The Founders, Federalist No. 78

"... [The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE
nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the
aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments." -- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

The progressive argument on the Judiciary tends to be along these lines, "Look, the Judiciary has done some good things by increasing its power and inventing rights and stuff even if they had to trash the Constitution to do so. So then you can't limit them or else all the good things that they've done will just wither away, wither away I say! And then, we'll have virtually no civil rights at all..."

The only way all that can be true is if we the people are generally stupid and need an oligarchy in the Judiciary making all our discriminations for us, defining all our rights for us, etc. The electorate being ignorant and stupid is the only way that rights retained by the people really would just wither away without the Judiciary, sothe progressive has to be assuming that people are generally stupid. But they will protect us with the help of their Judiciary that they control politically through the nomination process.

Note that the way they make fun of rubes and so on reveals the same thing, that is what they think of parts of "We the people..." who seek to retain rights based on common sense of self-evident truths. (Side note on Jefferson's ideal of agrarian communities, a conservative concept similar to Burke's notion of the English shire, a vision of a type of conservative community that progressives tend to condemn as ignorant bumpkins and so on. For on the one hand they are Greens and so want the fulfillment of gardening. Yet on the other hand they reject religion and the veneration and prescription that tends to be at the agrarian root of conservatism, so they can never find that lost balance.)

Here is an example of the reasoning, if the Judiciary can't act like textual degenerates then suddenly all of our discriminations will be wrong:

I’ve said for months to conservative acquaintances: if we confine our interpretation of the rights protected under the constitution to rights expressly stated in the constitution and to the known original intentions of its framers, then many of the rights we enjoy and take for granted today will be threatened. Consider a very basic one: the right of a woman to get pregnant and deliver her baby. Nowhere is that right expressly stated in the constitution.

(Delaware Watch)

So there you have it, if we go by the Constitution then women may not be able to get pregnant and deliver their baby. I wonder what else will happen if the rule of law is adhered to? Note that the reasoning that progressives engage in was viciously attacked by many of the Founders and so they can be quoted. They argued that having an oligarchy is more dangerous to Liberty than rule of law, among other arguments.

In short, the Founder's arguments on the best structure for government make sense while progressive arguments in favor of textual degeneracy do not.

[Edit: Sorry that I can't seem to refrain from sarcasm with respect to your argument Dana, I'll bet we can still be pals...unless you get real upset one day.]