My parents taught me reverence for America, a reverence that I have spent my life exploring beyond the emotional realm and into the intellectual one. At the beginning I had only the vague notion that America was special – somehow different from earlier civilizations – and that I was privileged to have been born here. As years went by I studied our history and our system of law in order to grasp precisely what made America unique, a process that often made me wish I could travel back in time to witness the birth of our experiment in human liberty. Only amazing events could bring this most revolutionary principle into practice: that government’s sole mission is to preserve our rights, and that we may abolish government when it expands its reach beyond this modest role.

This is not so much a political philosophy as it is a moral philosophy, one that refuses to repeal the distinctions between right and wrong in the name of “good governance.” Other political philosophies justify coercion as a means to implement one grand vision or another, to bring about a “fair” society, or even to remake human nature itself. Such philosophies are often portrayed as more idealistic, innovative, or modern than our own, but they in truth represent an ancient scheme that the Founders wisely rejected. As the Founders rightly understood, such “creative” uses of coercive power not only constitute a moral affront, but they also smother the creativity that flourishes when the individual is free to pursue his vision of the good life, even though such vision may differ from that of his peers or of his supposed betters. Respect for the individual and for his unique faculty of reason lies at the heart of America’s dynamism and prosperity. America proved to the world what wonders man can achieve when not enslaved to other men.

While I was progressing through school and gaining a fuller appreciation for the genius and virtue behind our system, I also came to notice that today’s federal government differs starkly from the one described in the supreme law of our land, which is of course the Constitution. This began as little more than a puzzle for me to unravel. How does the federal government exercise so many powers, when the Constitution grants it so few? If the First Amendment says that Congress “shall make no law” restricting freedom of speech, how does Congress restrict certain language over the airwaves? Why does Congress no longer declare war? Why was a constitutional amendment necessary to enact alcohol prohibition in the early twentieth century, whereas today the federal government conducts a “war on drugs” without a similar enabling amendment? If the Constitution truly grants sweeping powers to the federal government, then why did such powers go ignored for the majority of our history?

These were only some of the questions I felt compelled to ask, and the more I thought about them, the more troubled I became. The Constitution dedicates the power of amendment to the people through our state and federal representatives, yet a panel of nine individuals on the Supreme Court had wrought seismic constitutional changes over the course of the twentieth century. To be sure, the Supreme Court wields the power of “judicial review,” whereby the Court nullifies a governmental action that conflicts with the Constitution so that the latter may prevail. Yet most of the modern landmark decisions made no attempt whatsoever to uphold the constitutional design; rather, these decisions altered the design so as to enshrine a personal concept of justice held by the individual members of the Court. In ruling after ruling the Court went about demolishing generations of jurisprudence and bypassing the amendment process, the only lawful method for adapting the Constitution to modern conditions.
Apart from this renegade reordering of the Constitution, the very nature of the changes worried me. These were no mere refinements to the government’s mission of protecting our rights; instead, the changes bespoke a rejection of the Founders’ vision of limited government and signaled the embrace of the very philosophy of vigorous governmental action that the Founders had labored to defeat.

I shared my concerns with other students in law school and, later on, with fellow members of the legal profession. What I encountered ranged from indifference to hostility. During such conversations my peers revealed a deep disregard for the constitutional design and for the American citizenry itself.

First and foremost, they told me that the Constitution reflected a bygone era whose philosophy carried no weight in modern America. Government must have broad powers to “run” society now, so my scruples about constitutional niceties amounted to a naïve and misplaced obsession. Of course this response overlooked that the Founders’ ideals endured the exact same criticism over two hundred years ago: the very notion that government should limit itself to core protective functions struck the Founders’ contemporaries as naïve, laughable, and unworkable as well. In point of fact, the Founders rejected eons of their ancestors’ apologetics and rationalizations for open-ended governmental power. On this score my friends’ retort was both historically ignorant and unoriginal. Even worse, my friends displayed no concern for the moral underpinnings of limited government, mainly that coercive power must be used only in the defense of life, liberty, and property, not as a tool for compelling our fellow man to conform to a “plan” dreamed up by the cognoscenti.