I really don't think the public would oppose the Supreme Court if it refused to acknowledge legislation which shut it out entirely.
The good freedom loving folk of Iraq allowed Saddam to govern. I agree that the good freedom loving folk of the U.S. will probably continue to allow SCOTUS to dictate.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. - James Madison
Justice Curtis's warning is as timely today as it was 135 years ago:
"[W]hen a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean." Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393, 621 (1857) (Curtis, J., dissenting).
The Imperial Judiciary lives. It is instructive to compare this Nietzschean vision of us unelected, life tenured judges--leading a Volk who will be "tested by following," and whose very "belief in themselves" is mystically bound up in their "understanding" of a Court that "speak[s] before all others for their constitutional ideals"--with the somewhat more modest role envisioned for these lawyers by the Founders.
"The judiciary . . . has . . . no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither Force nor Will but merely judgment . . . ." The Federalist No. 78, pp. 393-394 (G. Wills ed. 1982).
Or, again, to compare this ecstasy of a Supreme Court in which there is, especially on controversial matters, no shadow of change or hint of alteration ("There is a limit to the amount of error that can plausibly be imputed to prior courts," ante, at 24), with the more democratic views of a more humble man:
"[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." A. Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (Mar. 4, 1861), reprinted in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, S. Doc. No. 101-10, p. 139 (1989).
One thing that I think needs to happen is to form a balance between having a court which can make decisions with neither regard for earlier precedent nor regard for the precedent the decision will make, and a court which is so bound by the concept of precedent that either it cannot deal with exceptional cases or else it gets "stuck" by them.
At minimum, the court needs to be able to make explicit in a decision that the facts of the extant case make it unique, and thus it should not be used for guidance in how to decide more general cases.
Further, I would like to see the Court be able to issue a decision in such a way as to explicitly create "anti-precedent". For example, if the court found that a statute as worded forbade an activity but also found that a reasonable person reading the statute might well conclude otherwise, I would like for the Court to issue a ruling which would forbid prosecution under the state's reading of the statute of any action performed before the second business day following the Court's ruling, but would allow prosecution for actions performed after that time.
To be sure, if there were nothing to discourage a court from doing that on every case, a court could decide cases at whim without rhyme or reason creating a judicial tyranny at least as bad as what exists now. But if it could be made clear that decisions claiming "exceptional facts" were to be regarded as inferior to decisions which did not claim such, except when such claim was in fact materially necessary, such things might be kept in check.