaugh and Barrett), in contrast to those "more willing to overrule precedent" (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch). This distinction in willingness to overrule precedent is a key difference in theories of reading.

John McGinnis, an expert in these matters, suggests that Roberts is “less willing to overrule precedent than [Scalia] was," and that if originalists want Roberts to move in the direction of Thomas and Gorsuch, "they need to offer a principled theory of precedent" that allows justices to overrule non-originalist precedent "without creating what the Chief Justice…would perceive to be too much uncertainty in the law."

Think of Supreme Court justices like referees in a game. Some referees (like Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) are quick to throw out old calls they think were wrong, even if those calls have been used for years and become durable and predictable part of social reality. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are different; they're more careful about changing old decisions, even if they might not fully agree with them.

Digital Textuality and Constitutional Interpretation

Donald Trump used a social media post in a provocative manner from the perspective of the autonomous literacy model after Roberts' rebuke. Trump seems to intend his tweet to be understood literally inside its four corners, a plain text in plain words: "It is our goal to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN," he tweeted after Robert's rebuke. "Such a high aspiration can never be done if Radical and Highly Partisan Judges are allowed to stand in the way of JUSTICE," he continued.

Reading ideologically (recognizing that texts are never neutral), I construe that Trump invites MAGA readers to read this assertion not as a fact of the text, but a fact of life, indisputable because Trump said it. Trump's invited readers read his texts as autonomous and neutral—much like smart automobiles reading signals from the highway.

"If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!" Trump concludes his tweet. Read as an autonomous text, this text says what it says; the job of the reader is to look to the literal facts of the text. Compare this with a scientific statement: "If sodium chloride (NaCl) is dissolved in water, the ionic bonds between sodium and chloride will break, creating Na+ and Cl- ions in solution."

Autonomous readers accept both assertions at face value. Ideological readers are responsibility-led to consider the values and beliefs at play in the larger context and interpret the meaning they take away. The ideology of science, once internalized and valued, lends credibility to the sodium chloride message. The ideology of tyranny damages the credibility of the tweet. Readers incapable of taking up an ideological perspective can't tell the difference.

From Orality to Literacy to Digital Textuality

The scholar Walter Ong observed a fundamental shift in human consciousness with the transition from oral cultures (what he termed "orality") to literate ones. Writing, or what we might call "tracing," transforms thought by making language visible, permanent, and analyzable in new ways.

The current constitutional crisis reveals the lingering tensions between oral and written authority. When Judge Boasberg verbally ordered deportation flights to return, the administration claimed only his subsequent written order carried legal weight. This privileging of the written over the spoken word is a classic feature of what Ong called "literacy consciousness," a naive perspective that grants written text an automatic (autonomous) aura of power.

We are now moving beyond traditional literacy into what Ong terms "secondary orality" or digital textuality, a type of critical digital reading teachers could teach in school. Trump's tweets calling for the judge's impeachment, El Salvador's president posting "Oopsie... Too late" when deportation planes landed, and social media tracking of ICE flights all represent new forms of textual authority operating outside traditional legal channels.

The Cliff of Strict Constructionism

The insistence on autonomous literacy by strict constructionists has brought us to a constitutional cliff. By treating the Constitution as a dead document to be read in isolation from evolving social contexts, we forego any possibility of progressing beyond the conditions of life when the document was ratified over two centuries ago. The judiciary risks becoming increasingly disconnected from lived reality and democratic values as we saw in the dismantling of women's rights to reproductive healthcare, which did not exist when the Constitution was written. As educational blogger Colleen Ruggieri noted, it's another case of Coleman's philosophy that "nobody gives a shit what you think or what you feel."

The Alien Enemies Act case illustrates this danger perfectly. A strictly constructionist reading might conclude that since the Act doesn't explicitly require a formal declaration of war, it can be invoked against any perceived "enemy" the president designates. Yet such a reading ignores the law's historical context as a wartime measure and its troubling history during World War II when it was used to justify Japanese internment.

More dangerously, if the Supreme Court validates the administration's position that deportation orders using this Act are unreviewable by courts, it would create a constitutional black hole where executive power operates unchecked. This outcome would be the logical conclusion of autonomous literacy's failure to account for power, context, and consequences.

Beyond Close Reading

The educational reformer David Coleman, architect of the Common Core State Standards, championed "close reading"—an approach focusing narrowly on what texts say while minimizing external context. This method bears striking resemblance to originalist constitutional interpretation. Both approaches ask readers to confine themselves to the text, avoid bringing in outside knowledge, and resist making connections to contemporary issues. Both create the illusion of politically neutral reading while actually encoding particular ideological stances.

For an example of how reading instruction looks and feels under the autonomous model, watch David Coleman teach the reading of Letter from a Birmingham Jail in this video from EngageNY's Common Core Video Series.

What we might consider instead is what literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf calls "deep reading"—a process that integrates technical decoding with critical and creative thinking, human empathy, and contextual understanding. A judiciary capable of deep reading would recognize that constitutional interpretation requires more than dictionary definitions and grammar analysis. It demands historical perspective, ethical reasoning, and democratic accountability.

A Way Forward

As this constitutional crisis unfolds, we have an opportunity to develop more sophisticated, contextually aware forms of constitutional literacy. This won't happen through some magical Supreme Court ruling but through broader conversation about how we read our founding documents.

Schools, colleges, public forums, and media must foster critical literacy that helps citizens understand both autonomous and ideological approaches to reading. We need public intellectuals who can explain complex constitutional issueswithout resorting to partisan talking points.

Most importantly, we need judges willing to acknowledge that constitutional interpretation is not a mechanical exercise but a profound responsibility requiring both technical skill and democratic wisdom. The Constitution isn't just a text to be decoded; it's a framework for collective self-governance that must be interpreted in light of its deepest principles.

The current crisis isn't just about immigration policy or executive power. It's about whether we have the literacy practices necessary to sustain constitutional democracy in the face of authoritarian challenges. The answer will depend not just on what the Constitution says, but on how we read it.