I am neither an attorney nor an expert in Constitutional law. Others have been good enough to say I am a good strategist. If so, then I would like to share my perspective of the current state of the judiciary. I have listened as a debate is occurring over the proper powers of the courts and the tendency of some Americans to cede to the advocates of unrestrained judicial power victories to which they are not entitled.

I am occasionally referred to as a "founder of the modern conservative movement." Such an honor places upon me and others to whom such a description applies a special duty to warn our fellow citizens. Americans today are witnesses to the realization of the great fear of our Founding Fathers: the passing away of government "of the people, by the people, for the people," as President Abraham Lincoln stated, in the United States of America. With respect to the courts, we need a revival of the rule of law based upon the constitutional principles laid down by those who founded this nation.

Our forefathers gave their lives to liberate us from the rule of a British Parliament unelected by the American colonists:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.... But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism , it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.... (Emphasis added.)

The grand formalities of American election rituals hide a glaring fact: Americans can no longer claim that we are our own rulers in every circumstance in which we are empowered to be. Regardless of our votes, the defining judgments in our collective and personal destinies often are made by persons whom the American people have not elected to rule.

We gave judges their robes and gavels so that they might resolve specific disputes between specific plaintiffs and defendants. We never gave them authority to issue commands to our elected lawmakers, forcing us down roads which we have not chosen to travel. Judges have no constitutional authority to make laws or to amend our national and state constitutions. They have no authority to redefine words and concepts in our laws to mean what they and their ideological partisans wish for them to mean.

To Americans of previous generations this was obvious and fundamental. But for many in America today, this is meaningless, a mere technicality: judges are supreme because, well, because they just are.

When several judges opined that there ought to be no more prayer in American schools, lawyers, politicians and journalists told us that after three centuries of prayer in our schools, judges had suddenly "outlawed" it. Court opinions interpreting law and social custom magically became the law itself.

After three centuries of Americans exercising their right to control their communities as citizens and to keep pornography out of public view, several judges opined that the Founding Fathers had given pornographers a right to pollute us and our children, a right that does not exist in the United States Constitution. They put us on a course that has almost obliterated the ideal of fidelity of body, mind, imagination and the heart, upon which marriage, family and child-rearing are built.

Nevertheless, lawyers, journalists and politicians announced that this opinion was to be the new law though it had no basis in the Constitution or in any law authorized by the American people via their chosen lawmakers.

Likewise, judges - acting on behalf of a tiny, anti-constitutional, self-styled cultural "elite" dedicated to turning America into an ideological utopia - opined that the American people may neither protect children from violent murder in their mother's womb, nor outlaw sodomy, nor restrict their civic blessing upon marriage to nature's definition of it, nor ensure that parentless children are placed with parents as nature defines them: one father and one mother.

Nor should I forget to mention judicial disregard for centuries of customary, legal and constitutional protection of private property in order to provide legal sanction for powerful, corrupt politicians lusting after other men's land or buildings. "Take what you please," they said in essence. And this was now the law. One hand washes the other.

Many of us received in shock and sadness the Goodridge v. the Department of Public Health of Massachusetts opinion on homosexual marriage. Why do self-styled "conservatives," lawyers, politician and pundits among them, spread the assertion that judges have powers that the American people have never given them?

The truth is that the ruthlessly enforced illusion of judicial supremacy did not merely empower judges and disenfranchise the American people. It made journalists, lawyers and clever politicians more influential culturally. Most, after all, are of the same ideological bent as many judges. And those who were not, the "conservatives," played within the new rules: judges' opinions are the law in the United States of America.

If Americans paid attention, understood what is at stake and agreed upon the solution, their long-term strategy would require:

* an string of primary victories by candidates who fully grasp the fact that judges have no authority to change our laws and who aggressively will oppose all claims to the contrary;

* an unbroken series of triumphs by such constitutionalist candidates in general elections, year after year;

* an unbroken series of nominations of judges who will interpret the law and will reject the noxious and absurd myth that previous court opinions are "the law of the land"; (Presidents Ronald W. Reagan and George H. W. Bush gave us activists such as Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter!);

* an unbroken series of Senate confirmations of originalist judges;

* unwavering constitutionalism by originalist judges in their years on the bench, withstanding daily assault by infuriated cultural "elites" who grew accustomed to using legally void and impotent court opinions as bulldozers to deceive and enslave Americans via a-moral, anti-constitutional and increasingly tyrannical judicial delusions.

Not a single signer of the Constitution (or of the Declaration of Independence) would have taken seriously the purportedly "conservative" view today that to restrain judges we need to replace them through attrition over decades. That view, in my opinion, guarantees a victory of the far left because it implies that the judicial branch is the final authority on the law.

In his book and British Broadcasting Corporation series Civilization, historian Sir Kenneth Clarke noted that after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, scattered pockets of normalcy continued for a surprisingly long time. How will we know, living in such "pockets of normalcy," when our republic has collapsed? Has it already? Are we prisoners who still think themselves free? Continued...