However, read purely literally, the law would also mandate ten years in prison for dining and dashing if the diner were to use a knife to cut their food.
[1] Similarly, many of the original framers of the Constitution were not strict constructionists; Washington, Hamilton, and Adams all took broad interpretations of the powers afforded to the federal government.
James Madison (the Constitution's primary author) tended to take a more moderate view, somewhere between the interpretations promoted by Jefferson and Adams.
"Strict constructionism" is also used in American political discourse as an umbrella term for conservative legal philosophies, which tend to be more willing to strike down federal laws and regulations for exceeding the authorities given to them by the constitution.
The major questions doctrine limits the ability of the executive branch to enact broad or sweeping changes without express authorization from Congress, under the principle that few people would understand a vague statute to imply the existence of broad, sweeping powers Constitutional scholar John Hart Ely believed that "strict constructionism" is not really a philosophy of law or a theory of interpretation, but a coded label for judicial decisions popular with a particular political party.
For example, on the campaign trail in 2000, when speaking on his choices for new Supreme Court Justices, George W. Bush promised to appoint "strict constructionists in the mold of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas", though Thomas considers himself an originalist, and Scalia outright rejected strict construction, calling it "a degraded form of textualism.
The term was used regularly by members of the Democratic-Republican Party and by Democrats during the antebellum period when they argued that powers of the federal government listed in Article I should be strictly construed.
Because the vagueness of Article I inevitably lent itself to broad interpretations as well as narrow ones, strict constructionists turned to the somewhat restrained descriptions of the powers of Congress that were offered by advocates of the Constitution during ratification.
Thus, politicians who identified themselves as strict constructionists embraced an approach to constitutional interpretation that resembles what we today call originalism.
The statute at issue provided for an increased jail term if, "during and in relation to ... [a] drug trafficking crime," the defendant "uses ... a firearm."
The Court held, I regret to say, that the defendant was subject to the increased penalty, because he had "used a firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime."