I. A Nation Born in Revolt Against Unchecked Power
The American republic was not born in a courthouse. It was born in the righteous fury of a people who had endured, catalogued, and finally rejected the arbitrary rule of a sovereign whose power acknowledged no boundary, no accountability, and no constraint but his own will. The Declaration of Independence is, at its core, a legal brief against tyranny -- a meticulously reasoned argument that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when any government subverts that principle, the people retain not merely the right but the duty to alter or abolish it.
The Founders were students of history and philosophy. They had read Montesquieu, Locke, and Blackstone. They understood, with crystalline clarity, that the concentration of power in any single body -- regardless of how that body was constituted or what noble title it wore -- was the very definition of tyranny. They constructed a republic of separated powers, of enumerated and therefore limited federal authority, of a Bill of Rights that carved out sovereign territory belonging to the states and the people alone. They were architects of restraint, engineers of balance.
And yet, more than two centuries after Philadelphia, we find ourselves governed in vast and consequential ways by five unelected lawyers in black robes who serve for life, answer to no electorate, and whose decisions on the most intimate and contested questions of American life cannot be overturned by any vote, any legislature, or any democratic process short of a constitutional amendment so difficult to achieve as to be nearly theoretical. The questions of when life begins, whether a child may bow his head in prayer at a public school, whether a citizen may keep a firearm in his own home, and whether the federal government may regulate the precise manner in which a farmer grows wheat on his own land -- these are not questions that the Constitution assigns to nine judges. They are questions the Constitution either leaves to the states and the people or addresses in terms whose plain meaning has been deliberately, sophisticatedly, and relentlessly distorted.
The thesis of this essay is not a comfortable one, and it is not offered carelessly. It is this: the Supreme Court of the United States has, through a long progression of self-granted powers, expansive reinterpretations, and breathtaking jurisdictional reach, transformed itself into an institution functionally indistinguishable from the very tyranny against which the American Revolution was fought. The robe has become the crown.
II. The Original Sin: Marbury v. Madison and the Court That Crowned Itself
To understand how the Supreme Court became what it is today, one must begin at the beginning -- or rather, at the moment the Court decided, on its own authority, what it would become.
In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall authored the opinion in Marbury v. Madison, establishing the doctrine of judicial review: the principle that the Supreme Court has the authority to strike down acts of Congress or the executive as unconstitutional. This doctrine has since become so embedded in American legal culture that most citizens simply assume it was always there, inscribed somewhere between the lines of the Constitution itself. It was not.
Search the text of the Constitution. Read Article III carefully. It establishes the judicial branch, defines the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and grants Congress the power to establish inferior courts. Nowhere -- not in a single clause, not in a single word -- does the Constitution grant the Supreme Court the power to serve as the final, unreviewable arbiter of what the Constitution means. Marshall did not find this power in the document. He constructed it, brilliantly and audaciously, from inference and logic and an argument so elegantly circular that generations of lawyers have mistaken its sophistication for its legitimacy.
Marshall's reasoning proceeded roughly as follows: the Constitution is supreme law; the Court must decide cases arising under the law; therefore, the Court must decide whether laws conform to the Constitution. The argument sounds reasonable until one presses on its foundational assumption -- that it must be the Court that performs this function rather than any other branch or, indeed, the states themselves.
Thomas Jefferson, who was no intellectual lightweight, saw the flaw immediately. James Madison, the very architect of the Constitution, expressed grave reservations about judicial supremacy in his later years. Andrew Jackson, upon reading a Supreme Court decision he disagreed with, reportedly declared that the Chief Justice had made his decision and could now enforce it -- a pithy illustration of the fact that judicial supremacy is, at its root, a political convention rather than a constitutional mandate.
The logical defect in Marbury is not subtle. It is stark. It is precisely the error a first-year philosophy student is taught to recognize: allowing an interested party to be the judge in its own case. If the question before the republic is how far does federal power extend, it is a fundamental violation of rational impartiality to assign the answer to a branch of the federal government. If the question is how far does judicial power extend, it is an even more grotesque conflict of interest to assign that answer to the judiciary itself. No reasonable system of justice permits a litigant to serve as his own judge. We do not allow corporations to sit on the regulatory boards that govern them. And yet we have permitted, for over two centuries, the federal judiciary to define the boundaries of its own authority, and we have treated the results as sacred.
