The FULL written transcript of AG’s Barr’s remarks .
Have it open while you listen and follow along :
Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers the 19th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DC
~ Friday, November 15, 2019
It was once well recognized that such matters were largely unreviewable and that the courts should not be substituting their judgments for the prudential judgments reached by the accountable Executive officials. This outlook now seems to have gone by the boards. Courts are now willing, under the banner of judicial review, to substitute their judgment for the President’s on matters that only a few decades ago would have been unimaginable – such as matters involving national security or foreign affairs.
The Travel Ban case is a good example. There the President made a decision under an explicit legislative grant of authority, as well has his Constitutional national security role, to temporarily suspend entry to aliens coming from a half dozen countries pending adoption of more effective vetting processes. The common denominator of the initial countries selected was that they were unquestionable hubs of terrorism activity, which lacked functional central government’s and responsible law enforcement and intelligence services that could assist us in identifying security risks among their nationals seeking entry. Despite the fact there were clearly justifiable security grounds for the measure, the district court in Hawaii and the Ninth Circuit blocked this public-safety measure for a year and half on the theory that the President’s motive for the order was religious bias against Muslims. This was just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration.
The Travel Ban case highlights an especially troubling aspect of the recent tendency to expand judicial review. The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a police officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant. And just last term, the Supreme Court appropriately shut the door to claims that otherwise-lawful redistricting can violate the Constitution if the legislators who drew the lines were actually motivated by political partisanship.
The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.
Thank you for the link to the text of the lecture.
Our modern government is in violation of all of the principles of the constitution. For example, the president’s political platform is primarily “what laws he will pass.” WTF?! That is a Congressional function!!
And yet few remark on this. Budget — set by executive. Plenty of laws start in the WH and its associated lobbyists, with that fact obscured by having some congressman drop the WH proposal into the hopper. See GWB’s Military Tribunal.
With regard to what Trump’s election has triggered, “What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the “loyal opposition,” as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Just so. The government is in open rebellion against the constitution and against the people. And that issue is piled on thop of the government having usurped powers not given to it under the constitution.
I view Barr’s lecture as academic. The republic is dead, long live the republic.