The Supreme Court was the American Founding Fathers’ biggest mistake, a disaster our founders followed, even awarding the federal government an untrammelled discretion in choosing judges. As the great US Justice Antonin Scalia asked, ‘Do you think the American people would ever have ratified the Constitution if they had been told the meaning of this document shall be whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it is?’

In attempting to transpose the essence of the British constitution to their new nation, the founders assumed their Supreme Court would operate only as a court and would be, as Hamilton said, the...