The consequences of this original error compound with every generation, because each new exercise of judicial review is built upon the last. The Court's power is self-reinforcing in a way that no other governmental power is. Congress can be voted out. The President faces reelection. But a Supreme Court precedent, once established, requires the Court's own assent to be overturned -- and the Court, being composed of human beings with institutional loyalties and professional self-interest, is naturally and predictably reluctant to diminish its own authority. The result, over two centuries, is not a court that has grown wiser and more restrained. It is a court that has grown larger in its ambitions with every passing decade.
III. The Federal Leviathan: Commerce, Penumbras, and the Dissolution of Limits
The Constitution that the Founders ratified was a document of breathtaking restraint -- not in its aspirations, which were soaring, but in its assignment of federal power, which was deliberately, painstakingly narrow. Article I, Section 8 enumerates the powers of Congress: to levy taxes, coin money, regulate commerce among the states, establish post offices, raise armies, declare war, and a handful of others. The Tenth Amendment then closes the door with a clarity that should have foreclosed argument: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
This was not ambiguous. The men who wrote and ratified these words lived under a government they had found too powerful, and they were constructing its replacement with the explicit intention of making federal power limited and enumerable. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 45, assured the ratifying states that the powers of the new federal government would be "few and defined," while the powers remaining with the states would be "numerous and indefinite." This was not rhetorical decoration. It was a constitutional promise upon which ratification was secured. That promise has been almost entirely broken, and the Supreme Court is the primary instrument of that betrayal.
The Commerce Clause has been the great engine of federal expansion. In its original context, the power to regulate commerce "among the several states" was meant to prevent states from erecting trade barriers against one another -- a practical problem the Articles of Confederation had failed to solve. It was a coordination mechanism, not a grant of plenary federal authority over economic life. The Founders would have been genuinely bewildered by the suggestion that this clause empowered Congress to regulate a farmer's personal wheat crop.
Yet that is precisely what the Supreme Court held in Wickard v. Filburn (1942). Roscoe Filburn grew wheat on his Ohio farm in excess of federal quotas -- not to sell, but to feed his own livestock and family. The Court, straining the Commerce Clause to a degree that would have astonished its authors, ruled that even purely local, non-commercial activity could be regulated by Congress if it, in the aggregate, substantially affected interstate commerce. The logic was not entirely without coherence -- but it was coherence purchased at the cost of any meaningful limit on federal power. If a man feeding his own chickens on his own farm with his own grain falls within the federal commerce power, then there is no human activity that does not. The enumeration of congressional powers becomes a formality, a historical curiosity, a dead letter.
Wickard was not an aberration. It was a template. In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Court extended the same logic to a California woman growing marijuana in her own home, for her own medical use, under a state law that specifically authorized it. The federal government's Controlled Substances Act prevailed. The state's democratic choice was overridden. Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, wrote what should have been the majority opinion: that the Court's interpretation of the Commerce Clause had abandoned any pretense of limiting federal authority, and that the Founders' carefully constructed system of limited enumerated powers had been rendered a nullity.
Then there is the doctrine of implied rights and constitutional "penumbras." In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the majority, discovered a constitutional right to marital privacy not in any specific provision of the Constitution but in the "penumbras" and "emanations" of various amendments -- a jurisprudential metaphor so strained that it reads less like legal reasoning than like a conjuring trick. One need not disagree with the result in Griswold to recognize that "penumbras" and "emanations" are not legal concepts; they are the linguistic tools of a court that has already decided where it wants to go and is fashioning the vocabulary needed to get there. This technique -- deciding the desired outcome first and then reverse-engineering the constitutional justification -- is the defining pathology of the modern Supreme Court. It is not interpretation. It is legislation, conducted by unelected judges, insulated from democratic accountability, and dressed in the borrowed authority of constitutional text.
IV. The Questions Stolen from the People
The most visceral evidence of judicial usurpation is not found in Commerce Clause abstractions or separation-of-powers theory. It is found in the specific, concrete, deeply human issues that the Supreme Court has removed from democratic deliberation and resolved by fiat -- issues on which reasonable, morally serious Americans disagree profoundly, and on which the Constitution is either silent or speaks clearly in a direction the Court has chosen to ignore.
