Now, mind you, the courts have been busy crafting exemptions to those guarantees for decades now. That right to a jury trial “in all criminal cases,” as unambiguously set forth in the Sixth Amendment? The courts have since determined the Founders must have meant “unless the prosecution agrees to jail you for only five-and-a-half months on each charge,” thus making the delivery chute to the prison system far more speedy and efficient.

Immunity from being forced to incriminate ourselves, as supposedly guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment? Given “the need for public revenue collection by a process necessarily reliant on self reporting,” and given that the needs of the government outweigh the liberties of the people and since government’s power “to raise revenue is its life blood,” the high court consulted its crystal ball and determined in U.S. v. Carlson, 617 F.2d 518, that the Founders didn’t mean for that immunity from self-incrimination to apply to filling out income tax forms.

But in fact, the rights enumerated in the first eight articles of amendment are not the sum total of our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, anyway.

It was precisely out of concern that future generations might draw that conclusion that the founders ratified the 9th and 10th amendments, guaranteeing that “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The founders well knew that the forces of state tyranny might someday conspire to eliminate freedoms which were so taken for granted in 1787 that no one even dreamed of the need to specifically list them.

Take, for example, the right of an American to consult a physician, for that physician to prescribe or recommend any medicine he or she sees fit, and for the patient to then buy (or grow, or manufacture) and self-administer that medicine.

For a full century after the founding -- for nearly 300 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock -- no one dreamed of infringing this basic right. And even when some modest licensing requirements for physicians began to be adopted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, everyone understood that any such prerogative was reserved to the states by the 10th amendment -- Washington was not allowed to meddle, especially to seek “uniformity.”

Thomas Jefferson himself wrote that the nation would be on the verge of “Bonapartist tyranny” should the states ever lose their sovereignty, becoming little more than administrative districts of the centralized authority, “like the departments of France.”

It had long been an American tradition that if some residents of Massachusetts found they didn’t like the degree of religious conformity enforced there, they were free to “vote with their feet” by moving to more tolerant Rhode Island.

But precisely that trend toward centralization of “one-size-fits-all” power so feared by Mr. Jefferson began in earnest after the Civil War.

On Monday it continued, as the U.S. Supreme Court struck another blow for centralized tyranny, ruling 6-3 that the people of California do not have a right to decide how and when that state’s doctors may recommend small amounts of marijuana to their patients, but that -- instead -- federal authorities may arrest and jail such sick people.

The decision is being described as a stinging defeat for advocates of even a limited return to medical liberty, who had run successful initiative campaigns in 10 states, including Nevada and Colorado, to allow the medicinal herb’s use to treat various illnesses.

But it defeats far more than this one sensible cause. It is a body blow against the concept of self-government, itself.

Long have Americans been told, “If you don’t like the law, follow the prescribed procedures and change it.”

Now, why bother? The gun-wielding federal bullies may do as they choose, regardless.

The case concerned two Californians, Diane Monson and Angel Raich. Ms. Raich, an Oakland woman suffering from ailments including scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, fatigue and pain, smokes marijuana every few hours. She said she was partly paralyzed until she started smoking pot. Monson, an accountant who lives near Oroville, Calif., has degenerative spine disease and grows her own marijuana plants in her backyard.

Monson’s backyard crop of six marijuana plants was cut down by federal agents with chain saws in 2002, even though the California law was on Monson’s side. She asked the court to protect her. Instead, Justice Stevens offers to start the narcs’ chain saws for them.

Absurdly, the court claims the federal government has jurisdiction in the case under the power to regulate “interstate commerce,” even though the California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge, and never crossed state lines.

(The court can’t even claim the existence of this homegrown pot affects the price of marijuana moving in legal interstate commerce -- as it did in the infamous 1937 “wheat” case, Wickard v. Filburn -- since there is no legal interstate commerce in marijuana.)

“The states’ core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens,” wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Justice O’Connor said she would have voted against California’s medical marijuana law, herself. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse “making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use.”

Genteel discourse usually requires that we “regret” or “lament” such decisions. Today, that rhetoric will no longer suffice.

Serving no imaginable aim but the further expansion of Washington’s arrogant jackboot authority, the high court here authorizes the kind of drug goons who killed Donald Scott on his own ranch in the hills above Malibu during a bogus “drug raid” (they really sought to annex his property) -- to terrify, intimidate and invade the privacy of sick people, to arrest and jail them, to threaten the careers of their doctors -- all despite lopsided democratic votes that have declared it is no “crime” in these 10 states for those doctors to prescribe a native-grown medicinal plant.

That is disgusting.