Kids learn that there are three branches of government that have checks and balances on each other. But adults can be forgetful. Here’s a reminder.

After Iowa’s Supreme Court ruled that the will of unelected judges means more than the will of the people regarding marriage, Polk County Attorney John Sarcone is quoted saying:  “Our Supreme Court has decided it, and they make the decision as to what the law is, and we follow Supreme Court decisions.”

Yes, he must follow the decision. But no, the final decision does not rest with the court. Not in a democracy.

The U.S. Supreme Court is only one of three branches of government and is not the sole interpreter of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States was founded on a system of checks and balances that gave three branches of government — the executive, the legislative and the judicial — equal footing in the project of governing the nation according to the Constitution. All three branches swear to uphold the Constitution, and all three are empowered to make decisions about what is and what isn’t constitutional.

The beauty of this system is that when one branch begins to read strange and unintended meanings into the Constitution another branch stops it.

The danger of the system: If the legislative and executive branches throw up their hands and say that it’s up to the judiciary to decide what is and isn’t constitutional, then a panel of unelected judges becomes the real highest power in the land. Then we are no longer a nation ruled by laws, but a nation ruled by men.

Our freedoms remain to the extent executives and legislators and judges in times past have not let their powers be trampled on.

It’s a good thing not everyone took Sarcone’s attitude to the Dred Scott decision.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t. As a congressman, he introduced legislation declaring that the Constitution didn’t at all intend to give the slave Dred Scott the treatment he got from the court in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

But the spirit of Lincoln isn’t relegated to Congress’ past. In 1966’s Katzenbach v. Morgan (involving English literacy tests for voters) and 1986’s Goldman v. Weinberger (involving wearing yarmulkes on Air Force duty), lawmakers challenged erroneous Supreme Court decisions and won.

It is high time for our legislators do what legislators of old did when faced with those other issues.

When legislators try to step on its turf, the judiciary should push back. When the court tries to legislate, legislators should push back. They should make and remake the laws that so many of their constituents want and pass those laws again and again, if necessary. That’s how the system works.

Otherwise the system is unchecked — and unbalanced.