Comment by karaterobot

First, even if we kicked all questions back to the authors, there would need to be a process for interpreting legislation when the original authors are not available—perhaps they died 200 years ago, for example. So, a judicial group is necessary for interpreting the law in any case.

Second, interpreting the law is a full-time job, and our legislators are already not doing the jobs they have. If we asked them to not do a second job on top of the one they're already in dereliction of, nothing would get done. Well, twice as much nothing would get done, if that makes sense. So, you need someone with the full-time job of interpreting the law, and it might as well be that judicial branch.

Third, legislation is often a compromise. If you go back and try to interpret what it was that people said during the debate which produced the language at issue, you'd have to decide whose voices carried the most weight, which seems very, very tricky. It's why legislation is written down in the first place: a single source of truth. Even if ambiguous, it's still less ambiguous than a transcript of extemporaneous debate.