Fidelity To The Constitution

“… the Constitution should be interpreted in ways that adapt its principles and its text to the challenges and conditions of our society in every single generation.”  Goodwin Liu

Until today, that is, when, on being confronted with his own words, he changed his tune :

The problem [i.e., challenge] for courts is to determine, at the moment of decision, whether our collective values on a given issue have converged to a degree that they can be persuasively crystallized and credibly absorbed into legal doctrine. This difficult task requires keen attention to the trajectory of social norms reflected in public policies, institutions, and practices, as well as predictive judgment as to how a judicial decision may help forge or frustrate a social consensus. Yet the task is familiar to common law adjudication and … pervades the interpretive work of courts on a wide range of constitutional questions. Goodwin Liu

What good are laws if open to reinterpretation at the whim of current social consensus?  As John Adams put it in the Massachusetts constitution, “we are a nation of laws, not of men.”  Or as Chief Justice Marshal wrote in Marbury vs. Madison:

The Constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part be true, then a legislative act contrary to The Constitution is not law; if the latter part is true, then written Constitutions are absurd attempts on the part of the people to limit a power in its own nature illimitable. Certainly all those who have framed written Constitutions contemplate them as the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently, the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void.

The anti-Federalists proved their foresight in expressing their concerns about an over-reaching and uncontrollable judiciary:

There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. there is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

Hopefully a few more senators like Sessions will call Liu out and prevent his confirmation.