" Frankfurter worried that assigning to the Supreme Court the job of protecting liberal rights would relieve the public of the responsibility to protect basic rights on its own, through influencing the legislature. If the courts should become the institution charged with protecting rights, he feared, the public would cease to care about protecting rights itself. Legislators might enact laws that they knew to be unconstitutional, passing the buck to the courts in the expectation they would strike those laws down. What was more, the courts might eventually lose their legitimacy, since they would be seen as acting against the public, not in fulfillment of its most deeply held values. The right thing to do, therefore, under our basic constitutional structure, was to rely on the democratic polity to preserve rights, not for the courts to intervene. "

― Noah Feldman , Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices