Excerpts:

“On February 7, 2006, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a former top lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, gave a speech in which she strenuously supported the Court’s use of foreign law in its proceedings. She denounced efforts to pass congressional resolutions that would prohibit federal courts from engaging in such unconstitutional behavior (unconstitutional because judges are limited to applying U.S. law to most cases and controversies before them).”

“I and other originalists argue for a federal government with limited authority, as compelled by the Constitution - and that includes a limited, defined role for the judiciary. And most Americans who read the Constitution for themselves agree.  The public is fed up with judges who use their office to exercise power they don’t have and who look outside the Constitution to foreign laws and courts for guidance. Under our republican form of government, the people, through their representatives, determine our laws, not judges. Yet Ginsburg, like O’Connor, is blinded by her arrogance and self-righteousness and cannot recognize this plain fact.”

“Most liberal politicians applaud judicial activism, because judges unencumbered by constitutional limitations use their activism to impose a liberal agenda on society, saving liberals the trouble of winning elections.”

“Liberal apologists for this kind of judicial tyranny glibly protest that but for the activist Supreme Court we would still be living in the dark ages on issues from slavery to civil rights. but it was the Court that upheld slavery and segregation, setting back race relations in America for more than a century. Every time the Court arrogates power that was properly left to the other branches, it chips away at our constitutional foundation.”

“The biggest myth about judges is that they’re somehow imbued with greater insight, wisdom, and vision than the rest of us; that for some reason God Almighty has endowed them with superior judgment about justice and fairness. But the truth is that judges are men and women with human imperfections and frailties. Some have been brilliant, principled and moral. Others have been mentally impaired, venal, and even racist.”

“Barely one hundred justices have served on the United States Supreme Court. They’re unelected, they’re virtually unaccountable, they’re largely unknown to most Americans, and they serve for life.  They work in a cloistered setting hidden from public view. Yet in many ways the justices are more powerful than members of Congress and the president.”

“The Supreme Court today is involved in nearly every aspect of modern life, regularly vetoing the decisions of elected federal and state authorities. As few as five justices can and do dictate economic, cultural, criminal, and security policy for the entire nation.”

“Were our forefathers to view the American federal government of the twenty-first century, I believe they’d be appalled. Activist judges have taken over school systems, prisons, private-sector hiring and firing practices, and farm quotas; they have ordered local governments to raise property taxes and states to grant benefits to illegal immigrants, they have expelled God, prayer, and the Ten Commandments from the public square; they’ve endorsed severe limits on political speech. and they’ve protected virtual child pornography, racial discrimination in law school admissions, flag burning, the seizure of private property without just compensation, and partial-birth abortion. They’ve announced that morality alone is an insufficient basis for legislation.”

“The Supreme Court in particular now sits in final judgment of essentially all policy issues, disregarding its constitutional limitations, the legitimate roles of Congress and the president, and the broad authority conferred upon the states and the people.  The Court has broken through the firewalls constructed by the framers to limit federal and, especially, judicial power.”

“In essence, activist judges make, rather than interpret, the law. They substitute their will for the judgment of deliberative bodies.”

“Jefferson’s concern about judicial power grew stronger as he passed into old age. From Monticello, in 1820, the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote to William C. Jarvis:

‘To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps...and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign with themselves.’”

“But neither Madison nor Jefferson, the framers most secular in outlook, were hostile to religion. It was widely believed at the nation’s founding that faith was a necessary predicate to liberty. As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, human beings have certain unalienable rights endowed by God. Rights are not conferred on us by a monarch or the state. Without faith, he later wrote, liberty was vulnerable. “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not violated but with his wrath?”

“Furthermore, Madison wrote near the end of his life that belief in God was ‘essential to the moral order of the world.’ Opposition to an established church is not opposition to religion in general - though this concept has been completely lost on today’s secularists.”

