Junto Boys

LOOKING TO ABE

Here's what the venerable Abe Lincoln had to say about too much power residing in the Supreme Court and the politicization of the Court:

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned the government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

On Bush bashing, gay marriage, and the rule of law:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the poeple who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself, and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it....

By the frame of the government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

On the 24-hour news cycle:

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.

Quotes from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address at the onset of civil war, in THE ESSENTIAL ABRAHAM LINCOLN, John Gabriel Hunt, ed., Portland House, 1993.