Professionals and practitioners of the legal arts are members of a guild who have fashioned their own vocabulary and adopted their own folkways. They have even adopted their own eschatology. And the more they can obscure their doings the more they get to play God.
This is the battle the originalists are waging against the God players on the court. Scalia says there is a higher authority, a higher secular authority, which is the United States Constitution. His adversaries on the court, the God players, regard the Constitution as an impediment, an obstacle, to their ability to do good. So, Laws in Connecticut against contraception are absurd and it is an intolerable remnant of the dark age to criminally prosecute anyone for practicing safe sex. When the urge to do good becomes strong enough, they cast about for competing authority to justify their predelictions. Today there are flirting with international law. Yesterday they examined penumbras. But every day they are intellectually dishonest because they are working backwards from their own prejudice.
Like any Pharisee, a Supreme Court justice is wonderfully skilled at masking what he does. He resorts to all of the mind games conveniently provided to him by The Frankfurt School which in effect writes political correctness into the Constitution as a new and super amendment. Not the least of these tools available to a God playing jurist is resort to stare decisis which, after 200 years with accretion after accretion and subtle amendment after subtle amendment, distorts the document 180° away from its original intent, as you suggested. Properly used, stare decisis is a legitimate tool to seek out and preserve the purpose of the Constitution. But when it is perverted to justify the opposite, it becomes an effective weapon in the hands of a God player like Justice Ginsburg.
I see Supreme Court Justices who impose statism on us to be only less plain spoken exemplars of the same art practiced against us by leftist politicians.
