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… is from page 220 of Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett’s superb 2016 book, Our Republican Constitution [2]; by “Republican Constitution” Randy refers, of course, not to any partisan document but, instead, to the original understanding of United States’s 1787 Constitution (original emphasis):
As Madison predicted, the greatest danger to the liberties of the people lies where the greatest power resides, which in a republic is in the majority of the people. By harnessing the powers of the majority, the progressives were able to overcome the barriers of the Republican Constitution.
Having breached those barriers, however, progressives then moved on to eliminate any “democratic” or majoritarian obstacles to their agenda. Indeed, at the very same time they were invoking the “will of the people” to undermine the constraints of the Republican Constitution being enforced by the Supreme Court, progressives were also advocating rule by an enlightened and dispassionate elite of public policy experts.
DBx: Those seeking power over others – regardless of the power-seekers’ deeper motives – are always clever in fashioning excuses into the authority they use to scratch their itch to order others about.