Federal district judges need a rebuke from Congress before clarity in articles of the Constitution, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told a North Carolina congressman and two subcommittees in a congressional hearing.
“This issue of district judges becoming alternative presidents and issuing nationwide injunctions and such, central point to where we are – if we can limit the judges, we would send such a strong signal of rebalancing the Constitution that I think it will sober up everybody on the judicial side,” Gingrich said Tuesday.
He was testifying during a hearing, Judicial Overreach and Constitutional Limits on the Federal Courts, conducted jointly by the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet, and the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government from within the Judicial Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
His answer came in response to U.S. Rep. Rev. Mark Harris, R-N.C., asking about legislative steps needed “to address the problem of activist judges acting beyond their constitutional authority.”
“In the future, there are some key issues,” Gingrich said. “The whole notion of whether judicial supremacy means supreme inside Article III or supreme over Articles I and II, I think is an issue worth taking up. I would put that a very distant second to this immediate problem because if you solve the immediate problem, you both make it possible for the executive branch to be effective, and, you send a pretty powerful rebuke to the judicial branch. They can’t overreach in what they’re doing. I would make it a sequence in that sense.”
Article I of the Constitution is about the Legislative Branch, Article II is the Executive Branch, and Article III is the Judicial Branch.
Harris is a member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government. U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., was also in the hearing, a member of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet.
Responding to a Ross question asking if President Donald Trump decides what issues judges rule on, Penn professor Kate Shaw cited Marbury v. Madison from 1803 saying judges with the Supreme Court have decisions on the laws, meaning of laws, and consistency with the Constitution.
“In our system, it has been the courts and not the president who has the final word,” said Shaw, an Ivy League-educated professor regularly writing for media outlets that lean liberal in opinion.
Ross equated Trump’s actions in his second term with previous business dealings, sexual impropriety accusations and litigations.
“Donald Trump’s contempt for the judiciary is not new,” Ross said. “He has fought civil cases against him because of real estate deals and people he hasn’t paid. He’s fought victims that he has sexually assaulted, and he has been convicted of sexually assaulting.
“We are seeing him treat the people of the United States of America the same way he treated those poor contractors he never paid, the same way he treated women who he sexually assaulted. He is doing the same thing to the United States of America.”
