… is from page 18 of Stephen Macedo’s 1986 monograph, The New Right v. the Constitution; by “New Right” Macedo means those many American conservatives – such as the late Robert Bork – who, being rightly appalled by the unprincipled activist jurisprudence of especially the Warren Court, overreacted by insisting that judges should read the U.S. Constitution narrowly as a document that gives the political branches enormous powers over a vast range of issues – powers the exercise of which, these conservative jurists insist, ought to be found by judges to be violations of the Constitution only under the rarest of circumstances:
For the people who drafted and ratified the Constitution, legitimate government depended not only on the document’s origin in popular consent, but also on its conformity with certain principles of justice and “unalienable Rights,” which were held to be “natural” or of higher moral standing than the will of any majority.
DBx: Yes. If the intent of America’s founders is to be understood as well as is humanly possible, the political philosophy that motivated their decision to declare their independence from Great Britain cannot be ignored. And that political philosophy emphatically rejected both raw majoritarianism and king-like powers exercised by the executive branch.
