This series of briefings is about ways to insure that government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. The first seven compact briefings in this series are each just a little over three minutes and keyed to one of the seven governing principles articulated within the Enacting Clause (Preamble), of the United States Constitution.

The following treatments are an analysis of the Court’s moral and legal relativism due to its disregard for the principles put forth in the Constitution’s Mission Statement, its Cardinal Precepts, and its Defining Objectives.

Make no mistake. When certain nominees for the Supreme Court engaged in deceptive practices during their confirmation hearings to win their form-fitting seats, it was they who undermined the legitimacy of the Court. And when, after the dark money funded nominations and confirmations, they go on to accept special accommodations, with individuals and companies that have business before the Court, reasonable people might infer that the same Justices who legalized political bribery, are now to be counted among its greatest beneficiaries.

John Roberts actually said: “I don’t understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court.” With all due respect Mr. Chief Justice, a majority of the people in the United States don’t believe you because it is seen within the context of a self-serving pattern and practice.

The real question before the Court of Public Opinion is whether Roberts is just feigning an abysmal ignorance or whether there is something more sinister at play; something reminiscent of the power dynamics at play during the times of the nation’s founding. When the well coiffed, pink fingered oligarchs with their squeaky clean fingernails wanted to impose their money and power preferences in 1776 with high sounding words, the great unwashed called their bluff. 

William Hogeland’s description of what occurred during that time, through his book The Hamilton Scheme, is not counted among the historical analogues used by those prevaricators of today who have consistently back-burnered the public interest. And John Roberts effort to place the separation of powers above the need for complementary powers, balance of power, or checks and balances is just the latest among the Supreme Court’s stupid ideas.

The Corner Post Decision that Amy Comer Barrett read, just prior to the one where the Court reprised the monarchy, opens the floodgates for gamesmanship in the form of legal challenges to each and every federal regulation. Previously, one would be required to understand and accept the rules of any given game prior to any participation. Now, the Supreme Court has created an entirely new class of professional victims. And, in so doing, it has made a solid case for expanding the Court by twelve additional Justices.

In her Dissent, Justice Jackson wrote:

“At the end of a momentous Term, this much is clear: The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the Court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government. Even more to the present point, that result simply cannot be what Congress intended when it enacted legislation that stood up and funded federal agencies and vested them with authority to set the ground rules for the individuals and entities that participate in our economy and our society. It is utterly inconceivable that §2401(a)’s statute of limitations was meant to permit fresh attacks on settled regulations from all new comers forever. Yet, that is what the majority holds today.“

So now, unelected judges will routinely substitute their unqualified opinions for the methodical science of unelected, but highly qualified, experts at the agency level. The Court’s effort to deconstruct the administrative state will undoubtedly increase the case load for the Federal Courts. And, any lethargic response, such as the proposal to enlarge the court to thirteen Justices, will be insufficient. The current levels of unsettled case law notwithstanding, the Court must be expanded to at least twenty-one Justices if it is to handle its self-imposed oncoming ‘tsunami.”

Just as the Appellate Courts typically impanel three justices for any given case, the Supreme Court could draw lots to randomly impanel seven justices to hear each case for which the full Court has granted cert. This would keep those lying in wait, for ideological shifts to occur before filing politically motivated cases, from gaming the system. It would lessen the influence of those justices that assumed positions of honor and trust by means of deceptive practices. And, it would have the potential to restore public confidence with respect to the legitimacy of the judicial process.

Is there still time to pull our democratic republic out of the nose dive that John Roberts and the other wackadoodle wing-nuts on the Supreme Court have accelerated? The short answer is ‘yes.’ But, in order to do that, the general public will have to get real focused real fast. This requires at least a basic understanding of the various forces at play.

To move onward and upward, we must be deliberate as we work to counteract certain retardant forces including the drag on progress and gravity of each given situation. And, as any aviator will tell you, our progress can be ‘stalled’ when the forces favoring forward momentum and lift are, in some way, interrupted. Student pilots spend hours rehearsing stall recovery. They to need develop a quick response for use in those dire situations when a finely crafted wing simply stops working, especially when there’s very little space between them and the dirt. After all, if one is going to fall from high places, it’s especially embarrassing to do it tail first.

Like the student practicing stall recovery, citizens who want to “secure the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity,” need to develop a quick response to every conceivable threat. And, these desirable traits, when skillfully honed, are best understood by analogy to a conditioned spiritual reflex.

On the 22^nd of March in 1775, Edmund Burke gave a speech titled On Conciliation with the Colonies. In that talk, Burke highlighted such a ‘reflex’ when, with reference to the Colonists, he offered the following observations:

“The smartness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is mighty well. But my honourable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as I, that when great honours and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious.

