Every time the United States Supreme Court hands down a controversial decision, somebody immediately starts whining, “That’s not what the majority of Americans want!”
Maybe.Maybe not.The truth is, nobody really knows.
We don’t decide constitutional questions by national referendum. We don’t take a Gallup poll. We don’t count “likes” on social media. Instead, we’re expected to rely on the legacy media to tell us what America supposedly believes. That’s a remarkable arrangement considering those same media organizations have spent decades proving they can shape public opinion almost as easily as they report it.
Then there’s an even bigger problem. Our educational system has done a spectacular job of producing graduates who know almost nothing about the Constitution or the liberties it protects. Civic education has largely been replaced with political activism, emotional arguments, and whatever fashionable cause happens to dominate the news cycle.
The result? Millions of Americans honestly believe the Supreme Court exists to conduct a nationwide popularity contest. It doesn’t. That was never the job.
The Founding Fathers had just fought a revolution against an overreaching government. They understood something many modern politicians have conveniently forgotten. Rights are supposed to protect the people from government.
Government is not supposed to redefine those rights every election cycle. The Framers intentionally made the Constitution difficult to change because they understood that today’s popular opinion often becomes tomorrow’s national embarrassment. They wanted liberty anchored to enduring principles, not tossed around like a beach ball at a political rally.
If Americans genuinely want to change the Constitution, there is already a process.
It’s called Article V. Congress, or a constitutional convention, proposes an amendment. Then thirty-eight states must ratify it before it becomes part of the Constitution.
That’s an intentionally high hurdle. More than 11,000 constitutional amendments have been proposed since our nation’s founding. Only twenty-seven have survived the process.
The first ten became the Bill of Rights shortly after the Constitution was ratified. The most recent, the Twenty-seventh Amendment concerning congressional pay, was ratified in 1992 after an astonishing 203-year journey.
That wasn’t a design flaw. That was the design.
The Constitution was never intended to sway with opinion polls, election returns, angry editorials, celebrity endorsements, or whatever outrage happens to be trending this afternoon.
This deliberate rigidity drives advocates of the so called “living Constitution” absolutely crazy. To them, the Constitution isn’t really a Constitution. It’s a constitutional Etch A Sketch. Shake it after every election and, magically, the Founding Fathers suddenly meant something entirely different.
If the Constitution is “living,” “breathing,” and constantly evolving, then why bother writing it down in the first place? We could replace it with a weekly opinion poll, a trending hashtag, and whatever cable television commentators happen to be yelling about today.
Originalists reject that nonsense. They believe the Constitution means what its words meant when they were adopted.
If society truly wants different constitutional rules, then persuade thirty-eight states to amend the Constitution. Don’t ask five lawyers wearing black robes to rewrite it.
The Supreme Court serves as the final interpreter of the Constitution. That does not mean it has always interpreted it correctly. Far from it.
One of its greatest disgraces was Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), a decision that denied citizenship to Black Americans and helped push this nation toward civil war.
Congress managed its own constitutional blunder in 1934 by passing the National Firearms Act, the first major federal infringement on the right to keep and bear arms. Apparently, some members of Congress believed the Second Amendment contained an invisible footnote reading, “Unless Washington thinks otherwise.”
Five years later, the Supreme Court did little to restore confidence in constitutional fidelity. In United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), the Court heard only the government’s arguments because no attorney appeared on behalf of the defendants. Despite hearing only one side of the case, the Court issued a decision that has confused judges, lawyers, historians, and scholars for generations. That is hardly the gold standard of constitutional adjudication.
Then came Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). The Constitution never mentions abortion.
It never even hints at abortion.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court announced that the Constitution somehow contained a previously undiscovered constitutional right to abortion. Rather than allowing the people to settle one of the nation’s most divisive moral issues through the amendment process or their elected legislatures, the Court simply declared the answer from the bench.
Whether one agreed with the policy outcome or not misses the larger constitutional point. The Court had again rewritten the Constitution instead of interpreting it.
Fortunately, Supreme Court mistakes are not always permanent. Sometimes the Court corrects its own errors.
It finally did exactly that in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), when it overturned Roe and acknowledged that the Constitution does not confer a right to terminate inconvenient pregnancies.
For decades, mostly liberal Supreme Courts also refused to seriously address the Second Amendment. That finally changed.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), the Court confirmed what millions of Americans had believed all along: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Two years later, McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), held that this individual right applies against state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Then came New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), which reminded governments that constitutional rights are not privileges to be granted only after paying fees, filling out paperwork, waiting months for permission, and convincing a bureaucrat that you have a sufficiently good reason to exercise a constitutional liberty.
The Court has now agreed to hear additional Second Amendment cases involving bans on so called “assault weapons.” If constitutional text, history, and tradition continue to control the analysis, those bans face a very difficult future. That prospect has some politicians and gun control activists in full panic mode. Good.
Constitutional rights were never intended to depend on opinion polls.
The next time someone insists the Supreme Court should simply do what “most people want,” ask one simple question.
If the American people truly want to change the Constitution, why aren’t they trying to amend it? The answer is obvious. Because persuading thirty-eight states is hard.
Convincing five justices to invent a new constitutional meaning is much easier. That’s precisely why the Framers made amendments difficult.
They understood that freedom should never be one election away.
The Constitution is not living. It is not breathing. It does not evolve.
It has no pulse, no heartbeat, and no political party. It is a written contract between the American people and their government.
Every President, every member of Congress, every federal judge, every military officer, and countless other public officials swear an oath to support it. Not rewrite it. Not modernize it. Not reinterpret it until it becomes politically fashionable. Support it.
If Americans want to change the Constitution, Article V tells them exactly how to do it.
Until then, the Constitution means what it says. Not what politicians wish it said. Not what newspaper editorials wish it said. Not what activists wish it said. What it actually says.
That is not a weakness of our constitutional system. It is one of the greatest safeguards of liberty ever devised by mankind.
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