> Textualists are trying to ignore the fact that there's a difference between intent and implementation.
It is actually the opposite. Textualists say that intent doesn't mean squat. Originalists will consider intent. Textualists say that intent is unknowable and therefore you must exclusively use the text of the law, regardless of how stupid that might seem.
> Textualists say that intent doesn't mean squat. Originalists will consider intent.
In practice, textualism and originalism aren’t all that different, because most of the same indicia that originalists will look to for signs of “original intent” textualists will look to for signs of what the words of the text mean in their original context (textualists are not, as a class, blind to context). While different observers will weight the individual indicia differently, the variation within the textualist and originalist camps on this is more significant than that between the camps. The camps really mostly differ in how they tend to frame arguments from the same facts to the same conclusions.
I blame Textualists for the existence of legalese.
Laws and contracts are so damn hard to read because they need to close every possible conceivable loophole. You get sentences that use multiple synonyms of the same verb because someone is going to come up with some strange incredibly-specific difference between them.
Imagine some parent telling their kid to not jump on the bed, and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping!". That's a kid that's going to grow up being a Textualist.
> Textualists say that intent is unknowable
I think Textualists are claiming this in bad faith, knowing damn well that intent is very well knowable, but argue otherwise to advance their agenda.
It is actually the opposite. Textualists say that intent doesn't mean squat. Originalists will consider intent. Textualists say that intent is unknowable and therefore you must exclusively use the text of the law, regardless of how stupid that might seem.