Antonin Scalia, as is typical of his originalist interpretation of the Constitution, introduced historical evidence in support of his argument that the Eighth Amendment imposes no proportionality requirement at all. Justice Anthony Kennedy argued in favor of a vague proportionality principle that allowed the Court to uphold Harmelin's sentence. And Justice Byron White argued that Harmelin's sentence was the sort of "excessive" sentence forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. Scalia's originalist argument Through his opinion in Harmelin, Justice Scalia voiced his disagreement with the Court's decision in Solem v. Helm, , which was decided before he was appointed to the Court. He first identified the English Bill of Rights of 1689 as the source of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. According to Scalia, Solem assumed that the Americans who adopted the Eighth Amendment in 1791 understood that language in the same way as the English of 1689. Scalia disputed this hypothesis. He pointed to a dispute among historians about which royal abuses the Declaration was intended to combat. Some historians contend that these abuses were the harsh punishments for treason—drawing and quartering, beheading, disemboweling—meted out by the Bloody Assizes. Other historians contend that the Declaration was meant to rein in the enormously arbitrary sentencing power the king had exercised in sentencing a notorious perjurer. Regardless, Scalia argued that those who wrote the Declaration considered a punishment to be "cruel and unusual" only if it were outside of the judge's power to impose. The phrase "'cruel and unusual' is treated as interchangeable with 'cruel and illegal.'" For this reason, the English of the 17th century did not believe a "cruel and unusual" punishment was a disproportionate one. For Scalia, though, the more important question was what the words "cruel and unusual" meant to the Framers of the Bill of Rights in 1791 when the Eighth Amendment was adopted. "Even if one assumes that the Founders knew the precise meaning of that English antecedent..., a direct transplant of the English meaning to the soil of American constitutionalism would in any case have been impossible." Because federal common law incorporated no common-law crimes, the Framers could only have meant to check legislative power. They understood the word "unusual" to refer to things that were "not regularly or customarily employed." Furthermore, if the Framers had meant to outlaw 'disproportional' punishments, they would have used that word, as many contemporary state constitutions