Ramesh Ponnuru reminds National Review Online readers that a U.S. Supreme Court decision does not end potential debate about the meaning of provisions within the U.S. Constitution.

A pro-choice voter in New Hampshire had a question for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who was making the rounds as a presidential candidate: Would he “respect” Roe v. Wade even though he is a pro-lifer? Kasich answered, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Whether he knew it or not, Kasich had wandered into a debate over the courts, one in which some of the other presidential candidates are also participants. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has denounced “judicial tyranny.” When five justices ruled that the Constitution requires governments to recognize same-sex marriage, he scoffed that the Supreme Court was not “the Supreme Being.”

It’s an often-heated debate. Huckabee’s side says that the courts have established a “judicial supremacy” at odds with the actual constitutional design; the other side says that people like Huckabee are threatening the rule of law. Both sides have some reasonable points, and both could profit from conducting the debate at a lower level of abstraction.

Huckabee’s side of the argument is of course the weaker one in our political culture. Think of how often people say, without realizing they are making a controversial claim, that abortion is “a constitutional right” or that laws against it are “unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court has ruled to that effect; our shorthand treats its rulings as either correct by definition or authoritative in such a strong sense that we should describe them as though they were. “The Constitution is what the judges say it is,” as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said before he was on the Court.

The case against this way of thinking holds that judicial supremacy is incompatible with constitutional supremacy. The courts can get the Constitution wrong; if they could not, there would be no point to justices’ trying to get it right by reasoning about the Constitution. Judicial review, though not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, can be inferred from it: In cases where the courts have to decide whether to apply the Constitution or a statute that conflicts with it, the higher law has to take precedence. The case against judicial supremacy rests on a similar inference: In cases where a judicial interpretation of the Constitution is at odds with the actual document, it is the latter that deserves the allegiance of citizens and officeholders. Kasich is therefore wrong: The Constitution is “the law of the land,” not Roe. (You can look it up in the Constitution’s sixth article.)