The Limbaugh Letter - September 2013

centralized government, with concentrated power, with a ubiquitous reach, where the people have less and less say on what’s happening in their lives — because so much is handled by a bureaucracy, and the courts, and Presidential fiat, and a Congress that operates in their shadows.

RUSH: The book proposes ten amendments. I don’t want you to detail them all here, because I want people to buy the book so they can follow your deep reasoning. People need to understand that you have spent months and months researching, analyzing, strategizing, explaining in great depth how these ten amendments would work, why they’re necessary, tying everything back to the original. But I’ll mention some of them. You’re proposing term limits, including for the Supreme Court. That’s big. You’re proposing to amend the Constitution, the lifetime appointment.

LEVIN: Yes. I’m proposing that Supreme Court Justices serve 12-year terms, for several reasons. First, they are far more powerful, and the Court as an institution is far more powerful, than the Framers ever intended. There is absolutely no evidence in the historical record of the Constitutional Convention, or the state Ratification Conventions, that anybody at any time supported a Court that has the power that it exercises today, period. You cannot have what is, in effect, a politburo making final decisions for anything and everything it chooses to make final decisions about.

I don’t want to attack the independence of the judiciary in any way, but we should limit the terms of these Justices, because like everybody else, they’re flesh and blood, they’re imperfect, and we have a historical record of Supreme Court cases that demonstrate it. We have very good Supreme Court decisions, based on the Constitution. We have average type decisions that don’t really amount to much, based on the Constitution. And then we have outrageous decisions. We have

Dred Scott, and Plessy, and Korematsu, and Roe v. Wade, and a number of others.

RUSH: Obamacare.

LEVIN: Obamacare is a perfect example. These people are imper-
fect, just as members of Congress are imperfect. Just as Presidents
are imperfect. Just as the rest of us are imperfect. So this kind of
concentration of power is exactly the opposite of what the Constitu-
tion provides. The notion that you’re appointed for life and might
serve 30 or 35 years is absurd. We’ve had Justices who served till
their death who were mentally ill. They were babbling buffoons by
the time they passed away. We’ve had Justices on the Court who
turned out to be racists and anti-Semites. We’ve had Justices who
turned out to be unethical. We’ve had all kinds of Justices, includ-
ing terrific Justices. And that’s the point; there ought to be some
kind of rotation. Twelve years is a long time. You can have a lot of
influence on the Court.

I also propose something else, that three-fifths of Congress, or three-fifths of the states, can override a majority decision of the Supreme Court. Not rewrite it. Not amend it. But override it. And I’ll tell you why.

RUSH: When you say override, does that mean nullify it? LEVIN: Expunge it from the record.

RUSH: Okay.

LEVIN: It would happen in exceptional cases. Keep in mind, there were not even 30 states to challenge Obamacare. What if we regularized this process for cases that are so important, that affect so many aspects of society? Why shouldn’t society have a say in what happens to society? I’m not talking about majoritarian-ism, which the Framers rejected. I’m not talking about plebiscites and that sort of thing. But why shouldn’t three-fifths of the states, a supermajority, or three-fifths of Congress, have the final word in some of these matters that are so big and so important to all of society — as opposed to five Justices? I don’t see that as destroying any concept of Constitutionalism; I see it as reinforcing it. Because think about it: if one Justice had been appointed by a different President, suddenly the Constitution means something completely different than it would have two months earlier? That doesn’t even make sense. RUSH: No. It’s absurd. LEVIN: This will be objected to,

as most of what I’m proposing will be objected to, by people who really support this centralized government. Republicans like to talk about federalism. Well, these amendments are, one after another, promoting federalism. So we’ll see how many Republicans in Congress actually support this. I doubt many. This entire enterprise is intended to bypass Congress, to bypass the Court, to bypass the President, and the bureaucracy — which is another reason why they’ll oppose it. This book wasn’t written for them. It was written for the American people.