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That is flawed thinking. *ANY* "final authority" is a dictator. In a representative democracy everything should be open to eternal debate by the people and their representatives.

We can argue forever about what the law should be and endlessly revise and amend it. But we do need some surety about what the law is at any given time. Who owns the property? Who has the right to vote? If you can't give clear answers to such questions at a particular moment, then force rules (or else political and legal pettifogging and chicanery that eventually gives way to force).

In political debates people often assume that there are only two big alternatives: liberty, republicanism, or democracy on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. But the third alternative is the "failed state" which is too weak to impose law on anarchy. Such countries find it impossible to establish law and order, and usually collapse into tyranny.

For the Jeffersonian or libertarian political debate is a struggle between liberty and tyranny. For Washington or Hamilton, the prospect of a "failed state" torn apart by irreconcilable conflicts was a very real possibility and one that needed to be avoided. The idea of some arbiter who could compel the legislature to abide by the Constitution looked like a good idea, given the alternative of each faction taking up arms to prove that it had the right view of things. Whether or not the court has gone too far since the days of John Marshall is another matter.

We can argue forever about what the law should be and endlessly revise and amend it. But we do need some surety about what the law is at any given time. Who owns the property?

"Who owns the property?" That is a perfect example!

Congress and state legislatures argued for decades whether slaves were property. Some legislatures went one way, some another. Congress changed its view from time to time, banning the importation of slaves in 1808, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Kansas-Nebraska and popular sovereignty.

Then the Supreme Court stepped in with Dred Scot (1857), invalidated the Missouri Compromise and confusing and contradictory state laws and said a slave bought in the South was property everywhere, thereby imposing slavery on the North. That radicalized the abolitionist movement throughout the North and led directly to turning the country into a failed state for four years. It is not debate and democracy that makes failed states, but the fear that one group's views are going to be overridden by another's by force rather than persuasion.