On Friday, Texas’s new law banning sanctuary cities in the state was slated to take effect. Unfortunately, it’s not going to, because 2017 America isn’t actually a democracy anymore.

The New York Times reports that US District Court Judge Orlando Garcia for the Western District of Texas issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the measure from being enforced.

The law, known as Senate Bill 4 or S.B. 4, prohibits cities and counties from adopting policies that limit immigration enforcement, allows police officers to question the immigration status of anyone they detain or arrest and threatens officials who violate the law with fines, jail time and removal from office. It also directs local officials to cooperate with so-called immigration detainer requests, which allow foreign-born detainees to be transferred to federal custody after they are released from state or local custody. A number of the state’s biggest cities, including Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas, all of which are run by Democrats, joined a lawsuit against Texas seeking to strike down the law, which was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in May.

Texas’s Democrat cities already had their say over sanctuary cities: they got to vote on whether to elect Abbott and pick representatives to send to the state legislature. They lost the governorship and their lawmakers are outnumbered.

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In a constitutional republic, that’s the end for now. Supporters of sanctuary cities’ next lawful recourse (well, as lawful as overt defiance of federal law can be) is to replace Abbott and his legislative allies in the next election.

The courts are supposed to be for undoing actual violations of the law (which mandating that laws be enforced obviously is not). They are not Democrats’ personal vehicle for disenfranchising their political enemies and undoing political results they don’t like.

Or at least, they’re not supposed to be. In practice, though, that’s exactly what they’ve become. The United States is no longer governed by three coequal branches that limit one another’s excesses, but an oligarchy where small, robed groups, usually installed for life and accountable to nobody, get to impose their will on the rest of us.

The good news is, the Founders gave the elected branches of government ample tools with which to rein in judicial tyrants. The bad news is, it’s been ages since Republicans have had the willpower to use them.