That’s the title of an interesting house editorial in today’s Washington Times that finds (and details the evidence of) a very disturbing theme in Elena Kagan’s paper trail:

Government is portrayed as the depository for, and granter of, rights, privileges and even prosperity. Judges, in turn, are positioned as the government’s conscience. The citizenry is little better than a crowd of supplicants. Rather than meting out power in small doses to the government while retaining rights antecedent to any government, the people are put in the position of asking government, through judges, to tell them what rights they do or do not have.
From this ideological perspective, the rights and the power both flow from the government to the people, rather than vice versa. Such appears to be Ms. Kagan’s viewpoint. It is a viewpoint neither shared by most of the public nor supported by American tradition.