That's a nice-sounding sentiment (and one that should have applied to the paper and its reporting long before Donald Trump arrived in the White House), but it's also trite and naïve. It is far closer to the truth to say that democracy dies out in the open, in the daylight, right in front of our faces, and with the approval of most of the people working at The Washington Post. In reality, democracy dies in the courtrooms and judges' quarters of our nation.

As the Trump Administration is thwarted in its efforts to cut federal spending, bloat, and waste time and again by activist judges, the people of the country must understand what is going on and what it likely says about the nation's future. These judges—most of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden—have taken it upon themselves to make policy and to engage in political maneuvering to spare the political status quo the fate for which the American people voted last November. 

Unironically and unapologetically, they are undoing the will of demos, purportedly to save democracy.

Interestingly, the Democrats who cheer the activist judges and their rulings are open and unremorseful about their overt injection of politics into the system of judicial review. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, crowed to PBS "Newshour" this week that he and his fellow Democrats are responsible for "saving democracy" because they intentionally packed the courts with judges that shared their ideology and would be unafraid to apply it to any case involving President Trump. "We did put 235 judges, 235 progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time."

As justification for their use of the courts to stymie the will of the democratically elected administration, the Democrats (naturally) cite Marbury v. Madison, in which every schoolboy (and girl) used to be taught strengthened the concept of judicial review and established the courts as a proper constitutional check on the executive and legislative branches. The catch here is that Marbury v. Madison was decided on procedural, constitutional grounds, thereby intentionally sidestepping the contentious politics of the case. More to the point, the ruling purposefully constrained the ability of elected officials to use the courts as vehicles for their political gambits, even as it also reined in the Supreme Court itself, arguing that its actions in defense of politically stacking the judiciary were unconstitutional.

Rather than relying on the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, the Democrats and all those who cheer their judicial strategy would do far better to read the words and heed the warnings of Carl Schmitt, the brilliant and rightly famous Weimar-era German jurist who became a rightly infamous Nazi-era German jurist, the "crown jurist" of the Third Reich.