Judicial Overreach Quotes

The federal judiciary is an irresponsible body … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction ...

The fact that the judiciary makes foolish rulings doesn’t mean the government should intervene.

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special movements into the jaws of that which feeds them.

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

Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.

In general, liberals fear conservative judges far too much. In almost all areas, in fact, they dramatically overstate the stakes.

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

'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.

Politically motivated lawsuits and prosecutions cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

a vile law system, calculated for expense and with a design to draw by degrees all law business into the Federal Courts. The Constitution is meant to swallow all the State Constitutions by degrees.

With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them - with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the 'reasoned judgment' of a bare majority of this Court - we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.

Formalist judges needlessly complexity the law in part to avoid the struggle to understand the complex real-world environment that generates much of the business of the modern court.

The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.

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.

It equally proves, that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive. For I agree, that "there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers." And it proves, in the last place, that as liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments…

The perception of the Supreme Court as a political court in most constitutional cases and many nonconstitutional ones derives from the fact that the justices form confident views without any empirical basis for them.

Trump's appointed extremist judges to the federal bench, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose decisions demonstrate a judicial philosophy far more concerned with the rights of corporations than marginalized Americans.

The court stands less than tall when it defers hearing a case for political reasons.

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.

I think I present an overwhelming case that these five justices were up to no good, and they deliberately set out to hand the election to George Bush.

It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.

The overreach of the judiciary can be attributed to, one, the inability of the executive to deliver; and two, the tendency to issue judicial pronouncements for national good. The second element is dangerous because that's the function of the government.

If judges were just secret legislators, declaring not what the law is but what they would like it to be, the very idea of a government by the people and for the people would be at risk. And those who came to court would live in fear, never sure exactly what governs them except the judge’s will. As Alexander Hamilton explained, "liberty can have nothing to fear from” judges who apply the law, but liberty "ha[s] every thing to fear" if judges try to legislate too.

I believe in the separation of powers. If a judge crosses the line between interpreting and making the law, he has crossed the line supporting his legitimate authority from the legislative branch's authority. Now, to me that's a very serious matter if we believe, as America's founders, did that the separation of powers - not just in theory or in textbook but in practice in the actual functioning of government - is the linchpin of limited government and liberty.

The appelate jurisdiction of the Supreme Federal Court, includes an unwarrantable stretch of power over the liberty, life, and property of the subject, through the wide Continent of America.