Reclaim Conservatism

At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to
be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience,
however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that
the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold
and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern
individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that
these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and
little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by
construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm
has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made
to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.– Thomas
Jefferson (letter to Monsieur A. Coray, 31 October 1823