From Rush Limbaugh:
Here is Justice Breyer once again talking about foreign law, and this goes right to the point that I was trying to make to Trudy and I have for several weeks, months, if you will, on this program about what's wrong with certain kind of judges and why we need others. Listen to Breyer, the first of a few bites here.
BREYER: Nations all over the world have followed our lead or the lead of other places, adopted constitutions that basically assure democracy, that are protective of human rights, and that try to do so in part by relying upon independent judiciaries. Well, if that is the world, we can learning something perhaps by looking at how they, in a few cases anyway, that raise comparable problems, interpret comparable documents, comparable provisions, protective let's say of human liberty. I'm not saying we follow them. We might learn what not to do. But let's read them. After all, they're written by judges.
RUSH: So what! That's the point. So they're written by judges and that makes them infallible? Look, you can read all you want, Justice Breyer. You can read and inform yourself all you want about what other nations are doing, but unless it's in our Constitution it is irrelevant when you are deciding constitutional law that comes before you in the form of cases at the Supreme Court. It's just that simple, but if you're going to have a personal view -- like Justice Breyer obviously does, a personal view -- that what they're doing around the world is something that we can learn from, that may be, independently speaking, but if it's not in our Constitution, it ought not be in anybody's reasoning or anybody's decision-making when it comes to deciding law in cases that come before the Supreme Court. What Justice Breyer is essentially saying here is that there are certain things going on in this country that he disagrees with, and he may find a better way of handling them in foreign countries, and since he's a judge, and since other judges where writing these things in other countries, why, it would be silly not to incorporate them! That is 180 degrees out of phase, and it is precisely why I have this profound concern of the direction the court's heading, and there are people, ladies and gentlemen, who have written and who are on benches, on courts deciding cases now who have undergone the scrutiny and the attempts to have their minds changed (a-hem) by public pressure, political pressure, and they have stood fast, they have remained solid in their beliefs on the Constitution.
So those people can be identified, and there's no guesswork about it -- and I guarantee you, if you find this kind of judge, you're going to get the right thing on Roe vs. Wade, but you're also going to get the right thing on all kinds of other cases that come before it, too. This business... Do you know that foreign law was used to overturn 19 state laws on sodomy? It was foreign law. Justice Kennedy cited it. Well, what good is any law in any state if nine lawyers at the Supreme Court can find what they're doing elsewhere around the world and say, "You states are so far behind the curve. You don't know what you're doing. They're way ahead of us, say, in Belgium. So we're going to going to incorporate Belgium into our decision on this case." Sorry. If it's not in the Constitution, you can't do that, and this started with Roe vs. Wade -- and this is the big argument that people have. Once you start finding things that aren't there, and pretending that they are, or inserting them yourself as a judge, the Constitution becomes meaningless, folks.
All this rigmarole and hoity-toity talk about human rights and civil rights and democracy? All of it would be meaningless. The only way it would have meaning is if a majority of judges agreed on some civil right or human right or what have you, or if they want to create a new one that's not in the Constitution. That's not how these things happen. The laws are not written by judges. They're not supposed to be. The laws are written by elected representatives in Congress and the state legislatures. If they want to go scrutinize foreign law, if they want to make a bill out of it and they can convince enough members of Congress as elected officials that we send there to do so, and then get the president to sign it, well, then fine. But this is not how this is supposed to happen, and Breyer knows, I think, he's under the gun. He won't stop talking this. He's got a book out about it, now. This is an argument going on within the court itself. You've got Scalia and Thomas, and you had Rehnquist, who are dead-set against all of this. We don't know where Harriet Miers comes down on this. We might find out in the hearings, but we don't know now. But there are plenty of other people out there whose opinion on this we do know.
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