The Supreme Court and American Democracy

There is an old saying: “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” One always presumes that members of the Supreme Court, having been carefully vetted for character and competence and being exceptionally well schooled in the law, will do their best to interpret the Constitution with objectivity and intellectual honesty, and that, however they rule on a Constitutional or other question, it will be based on intellectually defensible reasoning. What if in some cases it isn’t? What if in the worst case, a majority of justices on the Court are of a mind to subordinate the law and the Constitution to their personal ideology? The old saying holds. There is no appeal. And when it happens, it constitutes a possibly mortal wounding of American democracy.