By the standard activist judges use today, I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point displaying the Declaration of Independence on public property is challenged. After all, the Declaration speaks of “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and that “all men...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It declares that the founders are “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world” and relying “on the protection of divine Providence.” Rabbis, ministers, and priests at public high school graduation ceremonies can be legally barred from saying as much.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding gay marriage has been wrapped in the language of civil rights, ... economic equity arguments, ...and child welfare claims. But these are not questions for the nine unelected justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to decide. They are questions for the people to resolve through their elected representatives.

The issue in these cases is whether we, as Americans, can enact into law basic moral beliefs, shared by an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens, without the Supreme Court’s interference.

For the last several decades, the Supreme Court has effectively trampled on Congress’s constitutionally mandated, separate, and exclusive power and taken upon itself the task of rewriting America’s immigration laws. The Court has abused its limited authority and has become, effectively, the architect of the rules governing not only how immigrants enter and remain in america, but whether those immigrants can avail themselves of social benefits that states and even Congress have sought to limit to U.S. citizens.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong that citizenship was an unconstitutional requisite to holding a government job. In 1970, five resident alien civil service employees were dismissed from their jobs in the Post Office, the Health, Education, and Welfare Department, and other federal agencies because it was discovered that they were not U.S. citizens as required by Civil Service commission regulations. The five sued the commission in federal court.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the citizenship requirement violated the due process and equal protection clauses and legal aliens’ right to liberty.

In 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision is perhaps the most egregious of the Court’s immigration rulings. In the 1960s and 1970s, a rising tide of illegal immigrants crossed the border from Mexico into Texas ... By 1975, the financial strain of the influx had started to choke the already crowded school systems in Texas border towns. In response, Texas enacted a new law concerning children not legally admitted to the Unite States that allowed local school districts to deny their enrollment and withheld from local school districts state funds to educate these children.

Numerous lawsuits were brought on behalf of several children challenging the new law... In a 5-4 decision, Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, went so far as to extend the term “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment to include illegal aliens, by virtue of their physical presence in the United States.

What was once unthinkable is now law. Your right to free speech - especially political speech - is being suppressed with the active support of the courts. So absurd and dangerous has the Supreme Court’s view of free speech become that it struck down an anti-virtual child pornography statute as a violation of the first Amendment, but upheld prohibitions against running a political ad during the month before a federal general election as criminal. Indeed, you can burn an American flag as a form of protest, but you can’t distribute pro-life leaflets within one hundred feet of an abortion clinic. When students wear armbands to school, they are engaging in protected speech, but mentioning God at a commencement ceremony is unconstitutional. The illogic of these rulings, and the extent to which the justices are willing to split hairs and manufacture various standards when interpreting the first amendment’s free speech clause, is mind-boggling.

I believe that the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in the 2000 election not to choose a winner, but rather to rein in the Florida Supreme Court, which was intent on allowing county election boards to recount returns under increasingly flawed standards until the desired result had been achieved - a victory for Gore.

“Every judge I appoint will be a person who clearly understands the role of a judge is to interpret the law, not to legislate from the bench. To paraphrase the third occupant of this house, James Madison, the courts exist to exercise not the will of men, but the judgment of law. My judicial nominees will know the difference. “ President George W. Bush

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been fascinated with America’s founding fathers. I was fortunate to live just outside Philadelphia... and I would frequently take the train to the city to visit Independence Hall. On each visit...I roamed these buildings for hours at a time. We examined every desk, quill pen and ink well, and spittoon in the rooms where such great men as George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and George Mason met to consider the new Constitution. And we marveled at the brilliance, foresight and courage of these men, who risked everything to form the most successful and just experiment in governance in history.

But look at where we are today. It’s difficult to find any aspect of society where the federal government doesn’t have some role or influence. And the Supreme Court, more than any other branch or entity of government, is the most radical and aggressive practitioner of unrestrained power. The purpose in creating a branch of government not subject to election, and whose members are appointed for life, was to ensure that it would undertake its responsibility to interpret the Constitution and arbitrate disputes in an almost ministerial fashion. There was no expectation the courts would assume the functions of the legislative or executive branches.