Dahlia Lithwick Quotes

Why is it that some people, you know, think we should obey the Constitution sometimes and not other times.

I believe at its core we have a Constitution, as our Supreme Court's first great justice, Marshall, said in 1819, and I quote, "intended to endure for the ages to come and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs."

Power's not what the Constitution was about.

The Supreme Court today is plagued by a vision of the Constitution which is cramped and narrow.

It is wrong to say that the Constitution will change with the times. It will be, illuminated by the times.

Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness.

When the Chief Justice read me the oath and came to the words ‘support the Constitution of the United States’ I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.”.

When you start messing with the Constitution and what this country was founded on - our baseline is what we call it - it just opens up too many doors.

When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone’s graffiti.

Saying the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution.

We say, that the Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God.

That very document [Constitution] does little to serve people when Supreme Court decisions are written so that even high-priced lawyers can't figure them out.

The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.

The Constitution is a living, breathing document that can speak to you and nobody else.

Allowing a non-lawyer to be on the Supreme Court strikes me as a very American thing, in a good way. Another is that the speaker of the house doesn't have to be a member of congress. He or she can be anyone. I'm not sure if James Madison really intended that, or if the wording was accidentally imprecise, but the Constitution, as a recall, simply says that the House shall chuse a speaker.

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

Liberals see the Constitution itself as 'living' and 'evolving' that is, gradually turning into something that would have been unrecognizable to its authors.

The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief greatness.

The Supreme Court is about the Constitution. It is about constitutionality. It is about the law. At its bear simplest, it's about the law. It is not about the Democrat Party agenda. Because that's what it's become. The whole judiciary has become that because that's the kind of people they have put on various courts as judges, and every liberal justice on the Supreme Court is a social justice warrior first and a judge of the law second. And if they get one more, then they will have effectively corrupted the Supreme Court.

It is a Constitution that morphs while you look at it like Plasticman.... That is contrary to our whole tradition, to in God we trust on the coins, to Thanksgiving proclamations, to (Congressional) chaplains, to tax exemption for places of worship, which has always existed in America.

I can find no warrant for such appropriation in the Constitution.

I would appoint judges that interpreted the Constitution rather than invented it, understood the difference between being a judge and being a legislator.

Virginia States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not those seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. The time is long past — if indeed it ever existed — when we should permit the noble concept of states' rights to be betrayed.

The conscience of this nation is the Constitution.

The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.