I agree that's how the system was designed to work, but how does it work now? In our previous discussion we agreed (I think) that our constitutional rights hung on the thread of five men and women on the Supreme Court. That's surely not what the founders intended.

This is once more the difference between "de jure" and "de facto" - "is" versus "ought". Ever since the New Deal, where FDR amassed tremendous power and distributed it through countless federal agencies, to the point where the federal bureaucracy today has over two million employees, many of whom have more de facto power than our elected officials, we have been ruled by a different system than the one our founders created.