Fade Resistance Performance
Alexander Hamilton's vision of the Court's role was the duty of striking down new seizures of power by Congress. Notice how total the reversal of its role has become, as it now finds virtually everything Congress chooses to do, as "constitutional". The federal Government has assumed myriads of new powers nowhere mentioned or implied in the Constitution, yet the Court has never seriously impeded this expansion, or rather explosion, of novel claims of power. What it finds unconstitutional are the traditional powers of the States.
For the past 50 years, the Court has done real pioneering work in one notable area: the separation of Church and State. Praiseworthy? No! - Pioneering? Absolutely!! The Court has consistently imposed an understanding of the First Amendment that is not only exaggerated but unprecedented - most notoriously in its 1962 ruling that prayer in public schools amounts to an "establishment of religion". This interpretation of the Establishment Clause has always been to the disadvantage of Christianity and of any law with roots in Christian morality. And it's impossible to doubt that the justices who voted for this interpretation were voting their predilections.
Maybe that's the point. The Court's boldest rulings showed something less innocent than a series of honest mistakes. Studying these cases and others of the Court's liberal heyday, one never gets the sense that the majority was suppressing its own preferences; it was clearly enacting them. Those rulings could likely be described as wishful thinking run amok, and touched with more than a little arrogance. Altogether, the Court displayed the opposite of the restrained and impartial temperament one expects even of a traffic-court judge, let alone a Supreme Court.
It's ironic to recall Hamilton's bold assurance that the Supreme Court would be "the least dangerous" of the three branches of the federal government. It was also Hamilton who gave us a shrewd warning about what would happen if the Court were ever corrupted with his assertion in Federalist No. 78: "Liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other [two branches]".
Most of this country's youth learn about The New Deal from the well prepared texts in the propaganda machine of Government funded classrooms. They graduate into adulthood with slanted ideas of who our 32nd President was and only a slim few have ever understood the annihilation of the Constitution or our Freedoms which FDR's administration of 12 years perpetrated on the People of this country.
Since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, the judiciary has in effect formed a union with the other two branches to aggrandize the power of the federal Government at the expense of the States and the People. An expense that may possibly only be paid in full when the People of this country surrender to the Fascist State it is quickly becoming. Of course there is the option of becoming Patriots, once again.
And now, some Conclusions...
You won't find this constitutional history in the K-12 textbooks of this country and likely not even in most of the structured assemblies of our universities and colleges. Our publicly funded schools are required to be ommisive and optimistic, to present degeneration as development, and to treat the Supreme Court's findings and successive pronouncements as so many oracular revelations of constitutional meaning.
A leading liberal scholar, Leonard Levy, has gone so far as to say that what matters is not what the Constitution says, but what the Court has said about the Constitution in more than 400 volumes of commentary. This can only mean that opinions and comments have displaced the original text, and that "We the People" have been supplanted by "We the Lawyers". We the People can't read and understand our own Constitution. We have to have it explained to us by the professionals.
When the Court deifies itself to the point of enjoying oracular status, it can't really be criticized, because it can do no wrong. We may dislike its results, but future rulings will have to be derived from them as precedents, rather than from the text and logic of the Constitution.
The history of the Constitution is the story of its inversion. The original understanding of the Constitution has been reversed. The Constitution creates a presumption against any power not plainly delegated to the federal government and a corresponding presumption in favor of the rights and powers of the States and the People. But, what we have now is a sloppy presumption in favor of federal power. Most people assume the federal government can do anything it isn't plainly forbidden to do.
A Reality Check...