There never can be danger that the judges, by a series of deliberate usurpations on the authority of the legislature, would hazard the united resentment of the body intrusted (sic) with it (the power of impeachment and removal), while this body was possessed of the means of punishing their presumption, by degrading them from their stations.

The U. S. Supreme Court is constantly bombarded with requests to extend the law into uncharted territory; often the request is based on a novel, even preposterous, constitutional interpretation.  Usually a Court majority cannot be found to go along; the justices do not want to take fresh liberties with the Constitution every day, and a majority does not often share a strong emotional commitment to the goals of whatever special interest group presented the request.

However, sometimes a creative plaintiff strikes pay dirt; a Court majority is willing to play ball.  And an opinion comes down which asserts that the Constitution contains a previously undiscovered mandate, the assertion having no basis in the text of the Constitution and plainly contrary to the intent of the people who framed and ratified the relevant constitutional passages.  That opinion becomes a precedent for future cases in the Supreme Court and all lower courts.  So it's tantamount to a constitutional amendment with no input from us or our elected representatives.  It's popular among various elites to defend this process by claiming that we have a "living Constitution" which evolves to incorporate Supreme Court policy innovations.

It's undeniable that the Court has no legitimate power to revise the Constitution, although we do trust it to faithfully apply, to new situations, principles that "We the People" placed in that eminent document.  That trust does not entitle the Court to hand down constitutional rulings that are driven by the justices' own biases, unsupported by the language of the Constitution, and clearly contrary to the intent of the people who framed, adopted, and ratified its various articles and amendments.  God forbid that our original written Constitution has been replaced by a bogus one which "evolves" according to the policy preferences of our judicial employees.

Unfortunately, that's the way it really is.  Nobody is in a position to keep the Court honest, so it "evolves" the Constitution at will.  Unelected judges with lifetime appointments contrive to enact our most important laws, making a mockery of our constitutional guarantee of a "Republican Form of Government."

Politicians, historians and legal scholars have long acknowledged that judicial invention of constitutional mandates is routine; they tolerate, or even support, the practice because they often like the results.  They tell each other that Supreme Court innovations tend to produce better public policy than the efforts of elected politicians who can't afford to get too far out in front of the voters.  Supreme Larceny takes a critical look at this claim and concludes that it's historically unfounded; stealth legislation by the Supreme Court has led to a long list of national catastrophes.

Fraudulent, or at least speculative, constitutional interpretations by our employees on the Supreme Court:

Blocked effective enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, keeping African Americans in parts of the South in a condition of peonage for seventy years;

Helped cause the Civil War and the Great Depression;

Gave us 100,000 extra murders and half-a-million extra rapes between 1970 and 1990;

Ruined 20 million educations during the last three decades, wasting $100 billion of the taxpayers' money in the process;

Invented brand new constitutional protections for abortion, flag burning, and pornography.

The Temple of Karnak: How Rogue Judges Have Been Strangling Your Democracy

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