Quotes from Myron Magnet

The Constitution lodges all legislative power in Congress, which therefore cannot delegate its lawmaking function elsewhere. So it's forbidden for Congress to pass a law creating an independent or executive-branch agency that writes rules legally binding on citizens—for example, to set up an agency charged with making a clean environment and then to let it make rules with the force of law to accomplish that end as it sees fit.

As the American Revolution's tutelary philosopher, John Locke, had pronounced, the legislative branch has the authority "only to make laws, and not to make legislators"—but that's just what Congress has done in creating administrative-agency rule makers.

And if Congress can't delegate the legislative power that the Constitution gives it, it certainly cannot delegate power that the Constitution doesn't give it, such as the power to hand out selective exemptions from its laws, as agencies do when they grant waivers.35

Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not." By essentially abolishing the public use clause, the Court has subordinated individual rights to the arbitrary will of the government, Thomas remonstrated. "I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution.

As James Madison put it, because men are not angels—because they can (and do) rob, rape, kill, and conquer—they need a government to restrain and protect them, an "institution to make people do their duty.

But since such an institution is made up of imperfect human beings with the same unruly passions as anyone else, "In framing a government of men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."3

The founders worried constantly about how their envisioned republic might get hijacked, especially by ambitious officials who would transform it into an elective despotism. This is what they meant.

We all learn about how the Constitution's framers accomplished that delicate balance through the three branches of government and the separation of their powers: democratically elected representatives frame laws to do the voters' will, which the elected president executes, unless the Supreme Court deems them unconstitutional.

But that small government of limited and enumerated powers hasn't operated for nearly a century.

As Wilson outlined the concept, the Court would sit as a permanent constitutional convention, continually making and remaking the law, to adapt, in a kind of Darwinian evolution, to changing circumstances. It would make up law, in Chief Justice Earl Warren's words, according to "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."4

Ever since the New Deal, those on the Right have sensed the American polity's transformation with growing discomfort, but around 2009, when the Tea Party movement mobilized, that discomfort turned to anger.

For a half century, the Supreme Court, through increasingly fanciful legal reasoning, has handed the political Left victories in the culture wars—on race, sex, criminal justice, public order, schooling—that it would have found bruising, and sometimes impossible, to win through the constitutional legislative process.

There is nothing of democratic self-government in the "command" of this newly hatched, elitist administrative state, of course.

This was the ideology of the European enlightened despots of the eighteenth century, especially Prussia's Frederick the Great, who ruled through a meritocratic class of efficient, educated, benevolent bureaucrats, who, more than ordinary citizens, could divine the spirit of the times and knew which way the arc of history bent, so they could speed it along in the right direction.

The magnitude of the Great Depression, Roosevelt thought, required the federal government to seize control of the entire U.S. economy. Only national rather than state or free-market solutions, he believed, could nurse it back to health.

It's a strange conception of liberty when we argue over the right to kill our babies.

Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution.

JOINING THE COURT in 1991, Clarence Thomas brought with him the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate.