Date: 1997-04-16
Speaker: SAM JOHNSON (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the position of the other gentleman from Texas. Mr. DELAY. I come before the House today to talk about a problem that the gentleman has already laid out there. but it is quietly and steadily eating away at our constitutional system of government. Judicial activism is not only compromising our longheld tradition of separation of powers. but throughout our academic and legal community .they are pushing the judiciary to be activists in their decisions. so much so that any attempt by Congress to address this issue is immediately met with accusations of political sabotage and constitutional breach. Mr. Speaker. I want to assure mycolleagues that we in the Congress are not trying to undermine the Constitution. Far from it. We are trying to enforce it. to open the issue to public scrutiny and return the role of the Federal judiciary back to our Nations intended belief. what our Nations founders had always intended: That the third branch of the Government. the judiciary. is to be the weakest branch of government. In The Federalist papers. number 78. Alexander Hamilton. for example. wrote that the judicial branch. quote. Will be always the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution. and that it may truly be said to have neither the forc6 nor will but merely judgment. The judiciary was intended to interpret the law. not to create it. But that is exactly what we are seeing in some of our courts today. They are not ruling on the law. they are creating the law. Unelected Federal judges are furthering their own personal and political views by legislating from the bench and ignoring the will of the people of the United States. In fact. it has gotten so bad that judges are even overturning elections of our elected people. David Barton. in his book. "Impeachment: Restraining an Overactive Judiciary." said it best when he wrote that It has gotten to the point that any special interest group that loses at the ballot box only has to file a suit in Federal court to declare itself the winner. And most of the time our judges are ruling with them. If we just look at the recent instances of judicial activism. we will see some of the expansion of power that Federal judges are trying to achieve. I say some Federal judges. not all of them. We have seen judges overturn cases based on the weakest of circumstances simply to further their own political views. Judge Nixon. in Tennessee. a known opponent of capital punishment. has repeatedly issued rulings overturning cases where the criminal was sentenced to death. More recently. I am sure everyone has heard of Judge Baer in New York. who overturned a drug conviction on a technicality even though the defendant admitted his guilt to the police. In addition to these reversals. other Federal judges have taken it upon themselves to legislate from the bench. issuing farreaching orders to impose their own set of political views on the American people. One of those famous cases involves Judge Russell Clark. who ruled in 1987 in Kansas City. MO. that the school system was segregated. and he issued a court.order that called for a tax increase and forced the people of that State to pay for his desegregation scheme. Well. $2 billion in taxpayer dollars later. the Kansas City school system is no better off. and he is probably backing up on that. Judge Clarks agenda included such things as animation labs. greenhouses. temperaturecontrolled art galleries. and a model United Nations wired for language translation. I am not sure I know what that has to do with segregation. Closer to home for me. I spent quite a bit of time when I was in the Texas statehouse following the antics of Judge William Wayne Justice. whose rulings on our prison system in Texas forced us to allow prisoners to get out before their time was up. giving them a lot of good time. one. and. two. putting them in bigger rooms. In other words. where we had four beds. we could only put two. where we had two beds. we could only put one. And every man had to have his own color television set in prison. What a waste of taxpayer dollars addressing frivolous inmate lawsuits. Also back home we are seeing another judicial activist arise in the form of Judge Fred Biery. who on January 24 of this year issued an injunction which prevented two duly elected officials in Val Verde County from taking office. Why? Because he would not allow 800 absentee military votes to be counted. I consider this to be an affront to the rights of the military. As a matter of fact. after serving in the military for 29 years and being all over this Nation. I would say that it is important that we make sure that our military is allowed to vote. especially while they are defending the Nation. It is a dangerous precedent where one judge can decide he just does not like the results of the election and simply overrules the results. One final example. and perhaps the most newsworthy. is the decision by Judge Henderson in California. who issued an injunction stopping the implementation of proposition 209 in California. which would ban racial quotas in California and which passed with 54 percent of the vote of the State. Not many people know that that particular judge. Judge Henderson. had once served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of California. an organization which took an active interest against proposition 209. and here he is ruling with his own special interest group against the people of California who with more than 4.700.000 State residents voted to enact as law proposition 209. I think that tests the Integrity of our constitutional democracy. and I think that the threejudge panel which had the courage to remind their colleagues of the judiciarys rightful place in our constitutional democracy and overrule that ought to be commended. We cannot always count on Federal judges to keep their colleagues in check. and that is why I feel likeQConSgress must exercise our duty to ensure that the third branch of the Government does not exceed its authority.