David Wilkerson Quotes

The dramatic thing about this quotation is that in public, the mantra of conservatives about the courts of America is that they make and change laws as opposed to just interpreting and clarifying the laws. They traditionally accuse judges who rule against their favorite positions as using the courts as an instrument of political and social change. Here a leading conservative federal jurist, who thereafter became a member of the Supreme Court, was acknowledging and advocating the courts as instruments for conservative social, economic, and political change.

They were setting of the first government of the United States according to the new Constitution.

Senator Grimes thought that Andrew Johnson was a terrible President, but when the House of Representatives impeached President Johnson and he was tried before the Senate, Grimes voted for acquittal. His reason for the his vote was he thought that the Constitution did not provide for the removal if a President just because he has “Unacceptable.” Johnson survived removal from office by a single vote and had Grimes not been so principled about the Constitution, Johnson would have been removed from office. On the other hand, Johnson was a terrible President and many of the nations racial problems in later years emanated from his actions and inactions while in office.

Nixon was the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee running with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The original proposal made treason and bribery the only grounds for Presidential impeachment. Mason and others argued to broaden the grounds and finally they agreed on “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In the early 1900's there were major labor disputes between Colorado miners and the mine owners (the Colorado Mining Wars). Colorado Governor James H. Peabody ordered in a thousand troops under the command of Bell. Replying to the charge that his treatment of the miners was unconstitutional:

The Roosevelt administration had stemmed the tide of Hoover’s Great Depression but the nation had not yet recovered. The New Deal measures, most of which would be considered fundamental to good government 50 years later was being constantly thwarted by a Supreme Court with a strong arch conservative majority headed by James McReynolds, a virulent, overt, anti-Semitic racist, who hated FDR—see {616652} and {585241}. The situation was to many like that which existed before the Civil War when the Court rendered the Dred Scott decision that so harmed the nation. Frankfurter, not then a Supreme Court Justice, urged Roosevelt to do something lest the American Public lose all respect for the Court and our Constitutional system and have the nation harmed by not allowing reforms like child labor laws to go through. The court actually ruled by a narrow majority that the government could not pass laws making it illegal for 11 year old children to work in coal mines or factories. FDR attempted to add more justices turning the majority into a majority—“packing the Supreme Court”, but that politically backfired. Some of the reforms never went through while others needed Constitutional Amendments like the end to Prohibition.

Debs had unconstitutionally been arrested and jailed for opposing American entry into World War I. He was later pardoned by President Warren G. Harding.

This was an insult to the George W. Bush administration which had stretched the Constitution more so than any previous administration, had asserted Presidential powers that had never been asserted before and had had several of its more controversial policies and practices overturned by the Supreme Court.

The “compromise” admitted Misouri to the Union with the right to have slavery and Maine with the right to abolish slavery. The slave states had taken the position that states really had no right to abolish slavery at all, but they compromised on Maine. Many in the non slave states insisted on the aboloution of slavery everywhere, but compromised on Missouri. Luisa Adams, an implacable opponent of slavery on moral and religious grounds, condemned the compromise as politically expedient but morally bankrupt. She saw attempted compromise on the slavery issue as leading to disaster—current and future murder and degradation of human beings and postponing the issue until it would be out of hand.