John Cornyn Quotes

Stability in law - particularly constitutional law - is critically important; the Supreme Court would do well to remember that.

Laws, especially those of a constitutional nature like the Basic Law, which have been formulated through reasonable legislative processes, should never be freely interpreted or lightly abandoned.

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

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time and another some subsequent time when the circumstances may have changed…. the meaning of the Constitution is fixed when it is adopted.

As Alexander Hamilton said in 'The Federalist Papers,' law is about the exercise of judgment and not will. Judicial activism is best understood as substituting judicial opinion for the command of law. The law is not an infinitely malleable tool.

What many people, I think, don't really understand is how much their rights really turn on the interpretation of the Supreme Court.

Now whatever you think of the liberal agenda on its merits, until very recently nobody thought the Constitution meant what liberals now say it means.

As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to 'do what the people want,' instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

When did it become the law of the land that the Supreme Court has the final say on anything? They cannot have the final say on anything. The American people have the final say on anything.

There is a difference between constitutional government and judicial dictatorship, and I think it's time we remembered that our Constitution was not put together in order to establish the sovereignty of the judges, it was framed in order to guarantee the sovereignty of the people.

A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.

Supreme Court nominees should know without any doubt that their job is not to impose their own personal opinions of what is right and wrong, but to say what the law is, rather than what they personally think the law ought to be.

This is the difference between conservatives and liberals. Liberals want justices to vote a certain way. We, conservatives, want a particular legal philosophy, a philosophy for how to interpret the Constitution.

I respect, too, the fact that in our legal order it is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws. It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people's representatives.

A written constitution guides and directs the application of law in a way utterly unlike oral guidance. It reminds us that the certainty and consistency of legal application is essential.

Courts do not make the law.

Democracy demands that judges confine themselves to a narrow sphere of influence - that is why the late Alexander Bickel called the judiciary the 'Least Dangerous Branch.' In a world governed by a proper conception of their role, judges don't play at being legislators - they leave that job to our elected representatives.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

I believe Judge Kavanaugh will be a justice whose adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law will be a credit to the Court and all Americans.

In the legislative branch, you make the laws... and our role as judges is to interpret the law, not to inject our own policy preferences. So our task is to give an honest construction to what laws are passed by the Legislature.

As a general rule, I do not think judges should consider current societal preferences when ruling on constitutional challenges.

Judges should always behave judicially by adjudicating, never politically by legislating. I leave policy to policymakers. They're preeminent, but they're not omnipotent. In other words, lawmakers decide if laws pass, but judges decide if laws pass muster.