Ilya Shapiro > Quotes

“Justice Marshall once described his legal philosophy as: ‘You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“We also had the flip side of the expansion of powers: the warping of rights. In 1938, the infamous Footnote Four in the Carolene Products case bifurcated our rights such that certain rights are more equal than others in a kind of Animal Farm approach to the Constitution. So it’s the New Deal Court that politicized the Constitution, and thus also the confirmation process, by laying the foundation for judicial mischief of every stripe-- but particularly letting laws sail through that should be invalidated. The Warren Court picked up that baton by rewriting laws in areas that are best left to the political branches, micro-managing cultural disputes in a way that made the justices into philosopher kings, elevating and sharpening society’s ideological tensions.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“Congress and the presidency have gradually taken more power for themselves, and the Supreme Court has allowed them to get away with it, aggrandizing itself in the process. As the Court has let both the legislative and executive branches swell beyond their constitutionally authorized powers, so have the laws and regulations that it now interprets.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“Let federal legislators make the hard calls about truly national issues like defense or (actually) interstate (actual) commerce, but let states and localities make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives...That’s the only way we’re going to defuse tensions in Washington.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“Under the Framers’ Constitution, by which the country lived for its first 150 years, the Supreme Court hardly ever had to curtail a federal law. If you read the Congressional Record of the 18th and 19th centuries, Congress debated whether particular legislation was constitutional much more than whether something was a good idea.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“Clarence Thomas after being falsely accused: “This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“The only lasting solution to what ails our body juridic is to return to the Founders’ Constitution by rebalancing and devolving power, so Washington isn’t making so many big decisions for the whole country. Depoliticizing the judiciary and toning down our confirmation process is a laudable goal, but that’ll happen only when judges go back to judging rather than bending over backwards to ratify the constitutional abuses of the other branches.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“But the judicial debates we’ve seen the last few decades were never really about the nominees themselves-- just like the proposals for court-packing and the like aren’t about ‘good government.’ They’re about the direction of the Court. The left in particular needs its social and regulatory agendas, as promulgated by the executive branch, to get through the judiciary, because they would never pass as legislation at the national level. That’s why progressive forces pull out all the stops against originalist nominees who would enforce limits on federal power.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“In the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it gets the law right and applies it correctly...sometimes justices seem to make decisions not based on their legal principles but for strategic purposes. The public can see through that; it’s when justices think about ‘legitimacy’ and try to avoid political controversy that they act most illegitimately.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“The reason we have these heated court battles is that the federal government is simply making too many decisions at a national level for such a large, diverse, and pluralistic country.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court

“The only way judicial nominations will be detoxified...is for the Supreme Court to restore our constitutional order by returning improperly amassed federal power to the states; securing all of our rights, enumerated and unenumerated alike; and forcing Congress to legislate on the remaining truly national issues rather than delegating that legislative power to executive-branch agencies.”
― Ilya Shapiro, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court