>If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules s

>If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom. Unless you're arguing the Supreme Court is made up of necromancers, that's exactly what they do. If they had some objective understanding of what consensus the founding fathers or the people would have reached about any issues of the time, much less the thorny and complex issues of today, there would never be a split decision, nor disagreements between them based on their individual interpretations, nor reversals. Not that their beliefs and judgements exist entirely in a vacuum, but the results are called opinions for a reason. Educated opinions are still just that. And I'm not even going to mention that the Supreme Court's power of judicial review, itself, isn't even Constitutional, thus not a power the people who drafted or ratified the Constitution agreed that it should have, at least not the point of actually putting it in writing in the only document where it mattered. They just decided they had that power, solely based on their wisdom.