By JEFF SESSIONS | U.S. Senator 

The Supreme Court has become a Supreme Legislature. They have not only rewritten the laws of the 50 United States, but have redefined a sacred and ancient institution. The Framers provided only two means of amending the Constitution: an amendment must be proposed through either a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate or a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the states, and either must then be ratified by three-fourths of the states. They did not authorize judges to amend the Constitution. Five judges have neither the moral nor legal authority to decide for themselves that the heritage which gave birth to our nation should be supplanted with their own fleeting views of contemporary events.

It is not an act of courage but supreme arrogance to pretend that the wisdom of five judges is greater than all the men and women who have voted upon this issue in the 50 states, and the men and women whose convictions have defined the course of western civilization. The civilization we flourish in today did not spring out of nothing: it was carved out of the wilderness by families and communities knitted together by their faith and traditions, and set upon a foundation stretching back thousands of years.

When a society begins to strike its shared faith and traditions from every place of respect, a new faith always takes its place. Where the family is not the center of American life, government is. Today’s ruling is part of a continuing effort to secularize, by force and intimidation, a society that would not exist but for the faith which inspired people to sail across unknown waters and trek across unknown frontiers.

Justice Scalia was sadly but fully correct when he wrote that: “Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court… This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

Such action must end. All who seek high office — whether legislative or executive — must pledge to curtail these abuses and support only the nomination of those who will do the same. The American people are losing the power to control those who seek to control them.

In a single week we have seen the Congress surrender its legislative authority through fast-track, we have seen the Court rewrite the dictionary to protect Obamacare, and we have seen unelected judges rewrite the Constitution in order to impose the will of five on 300 million.

But whether these progressive victories are transient, or permanent, depends on us.