... is how the judicial branch came to wield an absolute and unchallenged power over everything. A single guy somewhere, or later a few guys and gals in the Supreme Court (that are never elected – just established – for life), decide which laws stand and which do not, which in effect means they decide the law.

American legal system is precedent-based, not law-based, which means that the judges are the both the legislative and the executive (no pun intended) aside of judicial. The job of Congress is really not to establish the law, but to provide more of the guidelines for the judges to play with at their will.

Then it comes to it – the elected president and the elected congress has no power in the land whatsoever, a small bunch of established, life-long kings decide everything.

No different than XVIII century Britain, really.

That's hardly the case, and you know it, or would know it if you ever read the Constitution or took a civics class. First, the only area in which the judges reign "supreme" is in the constitutional arena. If a congressionally-passed law is struck down, Congress may simply go rewrite it. More importantly though, we have this fancy constitutional amendment process which can pretty much fix all ills. Don't like abortion? Pass an amendment. Don't like flag burning? Pass an amendment. Don't like child pornography? You get the idea. The court can't do anything about a constitutional amendment, so why do so many of our allegedly outraged leaders take no attempts whatsoever to overturn the awful jurisprudence they complaint of so fervently?