Daniel Horowitz: We’ve Already Lost the Courts

Last week, Daniel Horowitz, senior editor of Conservative Review, told a talk radio host that conservatives and Christians have lost the courts, but there is a way to rein them in.

Vote Republican.

“I’m here to tell you we’ve lost the courts,” he told Huntington, W.V., talk radio host Tom Roten. “They’re gone, gone, gone. We do need a Republican Congress and administration, but for the purposes of stripping the courts of that power, giving it back to Congress and the state legislatures.”

The loss of the courts was evidenced earlier this year, he said, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals failed to come to a majority opinion in support of states’ voter identification laws. Ten of the 15 judges on that court were appointed by Republican presidents.

Of the 13 circuit courts, only four have Republican-appointed majorities.

Horowitz said this leads into the thesis of his new book—which he was promoting while talking with Roten—that America is now undergoing “societal transformation without representation.” He said when judges usurp power that doesn’t belong to them and simultaneously hold the belief the Constitution is a “living document,” it creates a dangerous situation for freedom in the country.

“It would be bad enough if they had that power and they, in good faith, attempted to interpret the Constitution as originally adopted, but it’s worse than that,” he said. “We’ve given them the power of the sole and final arbiter, but at the same time, they believe the Constitution is unconstitutional.

“What’s in it is taken out, what’s out is put in.”

Horowitz said the courts are being used to prevent Republicans from being elected by forcing the states to adopt laws that are beneficial to the Democratic Party. The federal courts are further “crushing the states,” he added, by refusing to allow the states to govern themselves.

“See, we’re winning in the states,” he said. “We have 32 governors. We control the trifecta of governance—two branches of the legislature and a governor—in 24 states. We have the potential to even grow from there. But we don’t benefit from it because the feds are crushing us …

“We need to return state legislatures to the power they had at the founding, the power they were supposed to have, and it at least starts with getting the unelected branch of the federal government out of our hair.”

Perhaps anticipating some might use his words to suggest it’s unnecessary to vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Horowitz pointed out there is a need for a GOP administration to rein in the courts. The key, he said, however, is found in Article III Section 2 of the Constitution. Under that section, Congress has the authority to restrict the jurisdiction of the courts, therefore a congressional statute is all that’s necessary to put the brakes on judicial tyranny in the U.S. All that is needed is a conservative Congress to enact the legislation and a Republican president to sign it into law.

“I’m not saying not to vote for Trump,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s not important to appoint better judges.

“But we don’t need a Republican president to merely appoint better judges. We need a Republican president to sign legislation stripping the courts of this power they don’t have to begin with.

“We don’t have to sit and take this social transformation anymore. This is our country, this is our Constitution; they have no right to change it, and let’s go back to our first roots, our first principles. Let’s take back our country from the unelected judges.”