Based upon Justice Sotomayor’s bizarre dissenting opinion in the recent Michigan affirmative action case, it seems she believes that government decisions made on the basis of race, something the Constitution expressly bars, are mandatory.

Someone has been emanating her penumbras because, to use the legal term of art, that’s Constitutional Crazy Talk.

Years ago, the liberals came up with the Political Process Doctrine. It’s the idea that if some small element of a state or local government – like a city council or a university board – is implementing policies liberals like, the people can’t use the ballot box to change things back.

It ought to be called the “Ratchet Doctrine.” You are free to make things more liberal to your bleeding heart’s content. You just can’t ever undo them. It’s right there in the Constitution. Somewhere. Maybe in the paragraph before the one that says you can have an abortion up until your fetus can drive.

Liberals like to call the Constitution a “living document.” Oh, how many activists in robes cite that mind-bogglingly misguided metaphor as they turn a foundational document into a kind of political Mad Lib where they scribble nonsense into blanks that don’t exist?

In fact, the Constitution is dead, dead as a doorknob. It has to be. Otherwise, it’s not a constitution.

The Constitution is designed not to change with the times, not to yield the ancient wisdom that flows through it to the faux-wisdom of the present. It is the foundation of our system, not something to be causally disregarded every time some politician who thinks he’s smarter than James Madison gets a bright idea.

It ensures a stable society where firm political principles keep political actors in check. This, in turn, creates legitimacy. We Americans take legitimacy for granted. Want to know what happens when you forsake legitimacy in favor of petty expedience? You end up like most of the rest of the world. Go ask a vet about how that works out – many of us have spent years in foreign lands full of mass graves cleaning up the bloody detritus of illegitimacy.

That a Supreme Court justice has such a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution’s purpose is alarming. She repeats the phrase “race matters” throughout her 58-page dissent, as if hackneyed clichés worthy of some third-tier MSNBC panelist constitute legal reasoning.

No, race doesn’t matter. That’s the point of our Constitution.

Sotomayor just didn’t like that the Constitution allows people to vote to undo liberal failures, so she simply invented a prohibition on doing so. Under her “constitution,” you are allowed to vote for any policy she and her liberal pals approve of. You can just never vote against one because…well, pretty much just because she says so.

To be charitable, it’s not a particularly coherent legal opinion. One can’t be sure Sotomayor was drinking when she wrote it, but one hopes she was because at least then she’d have an excuse.

Where liberals don’t totally ignore what the Constitution says, they add asterisks, each one qualifying and circumscribing a fundamental right. The right to freely exercise your religion? The right to speak freely? Those are totally, absolutely, completely inalienable!*

*That is, unless we liberals decide you shouldn’t exercise your religion or express yourself in the way you want.

You’ll hear a lot from liberal jurists and their quarter-wit cheerleaders in the pundit and social media worlds about how we have to interpret rights “reasonably.”

No, no, no, no, no.

That is utterly and completely wrong. The whole point of listing a right within our Constitution’s Bill of Rights is that it’s beyond discussion, meaning some bureaucrat cannot infringe upon it because his pea-brain has decided that it makes sense to do so. What’s a “reasonable” exercise of religion or “reasonable” speech? Constitutionally, the question makes no sense. Liberals hate that they can’t “reason” our rights down to a tiny nub that’s too small to interfere with their dreams of power and control.

Rights aren’t a favor the government extends to us in its wise benevolence. Our rights existed in us from the moment of our creation, and they are inalienable. The Bill of Rights is not there to list for us what rights we have been granted. It’s to provide the government with a partial list of our fundamental rights and to warn it to keep its grubby mitts off them.

The only thing worse than seeing things within the Constitution which aren’t there is refusing to see things that manifestly are. Only liberals can look at an amendment reading “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and see blank parchment.

That windy hack John Paul Stevens is back, making the rounds proposing an awesome solution for the “problem” with the Second Amendment. The problem to liberals, of course, is that it ensures that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Stevens’ solution is to amend the Second Amendment to nullify it, and at least his current campaign seeks to change the Constitution the right way – by amendment. Of course, he’s only doing that because his reflexive liberal attempt to impose a “reasonability” test on this fundamental right, and thus transform it from a right into a privilege, failed.

The mainstream media loves the idea of a former Supreme Court justice railing against flyover state rubes presuming to exercise rights without the permission of their liberal urban betters. But having this elderly jurist on television, even while being tossed the softest of softballs, is doing him no favor. It’s painfully clear that Justice Stevens is utterly ignorant of the last two decades of detailed and careful legal scholarship on the Second Amendment’s origins and history. It’s frankly embarrassing to see him on a public platform when he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.

While we can forgive Stevens, we should not be so charitable about those still on the bench who either do not understand, or do not care about, our Constitution. Our Constitution, and the legitimacy it fosters, have created a uniquely just and stable society. Let’s not throw that away just to check off a few items from the progressive bucket list.