The founders clearly didn't envision the court becoming as politicized as it is now. They basically hand-waved away the problem of how to interpret laws. If t

The founders clearly didn't envision the court becoming as politicized as it is now. They basically hand-waved away the problem of how to interpret laws. If the laws were written in some kind of unambiguous formal system, then there wouldn't be a need for a court. But no such system exists, so we have this read-time political power corresponding to the write-time political power of the Legislative branch. It's pretty clear the founders wanted some magic box to tell everyone how the laws applied in a given situation, and designed the rest of the system around that. They attempted to create that with the Judicial branch. It's clear from the lack of term limits that they thought the Justices would be apolitical. However, there is no mechanism forcing the justices to interpret the laws in the simplest, most literal way. Instead we have increasingly stretched interpretations used to affect political change sans representative legislature.