Abeunt studia in mores: This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.“

Our contemporaries would do well to channel at least some of the qualities Burke attributes to the Colonists. Like the pilot in the stalled plane, we must quickly make some attitudinal changes if our country is ever going to rise again and move onward and upward, from one level of attainment to the next.

This metaphor can also be comfortably extended into questions of balance. For when a load is too far aft of the center of gravity, it can make stall recovery well neigh impossible. Of course if the engine is strong enough one may be able to compensate for unintelligent loading, but at great expense in terms of energy generation and consumption.

It is within this question of balance that we must consider whether the Supreme Court’s is displaying an abysmal ignorance or an intentional sacrifice of checks and balances on the altar that have now fetishized as the separation of powers. Their contempt for the seven principles originally advanced, through the Enacting Clause of the United States Constitution, is now on full display. The coarse threaded wing-nuts on the Court today stand, in stark contrast and striking relief, against a backdrop of Declarative and Constitutional Principle. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has now fallen by the wayside as the wayward Justices indulge their insatiable appetites for more and more power.

Through their witch trial jurisprudence, they have selected historical analogues that favor bump-stocks and high capacity magazines over any authentic ‘pro-life’ agenda. They have enabled violations of the Thirteenth Amendment as they force females, who are not ready for parenthood or to bear children for someone else, into conditions of peonage and involuntary servitude at the pleasure of certain backwards governors and legislators within the states.

When one considers the first three words of the Constitution, ‘We the People’ was never meant to include women, persons of color, or anyone else that didn’t own land. As with the engraving “Equal Justice Under Law” displayed over the doors to the Supreme Court building, the Roberts Court is perpetrating a fraud on the People of the United States with its originalism and textualism schtick.

The forming of a more perfect union is hardly an ideal for those on the Court who seek to divide us even on consensus issues. An undercover documentary filmmaker, Lauren Windsor at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Annual Dinner on June the 3^rd in 2024, told Sam Alito that she doesn’t think negotiation with the left is possible if polarization in the country is going to end, but rather it’s a matter of “winning.”

She recorded Alito’s response wherein he said: “On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win,” he said. “I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”

Thus far the Court has compromised what is meant by each of the seven objectives within the Enacting Clause of the United States Constitution.

Placing the separation of powers above the nation’s need for complementary powers and balance of power was just the latest in a series of foolish ideas originating within the bowels of the United States Supreme Court. The right wing’s confusion about what the Constitution implies, as opposed to what malign actors infer, has become a serious problem for the nation. Gutting constitutional imperatives, such as checks and balances, in favor of unconstitutional immunities clearly derived from megalomanic notions of infallibility held by popes and kings, is even more serious. And, in the context of our democratic republic, it signals the arbitrary conferring of absolute power to a unitary executive, by an agenda driven Court already cloaking itself with absolute judicial immunity. The unbridled majority has been corrupted absolutely.

The Court’s textualism and originalism is pure fetishism. Those who have worshipped on the altar of inanimate objects like the letter of the law; and who are overawed by its supposed magical powers, ditched the Spirit of the law a long time ago because it was too difficult for malign actors to twist. And now, they are actively perpetrating a fraud upon the public through their pretense concerning any actual respect for the law.

The phrase engraved on the West Pediment, above the front entrance of the United States Supreme Court building reads “Equal Justice Under Law.” And, although this is a worthy societal ideal that has influenced the American legal system during good times, it was despised by the founding elite and was never even an aspirational statement for the majority occupying the big chairs within that building.

The Court’s contempt for the public interest is on full display even though they block cameras from the courtroom and audio streaming as they read their Opinions. In a nation where dark money nominations, confirmations, and accommodations have effectively bought off its Supreme Court, there was a time when sunshine laws were in vogue. But the Supreme Court never embraced them for reasons that are now obvious due to their fear of transparency.

It has now become a matter of utmost urgency that the Court be expanded to twenty-one Justices without further delay. It is not enough merely to match the number of Justices to the number of Judicial Circuits. Only a Court large enough, featuring a widely distributed grounding that can resist the upheaval of seismic political shifts, can fulfill its obligations in accordance with the judicial and constitutional oath.

It is rumored that John Robert’s most cherished possession is a letter he received on the day he graduated from law school. It features a letterhead that bears the Federalist Society’s logo and the opening salutation reads “Dear Wormwood.”

