Thoughts on Judicial Power

(quoted in Courting Disaster by Pat Robertson, 2004)

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“It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression . . . that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary . . . working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.”

Thomas Jefferson

"The history of liberty is a history of limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the process of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties."

Woodrow Wilson (1912)

“The judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

Alexander Hamilton (Federalist 78)

“I advocate impeaching judges who consistently ignore their constitutional role, violate their oath of office and breach the separation of powers. The Framers provided the tool of impeachment to keep the power of the judiciary in check. It is a tool Congress should explore using.”

Representative Tom DeLay of Texas (1997)

“One of the reasons judicial activists get away with ignoring the law and imposing their own pet notions instead is that much of the mainstream media treat the actions of judges as automatically legitimate and all criticism of them as undermining the rule of law. . . . time is long overdue to stop regarding judges as little tin gods who can do no wrong. An independent judiciary does not mean a judiciary independent of the law. If it does, then we can forget about being a free and democratic nation. We are just the serfs of whoever happens to be on the bench.”

Columnist Thomas Sowell (2000)

“During the past several decades an aggressively secular liberalism often driven by an expansive egalitarian impulse has threatened many of the traditional political and social values the great majority of the American people still embrace. The strong gusts of ideology have indeed threatened to blow out the moral lights around us. This has been the result of our knocking down certain institutional barriers to national political power-in particular, the abandonment of an appreciation for the necessity of the separation of powers, and for the continuing political importance of federalism.”

Former Attorney General Ed Meese (1987)

“The notion of judicial supremacy, that the court has the final say on the meaning of the law and Constitution, is nowhere to be found in the thoughts of the Framers or the text of the Founding document. It is a power the courts have arrogated to themselves over time with little resistance from the legislative or executive branches of government. Federalist 78 by Alexander Hamilton contains not so much as a hint that the courts constitute the supreme branch of government or that judicial rulings irrevocably settle issues in dispute. Such a notion of unaccountable, unanswerable, unfettered judicial power does violence to the whole notion of separated powers.”

Richard Lessner in The Washington Times (2003)