WASHINGTON, DC - Massachusetts Senator and presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry attracted a lot of heat a few weeks ago for saying that the United States needed "regime change" as much as Iraq. Did Kerry really mean that the U.S. Constitution and way of life were defective and required wholesale change, as the term "regime change" is meant when used properly by political scientists? Of course not; he was only trying to be humorous, as he explained later to knee-slapping reporters.

Everyone in public life blunders now and then, but the Kerry comment received disproportionate attention, especially when compared to a much more troublesome remark he made some weeks before that received almost no attention. Kerry said that he would appoint only pro-choice judges to the federal courts (fine-that's his prerogative if he wins the White House), but that this didn't constitute a "litmus test" for judicial appointments because abortion is settled law, and therefore it was his responsibility to appoint only judges who will uphold existing law.

Try this thought experiment: What would the reaction have been if President Truman, or President Eisenhower, had said that they would only appoint segregationists to the federal courts because, after all, segregation was settled law for more than 50 years now under the Supreme Court's Plessy decision, and judges should be bound to follow precedent? That wouldn't do, would it?

Never mind abortion. The trouble here is the deepening confusion about the ownership of the Constitution, and the acquiescence in the corrosive idea that its explication belongs solely to the judiciary. Kerry is not alone in this confusion; President Bush subscribed to it also in deciding to sign the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill even though he believed it to be unconstitutional. The centerpiece of the president's oath of office is defending the Constitution, and he has just as much right, and duty, as the judiciary to resist encroachments on the Constitution.

Lincoln understood that the Constitution belongs to all three branches of the government. In his early months in office Lincoln ordered the State Department to issue a passport to a free black in Massachusetts, and the Patent Office to issue a patent to another free black, after both had been denied on the grounds that the Supreme Court's Dred Scott case said neither man had any rights the government was bound to respect. Lincoln said his branch of government simply would not apply the principle of that odious case to other circumstances, and thereby struck a blow for co-ownership of the right to define the meaning of the Constitution.

Whether the issue is abortion, property rights, free speech, or religious liberty, it is an abdication of democratic responsibility to think that only the judiciary has the right to settle these issues. As Lincoln memorably put it in his first inaugural address in 1861, "the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." Would that these words were recalled in the next presidential inaugural.