Abortion
Few issues in American life are more deeply felt, more morally complex, or more genuinely contested than abortion. It involves competing claims about bodily autonomy, the nature and onset of human life, medical ethics, religious conviction, and the proper role of government -- questions that human civilization has debated without resolution for millennia and that touch the most intimate dimensions of human experience. The Constitution says nothing about abortion. Nothing. Not a word, not a clause, not a plausible inference from any enumerated right.
And yet in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court located a constitutional right to abortion in the same penumbral privacy doctrine that had emerged from Griswold, effectively invalidating the abortion laws of fifty states in a single stroke. Whatever one believes about the moral status of abortion -- and both positions command the allegiance of thoughtful, conscientious people -- the constitutional argument for Roe was always weak. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a committed supporter of abortion rights, said so herself on multiple occasions, arguing that the breadth and speed of the decision short-circuited a democratic process that was already moving toward liberalization in many states.
When the Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), supporters of abortion rights were devastated, and their devastation was understandable. But the constitutional argument in Dobbs was more defensible than the argument in Roe. The majority was correct that the Constitution does not speak to abortion, and that the issue therefore belongs to the democratic processes of the states. This is what the Tenth Amendment means. This is what a genuine federal system requires.
The tragedy of Roe is not merely that it was constitutionally dubious. It is that by removing the abortion question from democratic deliberation for nearly fifty years, it prevented the kind of political compromise, legislative negotiation, and civic engagement through which a genuinely pluralistic society works out its most contested values. Both sides of the abortion debate should, on reflection, be angry at the Court. Abortion-rights advocates were handed a constitutional protection that rested on an unstable legal foundation and was eventually taken away. Pro-life advocates were denied, for fifty years, the democratic victories they might have won in state legislatures. The Court did not resolve the abortion debate. It held it hostage.
Religious Freedom and School Prayer
The First Amendment's Establishment Clause -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" -- is one of the great achievements of Enlightenment political philosophy. Its meaning, in the context of its drafting, was specific and clear: the federal government would not establish a national church or compel religious observance. The states, which had their own established churches in several cases at the time of ratification, were entirely outside the clause's scope.
The Supreme Court, through the incorporation doctrine, has applied the Establishment Clause to every level of government in ways that would have genuinely astonished the men who wrote it. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Court struck down a twenty-two-word nondenominational prayer composed by the New York State Board of Regents for voluntary recitation in public schools: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country." Its recitation was entirely voluntary. The Court's reasoning rests on an interpretation of the Establishment Clause that has no historical support in the understanding of the Founding generation.
The same Congress that drafted the First Amendment also opened its sessions with prayer, appointed congressional chaplains at public expense, and passed the Northwest Ordinance explicitly encouraging the teaching of religion in the territories. George Washington issued Thanksgiving Proclamations calling the nation to prayer. The notion that the Founders intended to scrub religious expression from public life is not a reading of history; it is a rewriting of it. The result has been decades of litigation over nativity scenes, Ten Commandments monuments, graduation prayers, and moments of silence -- battles that have generated far more acrimony than the practices they targeted ever produced, and that have replaced a natural relationship between civic and religious life with hostility, suspicion, and federal litigation.
The Second Amendment: A Necessary Distinction
The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Its plain language contains two components that must be read together honestly: a prefatory clause acknowledging the civic importance of a well-regulated militia, and an operative clause that is unambiguous in its grammatical subject and its command. The subject is the people. The command is shall not be infringed. This is not complex syntax. It is a declarative sentence, and it says what it says.
Before proceeding further, this essay must pause to draw a distinction that intellectual honesty requires — one that the broader argument of this piece demands we not obscure. The central thesis here is that the Supreme Court has systematically usurped power that rightfully belongs to the states and the people, arrogating to itself the authority to settle questions the Constitution leaves to democratic deliberation. That thesis is sound. But it must not be applied indiscriminately, because not every act of judicial intervention is the same kind of act. There is a profound constitutional difference between a court seizing power from the people and a court protecting the people from an overreaching government. Conflating these two very different things in the name of anti-judicial consistency would itself be a form of intellectual dishonesty.
