“Here, sir, the people govern,” Alexander Hamilton said when explaining the republican form of government recently established in America. “Here, they act by their immediate representatives.” Most Americans agree, at least in theory, but theory is easy. It’s in practice, when this system does not deliver everything you want, that Americans really take sides.
That test is now before us. In 1973, the Supreme Court took authority to regulate abortion away from those “immediate representatives,” imposing a national policy of virtually unrestricted abortion that most Americans have never supported. The possibility that the court will put the people and their representatives back in charge is quickly exposing who respects their fellow citizens and who just wants the power to control them.
America’s founders wrote the Constitution down, the Supreme Court explained in Marbury v. Madison, so that its rules for government “may not be mistaken or forgotten.” Thomas Jefferson warned that if the Supreme Court controlled the Constitution’s meaning, it would be “a mere thing of wax” that the justices “may twist and shape into any form they please.”
