If a study of world history reveals anything at all, it’s that those power-hungry souls who are attracted to government work will gradually accrue more and more power to themselves until a dictatorship/oligarchy by a governing elite becomes inevitable.
The Founding Fathers did their level best to take that into account and design a “fool proof” republic. Alas, clearly they failed.
The suggested Bork Amendment (a supermajority of both houses of Congress can overturn any court decision) looks interesting, but couldn’t help here. The Senate is a long, long way from being Republican enough.
Unfortunately, as is usually the case, we seem to have found better fools than they anticipated.
Not fool proof, unless the people are Godly and decent. Our battle is a spiritual one. If we can come to terms with this, then we can fight the war on the ground that it is really being fought against us on, rather than fighting at political "windmills".
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"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams
". . . Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed . . . so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger." Patrick Henry
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net." John Adams
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." Benjamin Franklin
"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." James Madison
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." Samuel Adams
"The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue." Thomas Jefferson
"... the manners of the people in general are of the utmost moment to the stability of any civil society. When the body of a people are altogether corrupt in their manners, the government is ripe for dissolution." John Witherspoon
"The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments." Benjamin Rush
"Lastly, our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits." Daniel Webster
"Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith." Horace Greely
"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous." Frederick Douglas
"History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster." Douglas MacArthur
"I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her comodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile fields and boundless prairies; and it was not there; in her rich mines and her vast commerce, and it was not there. Not until I visited the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." An old adage attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville
"A state is nothing more than a reflection of its citizens; the more decent the citizens, the more decent the state." Ronald Reagan
The Founding Fathers did their level best to take that into account and design a “fool proof” republic. Alas, clearly they failed.
What killed the constitution was eliminating the possibility of states leaving the union when things became intolerable.