[TheDon]

You should probably rethink your analogy, at least I hope you misspoke. To favorably liken a government and nation to a captain and his ship, is to look favorably upon a dictatorship, and not a particularly favorable one at that!

To be "above the political fray" is not really possible, except in pretense. The safety in giving the least democratic branch of the government such power, is that they have no ability to enforce it. If the Supreme Court makes a ruling, the executive branch can ignore it, as long as the legislative branch does not object. Checks and balances do work, don't they!

My comment was in reference to those who seek to pass law via the judicial branch, i.e. Roe v. Wade. Liberals, or rather statists, in our country tend to favor the least democratic branch of government to pass their laws as they cannot get the other two to do so.

[Grand Old Partisan]

Jefferson was an important figure in our political history, but not an expert on the Constitution. After all, his position was that instead of the federal judiciary deciding upon constitutional questions, each state legislature would judge whether a federal law was constitutionally valid within the state! Absurd and chaotic, to say the least.

Aside from Hamilton, a much more relevant authority on the Constitution was George Washington, who chaired the Constitutional Convention. The man who drafted the Judiciary Act of 1787, which established that the judiciary was to decide constitutional questions, Oliver Wolcott, Washington then appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.