The Second Amendment is an enumerated right. It is not a penumbra. It is not an emanation. It is not a judicial invention conjured from inference and metaphor, as the privacy right in Griswold was, or the abortion right in Roe was. It is written, in plain English, into the Bill of Rights — that portion of the Constitution explicitly designed to place certain rights beyond the reach of government power. When the Founders enumerated a right, they were not making a suggestion. They were drawing a line that the federal government was forbidden to cross. The entire purpose of the Bill of Rights was to constrain federal authority, not to grant it.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms independent of militia service, and struck down the District of Columbia’s near-total handgun ban. This is the case most often cited as another example of judicial overreach, and it is here that the distinction matters most — because Heller is categorically different from the other cases examined in this essay.
Washington, D.C. is not a state. It is a federal enclave, governed directly by Congress under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. When the District of Columbia prohibited its law-abiding citizens from keeping a functional firearm in their own homes, it was the federal government — not a state, not a local community exercising its Tenth Amendment prerogatives — that was doing the prohibiting. The constitutional question in Heller was therefore not whether a state may regulate firearms within its own borders. The question was whether the federal government could strip citizens of an explicitly enumerated constitutional right.
It would not be illogical — and it would not be tyrannical — for the Court to answer that question in the negative. Indeed, it would be a straightforward application of the Court’s legitimate function: enforcing the explicit text of the Constitution against federal overreach. If the Bill of Rights means anything at all, it means that there are things the federal government simply may not do to its citizens. Disarming them, when the people’s right to keep and bear arms is explicitly protected in the Constitution, is one of those things. A court that refused to enforce that protection would not be a humble, restrained institution respecting democratic processes. It would be a court complicit in federal tyranny.
This is the essential distinction the essay’s broader argument requires us to preserve: the Court acts tyrannically when it invents rights not found in the Constitution and uses those inventions to override the democratic choices of states and the people. That is what happened in Roe, in Griswold’s penumbral reasoning, in the commerce clause distortions of Wickard and Raich. But the Court acts legitimately — and in fact acts as the Founders intended — when it enforces an enumerated right against the branch of government most prone to accumulate power: the federal government itself. The Founders did not create the Bill of Rights as decoration. They created it precisely because they expected the federal government to press against its boundaries, and they wanted those boundaries enforced.
What neither states nor the federal government may do — under a faithful reading of the Constitution — is abolish the right entirely. An enumerated right that can be regulated out of existence is not a right. It is a temporary government permission, revocable at will, which is the precise opposite of what the Bill of Rights was designed to create. When a court enforces that boundary against the federal government, it is not overstepping. It is doing its job — the job the Founders assigned it, the job that distinguishes a constitutional republic from a government of unlimited power.
The lesson of the Second Amendment, properly understood, is not that the Supreme Court should be more active or less active as a general matter. It is that the nature of the Court’s action matters enormously. A court that invents federal power — as in Wickard — or that invents constitutional rights from penumbras — as in Griswold — is acting as a usurper. A court that enforces a plainly written constitutional guarantee against the government that would violate it is acting as a guardian. The republic needs fewer usurpers and more guardians. On the question of the right to keep and bear arms, at least with respect to federal power, the Court in Heller was, however imperfectly and narrowly, a guardian.
V. The Founders' Republic vs. the Court's Empire: A Study in Contrast
To fully appreciate what has been lost, it is worth describing, with some precision, the actual distribution of power in the republic the Founders built -- and then comparing it, honestly, with what exists today.
In the Founders' republic, the federal government exercised authority over a narrow and specific set of genuinely national concerns: foreign affairs and treaties, war and defense, coinage and the regulation of interstate commerce, immigration and naturalization, and the management of federal territories. These were matters that required national uniformity to function. Everything else -- criminal law, family law, property law, education, public health, morals legislation, religious practice -- was governed by the states. Citizens who disliked their state's laws could seek to change them through the democratic process, or they could move to a different state. This was not a bug in the system; it was its most important feature. Competition among states for citizens and capital created a natural check on governmental overreach.
The Supreme Court, in this original design, was an important but genuinely modest institution. Its primary function was to resolve disputes between states, to adjudicate cases involving federal law, and to ensure that Congress did not exceed its enumerated powers. It was not a super-legislature. It was not the final word on the deepest moral questions of national life. Its power derived from the esteem in which its legal reasoning was held, not from any enforcement mechanism.
