This "Weaverizing" of contracts is symptomatic of the elitist arrogance of the ruling class -- they know better than you do what you need and what you really mean. It is this arrogance that leads to Congress passing 3,000 page bills it hasn't read, doesn't understand, and has no intention of reading or understanding. Government power is thereby transferred to the bureaucracy, and the people are left with no option but litigation, hence the constitutional challenge to Obamacare. If we don't have the courts, we are lost.

In the July-August 2010 issue of the American Spectator, Angelo Codevilla published a brilliant article, America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution. Please read it here. He describes the ruling class as considering itself "saviors of the planet" and "improvers of humanity." It is a penetrating, brilliant article, which he has expanded to book form.

A portion of Codevilla's article describes the interaction between the ruling class and the courts:

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you serious? Are you serious?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.

If we don't have the authority to govern our own affairs through written agreements, what is left for us?