 According to hard critics, factors like original understandings and the supposed discipline of common law reasoning seldom, if ever, succeed in fixing meaningful limits upon government power. As a result, reliance on such factors in constitutional adjudication only serves: (a) to rationalize the purely political decisions of judges pursuing, consciously or not, their own political ideologies. Further consequences include: (b) a serious affront to democracy. In most constitutional democracies, the judges who ultimately decide constitutional cases are appointed, not elected. That is, they hold office not because they were selected to do so by the democratic community, but because of a decision on the part of a President, a Prime Minister, a small group of fellow judges, or a judicial committee of Parliament. Furthermore, these appointed judges tend to come from the privileged classes of society. The end result is that a small group of unelected, elitist judges with the power to substitute their own, highly contentious views about the proper limits of government power for the considered judgments of the people’s representatives, e.g., those members of Congress or Parliament duly elected to exercise, on behalf of the people, the latter’s sovereign right to participate in political decisions affecting their basic rights. And possibly (c): suppression of those—women, minority racial groups, the poor, and so on—whose interests are not adequately recognized and protected by the dominant, mainstream ideologies to which these elite judges have an affinity. Instead of the curbing of rights-threatening government power for which the idea of constitutionalism is supposed to stand, we have political suppression disguised in a cloak of false constitutional legitimacy.