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Judicial Activism and the Constitution

by Rush Limbaugh - Dec 15,2006


RUSH: Jerry in Milwaukee, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi. Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I hear you and other conservatives, unfortunately, say that — make statements about judicial activism and judges making rights. Well, the Framers, our Framers of our Constitution created the Ninth Amendment that means rights not enumerated, not listed in the Bill of Rights in the previous constitutional amendment exists. Those are rights that exist even if rights weren’t enumerated.
RUSH: Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. First place, you have misquoted me. I do not say that activist judges create rights. Activist judges create law.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: The Ninth Amendment applies to Congress being able to do things, and it’s just a cover-all. Hey, just because we don’t mention it here doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
CALLER: Yeah, right.
RUSH: You have to understand something, though, about rights, and this is where I’m going to lose you. Rights descend from God.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Human rights descend from our creator. We are born with a natural yearning spirit to be free, for example. We are born.
CALLER: Sure —
RUSH: — as human beings with certain things built into us. The only thing governments do is take them away. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect people from government. And when judges start making laws that affect people’s lives that are not in the Constitution, when they start using foreign law to justify their own personal policy preferences, that is not rights being created, my friend, that is freedom being lost.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Learn it, love it, don’t bother me anymore, listen to what I say and learn something for once.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Okay, time once again to straighten out this judge thing. So many people, especially liberals and young people, have a gross misunderstanding of the whole concept of rights, where they come from, the purpose of the Constitution. It is one thing, and it’s hard to pick out just one when we’re talking about the Constitution, but if there is one thing to remember, ladies and gentlemen, it’s purpose was to limit the ability of government to encroach upon our freedoms. It was government that they distrusted. It’s not the other way around. The Ninth Amendment was never meant nor contemplated to grant the role of judges, the right of judges to start adding things to the Constitution.
It was never an instrument to empower judges, never, ever. I don’t think the last caller — I don’t think his use of the word “rights” was coincidental, and I don’t think he was trying to misquote me. I think there’s a large misunderstanding when people say, “I have rights! I have my rights!” People throw that around and they don’t even know what they’re talking about. Judges are out there inventing law. They are writing and creating law, which is not constitutional. That happens in Congress. Any time a Supreme Court justice consults foreign law, he is violating the Constitution of the United States, and he’s finding a way to get his own personal preferences into American law.
If he can’t find any precedent for what he wants to say or how he wants to rule in American jurisprudence, fine, go off to Namibia, and if you can find some there, we’ll use it, we’ll import it. But they do so selectively. It’s just absurd. The Constitution — see, this guy, to liberals, judges are gods because they think it’s judges that are standing in the way of the evil discriminating conservatives, because liberals think that conservatives want to take their rights away from them because they think conservatives are judgmental and see right and wrong and black and white and they’re simpletons as a result. They don’t see the gray nuance of complexity and so forth. It’s just a bunch of ne’er-do-wells that don’t want to be judged.
They know they’re not doing the right thing half the time but they don’t want anybody to tell them, and they don’t want any standards whereby any of these things can be measured because in that way liberals can address all forms of human imperfection and say all forms of imperfection equal normalcy. And who are you to judge it? It’s a perversion. In fact, I know a lot of you liberals, you’re going to think I’m nuts or that I’m trying to propagandize or something. The Constitution leaves most judicial authority to the creation of Congress, not all, but most of it. Congress has the sole responsibility or the most of the responsibility in setting up the court system.