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On the living Constitution: I am left to defend the 'dead' Constitution.
--
Speech at Marquette University in Milwaukee on March 13, 2001..

 

Antonin Scalia

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[T]he constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it. . . . It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. . . . So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is the very essence of judicial duty. . . . Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions . . . It would be giving the legislature a practical and real omnipotence . . . The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.

 

John Marshall

 

Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution. And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To progress past the Constitution.

 

Glenn Beck

 

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other, and how we treat the family.

 

Mike Huckabee

 

The Court's justification for consulting its own notions rather than following the original meaning of the Constitution, as I would, apparently is based on the belief of the majority of the Court that for this Court to be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution is an intolerable and debilitating evil; that our Constitution should not be 'shackled to the political theory of a particular era,' and that to save the country from the original Constitution the Court must have constant power to renew it and keep it abreast of this Court's more enlightened theories of what is best for our society. It seems to me that this is an attack not only on the great value of our Constitution itself but also on the concept of a written constitution which is to survive through the years as originally written unless changed through the amendment process which the Framers wisely provided.

 

Hugo Black

 

I'm beginning to understand how Americans must have felt living under King George. What was that again - no taxation without representation? The War of Independence wasn't America against England. It was Englishmen resisting the oppressive regime of their autocratic German king - asserting their human rights, in modern parlance. America may be a melting pot now, but it began with a defence of age-old English liberties; liberties that were promptly written into the Constitution - something we never got around to doing in Britain, so we no longer enjoy the same liberties Americans do. We don't have a constitution. We don't have a First Amendment. What we have, and what the whole of Europe has, is the Lisbon Treaty, a kind of top-down constitution that has been imposed on us against our will. And, unlike the American Constitution which empowers the people, the European constitution disempowers the people, and empowers the unelected bureaucrats and career politicians for whose sole benefit it was created.

 

Pat Condell