Dana Loesch Quotes

You want to know what judicial activism is? Judicial activism is judges imposing their policy preferences on the words of the Constitution.

Do judges follow the Constitution? Well, Yes and No. They follow the Constitution as they understand it.

The [Supreme] Court did not interpret the Constitution—the court amended it.

The real difficulty is not with the Constitution but with the judges who interpret it.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

Over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States.

If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.

My feeling is that the judge has a responsibility to the Constitution first, precedent second. Precedent is one factor. It is not the only factor. If it was the only factor, then, you know, we wouldn't have had Roe vs. Wade. We wouldn't have had Griswold. We wouldn't have had Lawrence. We wouldn't have had all these cases which the Left love.

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our property and our liberty and our property under the Constitution.

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.

If the Constitution, as interpreted by the Court, prevents the proper solution of our social and economic problems, should we do something to the Constitution to meet the difficulty, or should we do something to the Supreme Court?

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

When we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution ... we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in what was said a hundred years ago.

The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

If Americans loved judicial activism, liberals wouldn't be lying about what it is. Judicial activism means making up constitutional rights in order to strike down laws the justices don't like based on their personal preferences. It's not judicial activism to strike down laws because they violate the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence...is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people.

I am sworn to uphold the Constitution as Andy Johnson understands it and interprets it.

We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.

I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.

I'm looking for a Justice who appreciates the awesome responsibility that she will be given, if confirmed. A Justice who understands the gravity of the office and who respects the very different roles that the Constitution provides for each of the three branches of government.

I do accept that, with - with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn't exist at the time.

FDR's justices were allies while he was alive, but after he died, they developed four totally different theories of what the Constitution is, two of which are considered conservative and two of which are considered liberal.

Unfortunately, people are re-interpreting the Constitution as a living document, and it's not. It's a solid-based document and it shouldn't be played with.