Lino A. Graglia
Hoover Press : Bork/Values hborav ch1 Mp_1_rev1_page 1 —1— Constitutional Law without the Constitution: The Supreme Court’s Remaking of America Lino A. Graglia The President, who exercises a limited power, may err without caus- ing great mischief in the state. Congress may decide amiss without destroying the Union, because the electoral body in which Congress originated may cause it to retract its decision by changing its mem- bers. But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America The function of law in a society, at least a democratic society, is to express, cultivate, and enforce the values of the society as understood by the majority of its people. In our society today, this function has been perverted. Much of our most basic law, largely taken out of the hands of the people and their elected representa- tives by the Supreme Court, functions instead to overthrow or undermine traditional values, customs, and practices through the mechanism of judge-made constitutional law divorced from the Epigraph: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 172 (Harvey C. Mans- field & Delba Westhrop ed. 2000). Hoover Press : Bork/Values hborav ch1 Mp_2_rev1_page 2 2 lino a. graglia Constitution. Instead of serving as a guarantor of basic rights, the Constitution has been made the means of depriving us of our most essential right, the right of self-government. The system of decen- tralized representative self-government with separation of powers created by the Constitution has been converted by the Court into government on basic issues of domestic social policy by a tiny judicial oligarchy—by majority vote of a committee of nine law- yers, unelected and holding office for life, making policy decisions for the nation as a whole from Washington, D.C.—completely cen- tralized, completely undemocratic, with the judiciary performing the legislative function.
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