Thomas Sowell Quotes

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Controlling the interpretation of the Constitution is vital to the leftist agenda of expanding the federal government's power. That means keeping the federal judiciary as liberal as possible and treating the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal legacy as sacrosanct.

If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, warned the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions' authors (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively), it will continue to grow - regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power.

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.

My goal was to make New Jersey's state government a model for all other states to emulate, hopefully thereby to stem, or at least slow down, the flow of power to the federal government.

Roosevelt got a chance to name an amazing nine justices of the Supreme Court. He was not namby-pamby on this question. He wanted people who shared his views, he wanted liberals, and he wanted lots of them.

We have seen an outrageous increase in the size, scope, and intrusiveness of the federal government.

The tenth amendment said the federal government is supposed to only have powers that were explicitly given in the Constitution. I think the federal government's gone way beyond that. The Constitution never said that you could have a Federal Reserve that would have $2.8 trillion in assets. We've gotten out of control.

I think the federal government should be doing only what the Constitution says it should be. We don't have authority under the federal Constitution to have a big federal criminal justice system.

What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn't really 'empathy' and 'understanding.' He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice.

Obama believes in a big central government, where the federal government controls everything in our lives. That's socialism.

The nation will be shaped for decades by decisions that are made by President Bush and the Senate about the future of the Supreme Court.

Let the national government be armed with positive and complete authority.

Every amendment which I am convinced will have the tendency to lesson the danger of civil liberty by the central government will receive my sincere approbation.

Conservatives who care about nominations of judges who practice judicial restraint are, constitutionally, restrained people themselves.

Obama and Biden want a bench crammed full of liberal judicial activists, and it's up to the American people to tell them 'no.'

The American people have made clear that they want justices who have proven records of judicial restraint - exactly the kind of justices that Obama and Biden cannot abide.

Beyond diversity, the story of Obama's influence on the courts is more complex. Indeed, it could serve as a metaphor for his Presidency: symbolically rich but substantively hazy. Obama took office after years of intense conservative focus on the courts.

Republicans can nominate bad Justices, too. Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, David Souter... the list goes on.

Through the selection of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Damon Leichty, President Trump has already remade the judiciary, moving our country away from activist judges and toward individuals who will uphold the Constitution.

I've got that hands-on experience with federal judges and how important it is to have judges like Neil Gorsuch, who will take a rule-of-law approach to the decision-making process. I think he's eminently qualified.

For those of us on the front lines fighting Washington's power grabs, Judge Gorsuch's commitment to interpreting the Constitution and the laws as they are actually written is welcome news.

It is by far the safer course to lay [considerations of the future] altogether aside; and to confine our attention wholly to the nature and extent of the powers as they are delineated in the constitution. Everything beyond this, must be left to the prudence and firmness of the people; who, as they will hold the scales in their own hands, it is to be hoped, will always take care to preserve the constitutional equilibrium between the General and State governments.

The powers of the federal government ... result from the compact to which the states are parties, [and are] limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact.

The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.