Fire and Knowledge

Culture is made by the fiat of a majority of nine lawyers and forced upon the nation. . . . Contrary to the plan of the American government, the Supreme Court has usurped the powers of the people and their elected representatives. We are no longer free to make our own fundamental moral and cultural decisions because the court oversees all such matters, when and as it chooses. The Founders built into our government a system of checks and balances, carefully giving to the national legislature and the executive powers to check each other so as to avoid either executive or legislative tyranny. The Founders had no idea that a Court armed with a written Constitution and the power of judicial review could become not only the supreme legislature of the land but a legislature beyond the reach of a ballot box. Thinking of the Court as a minor institution, they provided no safeguards against its assumption of powers not legitimately its own and its consistent abuse of those powers. Congress and the President check and balance one another, but neither of them can stop the Court’s adventures in making and enforcing left-wing policy.
—Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, pp. 108-109.