There are different kinds of defenses of originalism. Some scholars make purely conceptual claims, this is just how language works. We first ask what does this law actually say? What does it mean? What does it do? What legal effect does it have in the world? And only then do we ask a secondary question, should that law still be the law? And that's probably right, but on the other hand, non-originalists will say, “Surely the judges should have the ability to update such an old constitution to adapt to modern circumstances.” It doesn't matter that it's just how language works if non-originalists all accept that they actually want to update the meaning of the Constitution over time. Other originalists thus make normative defenses of the Constitution because an originalist approach would be normatively more desirable because it would lead to better results. In reality, originalists need to make both kinds of defenses, originalists need conceptual defenses and normative defenses. If the non-originalist view is that it doesn't matter how we ordinarily interpret language because judges are in an activity of updating the meaning of the Constitution anyway, there needs to be some normative argument made for why judges should not be changing the meaning of the Constitution. Why we should be bound by the Constitution as written, the Constitution we already have.