Political Quotes

“I know what it means to be excluded from your own Constitution, and after the experience of African Americans in this country and a Civil War, I never thought I would see a civil war in law where we would try to exclude any other group of Americans from the Constitution of the United States, and that is exactly what we are trying to do here today. We are trying to change the constitutional system that the framers put in place over one constitutional issue. Now, every time there is an issue like this which raises the hackles of the country, people rush forward to try to do exactly this, to strip the courts. They did it during the era of desegregation. They have done it with school prayer. The fact is that the issue has been settled for 200 years in Marbury v. Madison, and the issue is quite simply this: That the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of constitutional matters. Now, if that were not the case, if that is wrong, then the framers were wrong, because the framers were still sitting, some of them in the court itself, some of them in the Congress when Marbury was passed, and under accepted principles of constitutional interpretation somebody could have come to the floor and said the court has got it wrong and we are going to assert ourselves. Instead they accepted Marbury v. Madison and we must accept it.”