Your argument is that law should be treated like a clean-room implementation with zero original context. The original interpretation is apparently meaningless.

Your argument is that law should be treated like a clean-room implementation with zero original context. The original interpretation is apparently meaningless. But interpretations by random judges are fine? And it's appropriate for these random decisions to become precedent? I've never understood this mindset. It's treating the English language like machine code, as if it could be written with a degree of deterministic certainty. Our human language is littered with reasonable unwritten assumptions, words that slowly evolve, words that completely change meaning. If we happen to know what the original authors of the bill meant with their words, why should we substitute their known interpretation with that of some random judge? Is the American system really suffering from too much Jeffersonian-ism? I'd argue the opposite.