Actually I just made that up. But I did it to underscore the fact that the Chief Justice’s treatment of the Dissenting Opinions in the case Trump versus United States is like a Master Class in the art of deception. It selectively amplifies, filters, and contextualizes the objections raised to create a false impression. And, were I to probe his motives, I would likely conclude that Roberts wanted to include that treatment and effectively preclude or simply dissuade undisciplined readers from doing a proper examination of either the thirty page Sotomayor Dissent or the twenty two page Jackson Dissent.

Unlike William Barr, with his willingness to provide a misleading “summary” of the Mueller Report, or Donald Trump, with his plan to have the Justice Department send letters to the States falsely alleging election fraud, sentinels like then acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen, did not just go along to get along. Roberts, with his Opinion and by avoiding the Second Impeachment Trial demonstrated that, in matters of character and the tenets of true statesmanship, he is seriously deficient.

The corrosive influence of dark money on the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic is the political equivalent of tar and nicotine. That sound you hear is the wheezing of Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam. For the plan devised long ago by Lewis Powell, to influence every judicial decision by the installation of integrity challenged Justices, has since been deemed a success by almost every measure. As the minority on the Supreme Court struggles to catch a breath of fresh air and reclaim at least some legitimacy, the smoke the majority has leveraged, against a plane of unreality, continues to distract the governed. And now any informed consent has effectively been nullified by the Court’s own unrelenting artifice infusion.

Roberts, with reckless abandon, has turned the Separation of Powers Doctrine into a shield for criminality. Rather than use it to protect the public interest, he has advanced the idiotic notion that Justice “may not inquire into the President’s motives.” And the Roberts spin on the earlier decision concerning the Nixon tapes now bars investigators from using “Testimony or private records of the President or his advisers” and prohibits “probing such conduct” insuring that it “may not be admitted as evidence at trial.”

The theft of democracy by those practicing criminality at the highest level is well neigh complete. To add insult to the nation’s severe injuries, John Roberts in his Opinion on Trump versus The United States drove a stake into the heart of the country even while he referenced a quote from George Washington’s Farewell Address. The Roberts Opinion twisted the stake as he included the following:

A government “too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction,” he warned, could lead to the “frightful despotism” of “alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge.” — And the way to avoid that cycle, he explained, was to ensure that government powers remained “properly distributed and adjusted.”

The adjustment layer that Roberts excised and excavated under was, at least in part, previously vested in the independence of the Justice Department.

When the Supreme Court can be packed and hyper-politicized, over the course of one presidential term, it sends danger signals to the entire nation.

It was never just about packing the Court, Trump packed it with malign actors that would be whoring for the businesses that backed him as he and McConnell were installing them in their cushy jobs. The prevailing public perception is entirely correct. We have had judges forced upon us that have no fidelity to their oaths, no affinity for the truth, and no reverence for those constitutional imperatives that The Supreme Court itself has now put asunder.

The hero of today’s hard right, Joseph Goebbels, defined the true aim of such moral inversion influencers with the statement:

“We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection.”

It is in this way, the so-called conservative majority on the Supreme Court has demonstrated, they are actually the conservators of nothing. And, the Chief Justice has become a junior tempter trying to corrupt the soul of his “Patient.” Unfortunately, Wormwood’s Patient in the immediate case is the United States of America. And, now that the majority on the Supreme Court has, at least for now, abandoned its highly selective historical analogues schtick in favor of their natural inclination towards judicial activism, the country is stunned.

The backwards people making up the Majority have clearly demonstrated they are, first and foremost, creatures of partisan politics; posturing, prevaricating, and prostituting themselves in ways that are offensive to the public interest. Somewhere between the covert and the overt bribery it has become apparent the Court’s undeniable value proposition is to insure that the rich will get richer and the poor will die.

No court has done more to systematically corrode the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic than the Roberts Court. And, while the moneyed interests that control the media try to frame the ongoing tension as one of autocracy versus democracy, the real contest is, and has been since the time of this country’s founding, one of kleptocracy versus democracy.

The Roberts Court has nothing to offer that qualifies as either a Spiritual ideal or a positive nature. Only a new court of sentience, with integrity at its center, can move us away from the present orgy of darkness and death onward and upward into a new era of light and life.

John Roberts is arguably Donald Trump’s Roy Cohn. When the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court declined to preside over the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Roberts set the stage for our grand experiment’s next and perhaps its final chapter. The insurrectionists have learned how to gain access in true Goebbelsian fashion.

It was Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, who wrote the playbook for the coarse threaded wing-nuts in government today. He said:

“We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear’s work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”

Like the apprentice demon C.S. Lewis wrote about in the Screwtape Letters, Roberts and his cohorts are methodically corroding the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic. Other Goebbelsian tactics; including lie often enough, specify the targets for hatred, and accuse the other of that which you are guilty, are now standard features within the cesspool of disinformation the Roberts Court has itself created.

