a federal judiciary comes after the articles that conceived the presidency and the Congress.

Santorum’s assessment is simply wrong; the judiciary is a coequal branch of the federal government, along with the executive and legislative branches. To suggest otherwise is absurd, and dangerous. With his rejection of the founding vision of a separation of powers, and of the view that such a separation is needed to defend against tyranny, the former senator is rewriting history to suit his ideological and political purposes.

Santorum’s disregard for the the system of checks and balances is so sweeping that he suggests that the Congress has the power to shut down courts with which a majority disagrees. In particular, Santorum proposes to abolish the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which hasSantorum.

He is not a “constitutional conservative.” And he is certainly not a proponent of the principle, advanced by the founders, that the United States should be governed by the rule of law, not the rule of men. Quite the opposite. For Santorum, it is the rule of men—particularly right-wing evangelical men—that supersedes the rule of law as outlined in the Constitution.

That Constitution has been assaulted all too frequently in recent years by Republican and Democratic presidents. But the battering it would take from Santorum, whose candidacy has been built on a promise to radically rewrite and even more radically reinterpret the document, would be unprecedented,