Before he marched on Persia in 547 B.C., Croesus of Lydia sent gold to Delphi and asked the oracle whether he should make war on Persia. The answer came back as a riddle: If he crossed the river Halys, he would destroy a great empire. He crossed. He destroyed one. It was his own.
Americans have their own Delphi. It sits at 1 First Street in Washington, D.C., with priests in black robes. Every October, a nation that once threw off a king gathers on temple steps to determine which of its liberties it may keep.
This December, the Supreme Court will hear two cases—Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins—that challenge state bans on the most popular rifle in America. Tens of millions of free citizens are waiting for nine justices to define whether “shall not be infringed” means what it says.
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 be the final arbiter of liberty. Alexander Hamilton, a staunch advocate for strong government, described the courts as a “harmless branch” with no influence over the sword or the purse: “It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”
Merely judgment—not supremacy—nor revelation.
Thomas Jefferson understood this well. 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; otherwise, “its discretion, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of its powers.”
The states retained the right to judge for themselves. James Madison echoed this for Virginia. Two decades later, Jefferson warned that making judges the ultimate arbiters of constitutional questions would place Americans under the despotism of an oligarchy.
We did not heed their warnings. Today, a right exists when five justices say it does and vanishes when five say otherwise. Legislators who swore oaths to the Constitution shrug: “Let the courts decide.” Governors wait. Sheriffs wait. Citizens wait.
That is not a republic. That is a petitioning class kneeling before the very oligarchy Jefferson named two centuries ago.
The Court opens its new term with record-low public approval. Americans sense something is rotten but have been told nothing. The problem is not that the oracle gives bad answers—it is that we keep asking it questions.
Every officer in the Union swears an oath to the Constitution, not to the latest court opinion. State legislators may refuse to lend their machinery to federal overreach. Sheriffs may refuse to confiscate what the Second Amendment protects. Citizens may read Article I, the Tenth Amendment, and the Bill of Rights for themselves in a single afternoon—without a law degree.
The Framers wrote the Constitution in plain English so that free men would never need an oracle to translate it.
Croesus trusted the riddle and lost his kingdom. We stand on the banks of the Halys now. We can linger on temple steps, awaiting the next pronouncement, or we can remember that the people of the states made this government, numbered its powers, and never surrendered the right to judge when it overstepped them.
The oracle does not hold our liberty. We do. Act like it.