Several 2020 candidates are determined to mainstream the perverse idea of expanding the Supreme Court to achieve policy victories. Such court-packing defies the intent, function, and ideals of the American judiciary.

Americans have been told a lie about the constitutional balance of power. Despite activist assertions to the contrary, the Supreme Court is not a supreme constitutional council with the sole and final say on legal matters. We have accepted a larger than life picture of the judiciary, and it is slowly destroying individual liberty and the constitutional order laid down by the founders.

The Constitution outlines the role of the courts, but for some time they have been operating beyond their proper function. We must change how we see them, understand their appropriate role, and stop allowing the growth of power. Each new interpretation of plain text that widens the judiciary’s authority is a dangerous violation of the separation of powers. If executive overreach concerns you, judicial overreach doubly should.

To correct a few common misconceptions, the judiciary’s rulings are not the supreme law of the land, even rulings from the Supreme Court. The judiciary is not the only or even final arbiter on the Constitution. And the judiciary is not a truly co-equal branch of government.

RENO, Nev. — Jordan Aaron was the president of a Carson City sushi restaurant who once ran for justice of the peace in Arizona. Antonio Pastini was the brash ex-Chicago cop who befriended a brothel mogul and spun yarns of a bare-knuckled youth in the Windy City that read like a cross between “Goodfellas” and “The Outsiders.”

They were one and the same person.

He used two names and two Social Security numbers. He kept different driver’s licenses and bank accounts under the two names, an ex-wife alleged. The ex-wife — one of four — said in court filings that he kept multiple identities to hide money, and she hinted that he had “trouble with the law.”

But he might have lived out his days simply as Tony Pastini, the garrulous retired cop, had his twin-engine Cessna not plummeted 7,800 feet on Feb. 3 into an Orange County, Calif., suburb, killing him and four people who were on the ground.

From the smoldering wreckage, investigators plucked a police badge belonging to Retired Chicago Patrolman #15599. That discovery would help unravel the threads of a life story Pastini spent three decades crafting. The 75-year-old, it turned out, had never been a Chicago cop, though it appeared he wished he had been.

Neither former slaves nor slave owners are alive today. Furthermore, columnist and radio host Michael Medved says that only about 5 percent of whites have any sort of “generational” connection to slavery. “The importation of slaves came to an end in 1808 (as provided by the Constitution), a mere 32 years after independence, and slavery had been outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War,” wrote Medved in 2007. “Even in the South, more than 80 percent of the white population never owned slaves. Given the fact that the majority of today’s non-black Americans descend from immigrants who arrived in this country after the War Between the States, only a tiny percentage of today’s white citizens – perhaps as few as 5 percent – bear any authentic sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave labor.”

"These are not minor or technical violations. We are talking about real money here. In all my years of studying FEC reports, I’ve never seen a more ambitious operation to circumvent reporting requirements. Representative Ocasio-Cortez has been quite vocal in condemning so-called dark money, but her own campaign went to great lengths to avoid the sunlight of disclosure," Tom Anderson, director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project, said in a statement.