Rule of Law vs Rule by Lawyers (which did the founders intend?)

In America, we no longer have the rule of law.  It has been replaced by the “rule of five politically-connected lawyers who hold lifetime appointments.”

This is just what Thomas Jefferson feared when he wrote this:

“the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary: an irresponsible body,  working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed; because, when all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
– Letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821

According to the Founders’ Constitution, the Judiciary – or more precisely the Supreme Court – was never meant to be what it has become.  Actually, let me rephrase that to what the Supreme Court has made of itself.

Instead of acting as a “Supreme Court,” it now acts as “Supreme Law Giver.”

There were rumblings from the very beginning that this could happen, and it did not take long for the slow creep of expanding powers to eat away at the very fabric of the Constitution.

Early Court rulings – in the philosophy of the lover of centralized power, Alexander Hamilton, gave the courts powers never approved by the Founders and Ratifiers.  Five lawyers would now decide our fate and make law from the bench.

Constitution be damned.  That power still hangs over us like a black cloud today.

Following in this new tradition, 19th Century Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story became one the most nationalist of judges in our early history.  He worked to further the supremacy of centralized government. He pushed Hamilton’s ideas of so-called “implied” and “resultant” powers in the Constitution, and expanded the power of the executive and federal judiciary even further. ...