As long as dark money funds judicial nominations, confirmations, and accommodations, the Court will do the bidding of those operating in the shadows and to whom the consent of the governed has always been seen as an arcane, banished idea. Opposing forces have now largely given way to those who think making America great again means returning us to the good old days of teenage breeding wenches, peonage, and involuntary servitude.

The witch trial jurisprudence of Dobbs, and the way the Court became a primary enabler of murder and mayhem through decisions in Bruen and now Cargill, demonstrates its contempt for the public interest. High sounding words no longer mask the depraved heart indifference some SCOTUS justices have shown towards young women not ready for parenthood and children trying to avoid having their faces homogenized by a 45 round-per-minute gun never envisioned by those who ratified the Second Amendment.

In trying to identify the corrosive influences within our country, the public is focusing on certain individuals that should have never occupied positions of honor and trust within the judiciary. For the authors of Opinions that advance a moral inversion agenda, there is not a trace of statesmanship discernible. And now they have opened the door for a deluge of cases that will address all the new ambiguities, even the incumbents acknowledge more Justices will be needed to avoid interrupting their island hopping and book tour schedules.

The United States Constitution provides that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint…judges of the Supreme Court….” After Senate confirmation, the President signs a commission appointing the nominee, who then must take two oaths before executing the duties of the office. These oaths the Constitutional Oath and the Judicial Oath.

When on September the 10^th in 2022, Chief Justice John Roberts admitted he doesn’t “understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court,” he displayed or feigned a clear lack of situational awareness that is, in itself, problematic.

It certainly was not lost on the public how one presidential candidate could lose the popular vote in 2016 by 2.9 million votes and then, as President go on to pack the Supreme Court with three agenda-driven justices. And while the electorate is resigned to the fact we must, for the time being, live with an Electoral College scheme that might have made sense in the days of the Pony Express, we also understand how the corrupted nomination and confirmation process was foisted upon us by means of dark moneyed Senatorial, Judicial, and Media sophistries.

Dark money politics is not only owned by the Court that condoned it, some SCOTUS Justices are also among its greatest beneficiaries. Even so, the most concerning aspects of what has been exposed, as unjust enrichment, is the way certain members of the Court seem to be delivering victories for their benefactors. In the absence of even the usual revisionist historical analogues, it is now the bump-stock and gun manufacturers that are receiving a tremendous amount of return on investment.

Just how much blood money is required to convert a sitting SCOTUS justice into an enabler of murder and mayhem has recently become less of a mystery. And, the jury in the Court of Public Opinion is still out. As Chief Justice Roberts shrinks away from so many of his responsibilities, while he shirked his duty to preside over a president’s second impeachment trial that was more about disqualification from holding future office than it was about the removal question that had been rendered moot. As Roberts failed in his responsibility, to create meaningful judicial ethics reform, it is no wonder he has difficulty grappling with questions about his Court’s legitimacy.

If such cowardly avoidance was confined to the office of Chief Justice, it would certainly be bad enough. But the Judicial Conference of the United States is the national policymaking body for the federal courts. It too has been lackadaisical with respect to the pressing need for meaningful reform.

Principle #1 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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On September the 10^th in 2022, John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said:

“Obviously people can say what they want. And they’re certainly free to criticize the Supreme Court. And if they want to say that its legitimacy is in question they’re free to do so but I don’t understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court.”

The Declaration of Independence incorporated a doctrine first articulated as “the consent of the governed” by John Duns Scotus in his Lectura and Ordinatio of the 1290s. That phrasing, adopted unanimously by the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress on July the 4^th in 1776, was an unambiguous acknowledgment of the new nation’s cardinal precepts. Their expanded phrasing further defined government’s legitimacy. The Declaration stated that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

On the United States Court’s website we find the following statement: “Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787.” In fact, the words: “in Order to form a more perfect Union” precede “Establish Justice” and any literate person would reasonably infer that the forming of such a union is a clearly stated objective. In fact, there are seven objectives advanced through the Preamble.

The United State’s Constitution’s first three words “We the People” are also a clear indication that the consent of the governed was foremost in the minds of the framers, that any and all of government’s legitimate functions are clearly derived therefrom. The Preamble is the Enacting Clause. The expressed intent, that the nation was to be formed by We the People, is widely understood to be a clearly defined objective.

The citizenry is ultimately responsible for insuring the faithful interpretation of The Constitution’s Mission Statement, its Defining Objectives, and its Guiding Principles. Implicit to the statement “We the People of the United States” is that we are the stewards of a Constitution that is designed to facilitate the formation of a unified nation. It is much, much more than a treaty between separate sovereign states.

