A Constitution against Oligarchy / William E. Forbath

The constitution as the framers imagined it, building on a long, English tradition, was something very different from ordinary law. And what happened over time is that the supreme court said that "no, the constitution is just like ordinary law, and we get to interpret it and what we say is binding." And then, in the coup de grace, liberals and progressives bought into that. For good reasons, and we can talk about those, but for reasons that are completely worn out. So no, the framers would be the first to say constitutional law is the law the people enforce over against their rulers. It's the opposite of ordinary law, that's the English tradition. We wrote it down in the U.S. to make it firmer, but not to give courts authority over it. The idea of judicial supremacy was something that was built up over the nineteenth century, and it was an idea that progressive over the nineteenth century and beyond always rejected.