In today's republic, the federal government's reach extends to virtually every dimension of American life. Federal law governs the content of school curricula, the terms of employment, the design of restrooms, the words that may be spoken in a workplace, the religious practices of private businesses, the firearms a citizen may own, the crops a farmer may grow, the medical procedures a doctor may perform, and the conditions under which a woman may terminate a pregnancy. The states remain, technically, sovereign entities, but their sovereignty is exercised in the ever-shrinking space that federal law -- interpreted and enforced by federal courts -- leaves them.
The citizen of 1795 was, in the most practical and immediate sense of the term, governed primarily by his state and his community. He interacted with the federal government almost exclusively through the postal service and, in wartime, the military. He had, consequently, a meaningful ability to influence the laws under which he lived, because the legislative bodies that made those laws were close to him, small in scale, and responsive to his voice. The citizen of today is governed, in profound and intimate ways, by a federal apparatus whose scale and complexity defeat ordinary democratic participation -- and at its apex sit nine unelected judges whose decisions arrive with the finality of royal decrees.
VI. The Court and the Crown: An Uncomfortable Comparison
It is a comparison that many will resist, because it is unflattering and because it challenges a founding mythology. But if we are serious about self-governance -- if we take seriously the principles that animated the Revolution -- we are obligated to ask: how does the power of the Supreme Court today compare to the power of King George III at the time of the Revolution?
The comparison is not as absurd as it first appears, and in some respects, the Court's power exceeds the King's. George III ruled in the British constitutional tradition, which by 1776 was already substantially constrained by Parliament. The King could not make law unilaterally; Parliament was required. He could not levy taxes without parliamentary assent. The British system, for all its flaws from the colonists' perspective, was one in which someone was accountable to someone else through an electoral mechanism. Parliament sat in regular session, faced periodic elections, and was answerable -- however imperfectly -- to the political nation.
The Supreme Court faces none of these constraints. Its members serve for life, appointed by a process that has become nakedly political -- a choreographed audition in which nominees decline to express any opinion on any contested question and then, once confirmed, proceed to hold opinions on every contested question. They are removable only by impeachment, which has never once succeeded against a Supreme Court justice in American history. They have no electorate. They publish no platform. They make no campaign promises. And yet they decide, with finality and without meaningful appeal, the most contested questions of American civic life.
The Declaration of Independence charged King George with specific tyrannies. Several of them resonate uncomfortably when applied to the modern Court. The colonists protested that they had been subjected to laws "in all cases whatsoever" by a legislature in which they had no representation. Today, the people of the United States are subjected, in all cases that reach the Supreme Court, to the constitutional interpretations of justices for whose selection they have no direct voice and over whose decisions they have no democratic recourse. The King's edicts could be -- and eventually were -- resisted, first by political action and ultimately by force. The Supreme Court's decisions are enforced by the entire apparatus of the federal government, including the very executive branch that is increasingly at the Court's mercy.
VII. The Trickle-Down Tyranny: When District Judges Rule the Nation
The problem is not confined to the Supreme Court. The pathologies of judicial supremacy have cascaded downward through the federal judiciary, producing a system in which individual district court judges -- unelected, unaccountable, and often selected through a process driven by senatorial patronage -- exercise sweeping power over national policy.
The nationwide injunction -- an order by a single district court judge prohibiting the federal government from enforcing a policy anywhere in the country -- has become a standard tool of political opposition. When a new administration takes office and changes immigration policy, environmental regulation, or foreign affairs, it is now entirely routine for a single judge in a favorable jurisdiction to halt that policy nationwide, not for months but sometimes for years, while litigation crawls through the courts. This is not a partisan observation; administrations of both parties have been subjected to this treatment.
Whatever one thinks of the specific policies at issue, the practice is constitutionally troubling in the extreme. The Founders designed a system in which the elected branches -- the President, accountable every four years, and Congress, accountable every two -- would make policy. The judiciary's role was to say whether that policy violated the Constitution or federal law, not to substitute its own policy preferences for those of the elected branches, and certainly not to freeze national policy in amber while litigation proceeds. A single district court judge should not have the power to override the immigration or national security judgment of an elected President -- not because the judge is necessarily wrong on the merits, but because that concentration of power in an unaccountable judicial actor is incompatible with democratic self-governance. The Supreme Court has enabled this practice by refusing to clearly prohibit it.