Understanding this constitutional imperative is first among the most basic qualifications for anyone holding a position of honor and trust on the United States Supreme Court or elsewhere in government. The Enacting Clause of the Constitution has been targeted by malign actors throughout the history of the United States. They have persuaded the Judiciary to rule that it is to have no operative effect. And, We the People never, ever consented to that!

Principle #2 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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Abraham Lincoln steadfastly believed that the Constitution should be interpreted in a manner that is faithful to its purposes. Today, the legacy of Lincoln stands as an inspiring example against the pernicious sophistries of those who seek to undermine what John Wycliffe described in the Preface to his translation of the Latin Vulgate into Middle English. He wrote: “The Bible is for government of, by and for the people.” Lincoln later expressed the hope, shared by all people of authentic good will, that such an evolved form of government “shall not perish from the earth.”

The Constitution is a contract with the people of the United States. In 1819, then Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall wrote an Opinion in the case Sturges versus Crowninshield. It was a case involving a federal question about the obligations of contract and the extent to which such obligations might be discharged as a result of insolvency or bankruptcy.

Marshall referred to controversies about the Contract Clause when he wrote:

“Before discussing this argument, it may not be improper to premise that although the spirit of an instrument, especially of a constitution, is to be respected not less than its letter, yet the spirit is to be collected chiefly from its words. It would be dangerous in the extreme to infer from extrinsic circumstances that a case for which the words of an instrument expressly provide shall be exempted from its operation.”

Eighty-six years later Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan blunted the spirit of the law, and its operational effect, when he wrote the opinion in Jacobson versus Massachusetts.

Harlan acknowledged the prior work of Marshall with out-of-context phrasing when he wrote: 

“While the spirit of the Constitution is to be respected not less than its letter, the spirit is to be collected chiefly from its words.”

But then he quashed the essence of the Enacting Clause, effectively excising and excavating under it, when he wrote: 

“The United States does not derive any of its substantive powers from the Preamble of the Constitution. It cannot exert any power to secure the declared objects of the Constitution unless, apart from the Preamble, such power be found in, or can properly be implied from, some express delegation in the instrument.”

Harlan’s personal confusion concerning the difference between inference and implication notwithstanding, this was also the time of the Fuller Court. Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller and his cohorts in 1905 were consistently expressing contempt for, the Ninth Amendment which clearly states:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Principle #3 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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Melville W. Fuller was the first Chief Justice to lobby Congress. He successfully advocated for the adoption of the Circuit Courts of Appeals Act of 1891. It established appellate courts, which reduced the Supreme Court’s backlog and allowed it to decide cases in a more timely manner. In 1893, President Grover Cleveland offered to appoint Fuller to be Secretary of State.  He declined, contending that accepting a political appointment would harm the Supreme Court’s reputation for impartiality.

Many legal scholars have argued that Fuller, who served from 1888 until his death in 1910, was overly deferential to business interests and those of the wealthy. Prior to his service as Chief Justice, he vehemently opposed the policies of President Abraham Lincoln. He helped develop a gerrymandered system for congressional apportionment, corroding the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic.

Fuller supported barring African-Americans from voting or settling in Illinois. He spoke in opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation and he worked to prevent the federal government from outlawing slavery, thereby impairing the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for those who were actively building the nation. While serving as Chief Justice, he placed the Court’s imprimatur on Jim Crow laws with Plessy. The Fuller Court also rejected a challenge to poll taxes and literacy tests that effectively disenfranchised Mississippi’s African-American population.

Fuller was instrumental in setting equal justice under law squarely onto a plane of unreality as he worked to maintain the two tiered justice system. In 2021, the commissioners of Kennebec County, Maine voted unanimously to remove a statue of Fuller from public land with the aim of dissociating the county from racial segregation.

In Lochner v. New York, Fuller agreed with the majority that the Constitution forbade states from enforcing wage-and-hour restrictions on businesses. The 1905 case involved a New York law that capped hours for bakery workers at sixty per week. In a decision widely viewed to be among the Supreme Court’s worst, a five-justice majority held the law to be unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause. The opinion, written by Justice Rufus W. Peckham and joined by Fuller, maintained that the liberty protected by that clause included a right to enter labor contracts without being subject to unreasonable governmental regulation.  Peckham rejected the state’s argument that the law was intended to protect workers’ health, citing the “common understanding” that baking was not unhealthy.  He maintained that bakers could protect their own health, arguing that the law was in fact a labor regulation in disguise. Most scholars believe that the majority in Lochner engaged in judicial activism, substituting their own views for those within the democratically elected branches of government.