> Isn't it more important to advocate a policy than to try to interpret the placement of a comma?

I mean that question is the "emacs versus vi" of holy wars in the legal community. My legal philosophy tends to lean towards pragmatic/conservative, which means I think it's generally more important to interpret the placement of the comma. The reason is that, like conservatives generally, I tend to view the Constitution as an agreement, the last time Americans ever agreed on anything (and then just barely). So given the extreme lack of consensus today, I think it's at least a principled position to fall back to the existing agreement.

At the same time, I'm pragmatically concerned about judicial legitimacy, which is a function of how the judiciary spends its political capital. The farther judicial decisions stray from the original intent of the laws, the more political capital is spent. Every time the judiciary disagrees with the elected branches, political capital is spent (see, e.g., the response to Citizens United, which is an excellent interpretation of the law, but went against what the political branches wanted). I don't think its wrong for judges to "legislate from the bench" but I recognize that it costs political capital to do so, and that this political capital is best saved for situations in which there is an acute need to overturn the existing agreement (e.g. I'll concede that Roe v. Wade was a very tenuous interpretation of the law, but I also think it was one of the rare cases where it was necessary for the court to make up law out of thin air).

But that's my two cents. As I said, it's the subject of much religious zealotry. Lots of people would say that the most important thing is to establish the "right" policies. In terms of what policy I think is best, I'm a huge fan of judicial oversight, so I think the only exceptions to the warrant requirements should be exigent circumstances (e.g. searching a suspect for weapons at a crime scene).