VIII. The Philosopher-Kings in Black: Precedent as Putty
In The Republic, Plato imagined a city governed by philosopher-kings -- wise, virtuous rulers who, precisely because of their superior understanding, should be trusted to govern without the messy constraints of democratic accountability. It is a seductive vision, and it is one that the Supreme Court has, whether consciously or not, increasingly come to embody. The problem with philosopher-kings -- as Plato's own student Aristotle recognized -- is that there is no reliable mechanism for ensuring they are actually wise and virtuous rather than merely powerful.
The evidence that Supreme Court justices decide cases based on their personal convictions and then find constitutional language to support those decisions is not a radical accusation. It is the frank admission of the justices themselves, inscribed in their dissenting opinions. When five justices reach a result and four write furious dissents accusing the majority of "discovering" constitutional rights with no textual basis, of "imposing its own policy preference on the country," of "engaging in constitutional revision," and of "overruling the democratic judgments of the people" -- these are not the complaints of sore losers. They are the observations of legal professionals watching their colleagues do exactly what the accusation describes.
Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), described the majority opinion as a "judicial Putsch" -- a coup by a majority of five justices who "found" a constitutional mandate that no one in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, would have recognized. Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the decision confused philosophical preferences with constitutional entitlements. Justice Samuel Alito warned that the decision would be used to vilify Americans unwilling to assent to the majority's view, with consequences for religious liberty still unfolding in courtrooms across the country.
One need not hold any particular view on the merits of same-sex marriage to recognize the constitutional problem. If four of nine justices say emphatically that a majority's reasoning has no basis in text or history -- that the decision is an exercise of raw judicial power -- then either four justices are being deeply dishonest, or the majority of five has done precisely what they are accused of doing: used the Constitution's language as raw material from which to fashion the result they preferred. This is not isolated. It is a pattern. It recurs across generations and across the ideological spectrum, because the pathology is not ideological. It is structural. When an institution has unchecked power, when its members are insulated from accountability, when its precedents are its own to make and unmake, the result is not the rule of law. It is the rule of the institution.
IX. Toward a Recovery of Self-Governance
To diagnose a disease is not to prescribe a cure, and the cure for judicial supremacy is not obvious. The most radical proposals -- abolishing judicial review entirely, imposing term limits on justices, expanding the Court's membership to dilute any faction's influence -- each carry their own risks and constitutional complications. But the diagnosis itself is a precondition for any treatment, and the diagnosis must be stated plainly.
The American republic was founded on the proposition that the people are the ultimate sovereign, that power is legitimate only when it derives from their consent, and that no institution -- however prestigious, however learned, however ancient its pedigree -- is entitled to make the most fundamental decisions of civic life on their behalf without accountability to their judgment. The Supreme Court, as currently constituted and as it has functioned for at least the past century, violates this proposition systematically. It has taken from the people and the states the power to decide questions that the Constitution assigns to them. It has granted itself a jurisdiction that the Constitution does not confer. And it has done all of this behind the comfortable fiction that it is merely "reading" the Constitution.
The constitutional amendment process exists for a reason. The legislative process exists for a reason. The democratic process -- however slow, however frustrating, however imperfect -- exists for a reason. That reason is the fundamental conviction that a free people should govern themselves, making their own mistakes and finding their own path, rather than being governed by the wisdom of the few, however well-credentialed. If the people of Georgia and the people of California and the people of every state in between hold different values about abortion, religious expression, firearms, and the texture of civic life -- they should have the power to enact those values through their own legislatures, and to live with the consequences, and to change course when experience counsels otherwise.
The Founders did not fight a revolution against one set of unchecked rulers only to bequeath their descendants another. They built a system of checks, balances, and distributed power precisely because they understood that the accumulation of power corrupts, that human wisdom is fallible, and that the only reliable safeguard against tyranny is accountability. The Supreme Court, in its current form, is accountable to no one but itself.
That is not the republic the Founders built. It is the tyranny they revolted against -- wearing different clothes, speaking a different language, but exercising a power over the lives of citizens that King George III, for all his actual authority, never quite managed to claim. If the principle of July 4th, 1776 means anything at all, it means that this cannot stand unchallenged. The people must reclaim what the Court has taken -- not by abandoning the rule of law, but by insisting, with the same righteous clarity their forebears showed, that no institution governs justly without the consent of the governed.