What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
While the president is to nominate that individual [to Supreme Court], we in the Senate must provide our advice and consent. This function is not well-defined. The Constitution does not set down a road map. It does not require hearings. In fact, it does not even require questioning on your understanding of the Constitution nor the role of the Supreme Court.
Americans revere both the Constitution and an independent Court that applies the document's provisions. The Court has done many excellent things in our history, and few people are willing to see its power broken. The difficulty with all proposals to respond to the Court when it behaves unconstitutionally is that they would create a power to destroy the Court's essential work as well.
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
At issue here is a basic law which enables the Supreme Court to quash laws in extreme cases. Up until now, this right of the Supreme Court was not mentioned anywhere, but was just taken. At the same time, we want to enable the Knesset to overrule decisions of the Supreme Court.
Sometimes local, state and federal laws so clearly run afoul of the Constitution that the court must step in and strike them down. In most cases, the court performs this admirably and with great restraint.
We want a Supreme Court which will do justice under the Constitution - not over it. In our courts we want a government of laws and not of men.
The Frist fairness rule guarantees up-or-down votes for every circuit court or Supreme Court nomination, regardless of which party controls the Senate or the White House.
What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?
I've learned that the Court will continue to change the meaning of the Constitution. Although all of the Justices have expressed the importance of judicial restraint, the Court inevitably makes new law every time it interprets the Constitution.
All those lessons that I've learned on the court, I have applied them to my life outside of the court in business, my company, called V Starr interiors, an interior design company, and EleVen, which I wear on court.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
My parents and my older brother played. You kind of want to do what your family does. They were on the court. I'm like, 'I want to be on the court, too.'
But the Supreme Court does not make sweeping changes in constitutional law by accident, or by its own design. Rather, the Court is limited to deciding the cases that the parties ask the Court to decide.
A constitution, therefore, is to a government what the laws made afterwards by that government are to a court of judicature. The court of judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution.
Class warfare always sounds good. Taking action against the rich and the powerful and making 'em pay for what they do, it always sounds good. But that's not the job of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court standing on the side of the American people? The Supreme Court adjudicates the law. The Supreme Court determines the constitutionality of things and other things. The Supreme Court's gotten way out of focus, in my opinion.
I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.