Thomas Sowell Quotes
Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.
Sowell, Thomas. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books, 2011.
Cummings was arguing against a Constitutional amendment. His alternative led to Roosevelt's court packing schema.
Referring to the Brown v. Board of Education, the Topeka, KS, Supreme Court school desegregation decision:
The Roosevelt administration had stemmed the tide of Hoover’s Great Depression but the nation had not yet recovered. The New Deal measures, most of which would be considered fundamental to good government 50 years later was being constantly thwarted by a Supreme Court with a strong arch conservative majority headed by James McReynolds, a virulent, overt, anti-Semitic racist, who hated FDR—see {616652} and {585241}. The situation was to many like that which existed before the Civil War when the Court rendered the Dred Scott decision that so harmed the nation. Frankfurter, not then a Supreme Court Justice, urged Roosevelt to do something lest the American Public lose all respect for the Court and our Constitutional system and have the nation harmed by not allowing reforms like child labor laws to go through. The court actually ruled by a narrow majority that the government could not pass laws making it illegal for 11 year old children to work in coal mines or factories. FDR attempted to add more justices turning the majority into a majority—“packing the Supreme Court”, but that politically backfired. Some of the reforms never went through while others needed Constitutional Amendments like the end to Prohibition.
This quotation is particularly important because it summarizes one of two opposite schools or thought regarding judicial interpretation of the Constitution that politicians have been arguing about since the Supreme Court first sat. The other is Original Intent where only the original intentions of the writers and ratifiers of the Constitution should be considered—assuming that it can be determined.
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
