Why do the Courts so often impose their “enlightened” views on the rest of us? Political Science professor Robert Lowry Clinton believes he has the answer:
A few months ago, I was attending a presentation by one of my colleagues on American elections. He reported that it was now settled among experts that American voters were “idiots.” After some reflection, I have concluded that here lies the real answer. The true explanation for judicial supremacy is elitism, pure and simple.
The notion of judicial supremacy has enabled the progressive elites that now run the country to discard the Framers’ Constitution and replace it with a “living constitution.” The idea of a “living constitution” dates back to the era of Woodrow Wilson, that consummate progressive who described the Constitution as a “vehicle of life.” In Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson says: “As the life of the nation changes so must the interpretation of the document which contains it change, by a nice adjustment, determined, not by the original intention of those who drew the paper, but by the exigencies and the new aspects of life itself.”
In the same book, Wilson embraces judicial supremacy, describing the courts as “instruments of the nation’s growth,” who by determining “what powers are to be exercised under the Constitution . . . determine also the adequacy of the Constitution in respect of the needs and interests of the nation.” Pause for a moment’s reflection on that statement. No longer is the Constitution the benchmark by which we judge the work of the courts. Rather, the courts must judge the fitness of the Constitution to serve the current “needs and interests” of the nation.