Mike DeWine Quotes

Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.

There's no such thing as judicial supremacy.

We have a problem with judicial activism in this country.

When justices seize authority from the other branches of the federal government, as well as state and local governments, under the rubric of judicial review, that’s tyranny.

The court's recent decisions have made life more difficult for the democratic institutions that perform the day- to-day work of our nation.

When a judge goes beyond [his proper function] and reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the process of democracy.

The Supreme Court is not elected, and it is therefore not a proper arbiter of social policy.

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.

The (Supreme) Court has shown in the past that the Constitution can also be twisted to frustrate the needs of democracy

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.

Save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.

Judicial activism must be lessened, and the judiciary should do its work and let politicians work.

When it comes to our Constitution, judges perform, certainly, an important role. But the people, acting through their elected representatives, should play an even more important role.

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.... There should be, therefore, great resistance to ... redefining the category of rights deemed to be fundamental. Otherwise, the Judiciary necessarily takes to itself further authority to govern the country without express constitutional authority.

When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom; we have surrendered its only real meaning, and we will not be free again until we get it back.

[T]he opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their, own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.

Without the basis in written law, and without the basis in our Constitution ratified by the people, judges can't make laws. And if we accept the notion that their dictates are law, then we have not only submitted to tyranny, we have abandoned a republican form of government.

This country is always changing. But my point about the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court didn't wait for the country to change. Five unelected lawyers overruled 320 million Americans.

The Court’s jurisprudence is focused more than anything else on who under the Constitution gets to decide policy, not what that policy should be. This is the main reason Democrats and the press corps are furious about the Court’s decisions. For decades they have counted on a majority of Justices to deliver or bless the policy results they want: on abortion, voting rights, healthcare, racial preferences, climate and economic regulation. You name it, the Court found ways to deliver it with balancing tests, trimester analysis, and the discovery of unenumerated rights between the lines of the Constitution’s text. For decades conservative critics have argued that the role of the Court should be different—supporting rights that are actually in the Constitution, but otherwise enforcing the separation of powers so each branch of government stays in its lane as defined by the Founders. With the arrival of three new Justices nominated by Donald Trump and shepherded to confirmation by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, that Court has arrived.

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

Certain characteristics about 'Marbury v. Madison' are, I think, indisputable. Marbury was the first Supreme Court decision ever to strike down an act of Congress as unconstitutional. Marbury stands for the authority of the Supreme Court to have and to exercise that power.

When a judge assumes the power to decide which distinctions made in a statute are legitimate and which are not, he assumes the power to disapprove of any and all legislation, because all legislation makes distinctions.

What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.

Judicial review has been a part of our democracy in this constitutional government for over 200 years.

There are some in black robes sitting on federal benches all across this country. They're Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and even conservatives that pervert the Constitution.