John Ashcroft Quotes

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

What I reject, out of hand, is the idea that by 5 to 4 Supreme Court judges can rewrite the Constitution, but it takes two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the States to equal 5 judges.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

The [Supreme] Court is no longer primarily a legal institution but rather a political and cultural power.

This [nullification] is a normal and traditional American method of circumventing the inflexibility of the Constitution. When the Constitution has come into conflict with the living needs of the nation, and when amendment was impossible, the method of changing the Constitution has been to change it and then get the very human Supreme Court to sanction it.

The Supreme Court does not get very reckless very often.

There's no such thing as judicial supremacy.

Conservative Justices have a history of not standing by their professed commitment to judicial restraint.

Many voters think about the makeup of the Supreme Court when they are choosing a president. The justices deal not only with constitutional issues but also with social issues that were unknown to the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago.

Judges wear legal professionalism and precedent as a mantel that secures legitimacy for their decisions. It's how they distinguish themselves from politicians or administrative agencies, while wielding power that is sometimes much greater than those democratically accountable actors.

Most high courts in other nations do not have discretion, such as we enjoy, in selecting the cases that the high court reviews. Our court is virtually alone in the amount of discretion it has.

What five members of the Supreme Court say the law is may be something vastly different from what Congress intended the law to be.

A chief justice's authority is really quite limited, and the dynamic among all the justices is going to affect whether he can accomplish much or not. There is this convention of referring to the Taney Court, the Marshall Court, the Fuller Court, but a chief justice has the same vote that everyone else has.

The Supreme Court has a very light backlog. They leave a lot of splits among the circuits, a lot of uncertainty. And I think they ought to work a lot harder.

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

So the danger of conservative judicial activism has been averted for another year. Stay tuned.

In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside. The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body…. Judges who will bring to the Courts a present-day sense of the Constitution - Judges who will retain in the Courts the judicial functions of a court, and reject the legislative powers which the courts have today assumed.

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

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.

The Constitution is ... power. That is why we see political struggle over the selection of judges who will wield that power.

Our Federal judicial rulings have come to reek with the snap judgments of New Dealers.... The Supreme Court of the United States as assumed quasi-legislative authority.

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?

The key to the [Supreme] court's critical constitutional role lies in the mystery of its future actions.

If the people desire changes in the highest judicial tribunal in the land, the people can speak with their power to amend their own Constitution.

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