“Every word employed in the Constitution is to be expounded in its plain, obvious, and common sense, unless the context furnishes some ground to control, qualify, or enlarge it. Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, rounded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings. The people make them, the people adopt them, the people must be supposed to read them, with the help of common-sense, and cannot be presumed to admit in them any recondite meaning or any extraordinary gloss.”
— Joseph Story, Constitution (5th ed.) 345, SS 451
The style is a bit florid for my personal taste, but the message is important, and sound.
Let me restate that message a little more succinctly:
The Constitution belongs to, and is the instrument of, We the People. It is not the property of the lawyers and the politicians.
And we will never rescue and preserve the republic instituted by that Constitution until and unless we learn to tell the judges and the politicians to go to hell, whenever and wherever necessary.
Grab a sharp instrument and cut off the serpent’s head.