Building on the American Heritage Series: Demystifying the Courts

Courts shape our daily lives, but most of us were taught a version of the judiciary that the Constitution never actually designed. We dig into the biggest myths head-on: the idea that federal judges are appointed for life no matter what, that the judiciary is an “independent” branch beyond real restraint, and that only the Supreme Court can decide what’s constitutional. Using the Federalist Papers, founding-era practice, and early historical examples, we lay out a clearer picture of Article III and the checks and balances that are supposed to keep every branch accountable to the people.

From there, we shift to a forgotten powerhouse in American law: the jury. We talk about when juries were central to “courts of justice,” why juries originally weighed both the law and the facts, and how that citizen check protected against judges who drifted into policy-making. We also walk through how limiting juries changed the system, including why juries sometimes refused to convict under laws they believed were unjust, and what that tells us about due process and liberty.

We then connect America’s due process safeguards to the hard lessons learned from abusive court systems in history and the moral arguments that helped drive reform. Finally, we tackle the modern question of judicial “neutrality” and why a judge stops being neutral the moment the bench starts writing policy instead of interpreting and applying the law. If you care about constitutional law, judicial accountability, jury trials, and the real balance of power, this conversation will sharpen your instincts. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Transcript

Singer [00:00:00] Let the torch of freedom burn! 

Rick Green [00:00:11] You found your way to the intersection of faith and politics. WallBuilders Live with David Barton and Rick Green, also found online at wallbuilderslive.com and wallbuilders.com and also on Facebook you can follow us there as well and comment on the shows as you get a chance to listen to them. In fact, you might have a show you'd like us to cover, a topic, or an interview. You can email that to us at radio@wallbuilders.com. We also encourage you to let your local station know if you'd to hear us locally and we're not on the station there close to you. Which we probably are. There's about 200 around the country that are carrying us. So if you're not familiar with which station we're on close to you, then go check it out at wallbuilderslive.com. Here we go to Building on the American Heritage Series with David Barton. 

Rick Green [00:00:48] Alright David, our topic today is the judiciary. And we do talk about judges a lot in the news these days, but sometimes I think our perception may be wrong about the proper role of the judiciary 

David Barton [00:00:56] It is. A lot of times our perception is based on what people tell us, especially what judges tell us. Judges try to define their role. The Constitution is what defines their role, and in the case of Christians, the Bible also clearly defines the roles of judges. Judges are a big deal in the Bible. Lots of passages talk about the qualifications of judges, the behavior, the appointment of judges and how they conduct themselves. So the Bible has a lot to say about judges. As a matter of fact... One of our early Founding Fathers of the American jurisprudence system, James Kent said our whole system of appeals courts came out of the Bible, because Samuel the judge rode from Gilgal to Misbra, all these places to judge the people, and so that's why we have traveling courts that move from place to place, and, so, so much of what we had in tradition actually came out the Bible. But because we've lost that, we don't read the Constitution like we should, we've really gotten into a bunch of myths that we've bought into today. I mean, we buy into the myth that federal judges are appointed for life. Founding Fathers said no they aren't. The Constitution says no, they aren't.. 

Rick Green [00:01:48] But that's what most people believe. 

David Barton [00:01:49] That's what people think. Most people think the judiciary is an independent branch. No, it's not an independent branch. No branch is independent from the people. All three branches are accountable. There's tons of checks and balances in the Constitution to make sure the judiciary is not an independent branch. They were never to be separate from the other two branches as far as you guys can't touch us. We're the judges. No, never at all in any way, shape, fashion, or form. 

Rick Green [00:02:09] Wouldn't that make any branch or any person despotic? I mean, you'd have a despot then. 

David Barton [00:02:11] Sure, you can do anything you want if you can't be held accountable for, and that's never designed because the government comes from we the people, it's to reflect the consent of the government as our documents tell us. So we have those kind of issues. We've also got issues, we're told that only the judges get to decide what's constitutional or not. No, no, no. James Madison, the other guy, said all three branches get to decided what's constitutional. That's how you have checks and balances. The court may say it's constitutional, and the other two branches say, no it's not.  

Rick Green [00:02:38] That's a shocking one for people, David, because we think only the court can determine constitutionality. You're saying the president has the right to do that, Congress has the right to that as well. 

David Barton [00:02:46] Well, in the case of one of the earliest examples is Congress passed a law called the Alien Sedition Act. It says, if you criticize the government of the United States, you're going to jail. The court didn't strike it unconstitutional, but President Jefferson got in there and said, that is a wacky law. You can't throw people in jail for saying something bad about the government. Twenty-five people had been taken to court on that law, 10 were sitting in jail because of it. President Jefferson comes in and says, that's an unconstitutional law, turned everybody out of jail. So, all three branches have the ability to determine constitutionality. You don't let just a body of nine people, or the majority of nine people, five people determine what's constitutional for the whole nation. No, no, no. That's never part of the design. 

Rick Green [00:03:23] So they all have the ability to do that. Are they all, we often hear they're equal branches. 

David Barton [00:03:27] They're not equal branches, they're separate branches, but they're all accountable. As a matter of fact, the Federalist Papers right here, very clear. Now, the Federalist papers written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, both of them and the Constitution. And John Jay, the original Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. They say in here that the legislative branch predominates. That's the most powerful branch. They also say that the judiciary branch is the weakest of all the branches, by far the weakest. Talks about the comparison. It says it has no power over the sword, over the purse. It can't influence society or policy. I mean, they go through and say, they're not co-equal. They said, legislative is the biggest branch because that's the one closest to the people. It's got the most power. You look at Article I of the Constitution really long. The next most powerful branch is the executive, because people choose the executive but only every four years. So that Article 2 is a little shorter, but the tiniest article of all, of the three in the Constitution, is Article 3, judiciary, because they're not chosen, they're not elected, therefore they get fewer opportunities to do anything. They have very limited opportunities. And so the Founding Fathers made real clear that they're no co-equal branches. As they said in the Federalist Papers, the liberties of the people will never be endangered by the judges because they don't have any power. 

Rick Green [00:04:36] Wish it was still that way. 

David Barton [00:04:37] Wish it was still that way, but those are some of the judicial myths we've grown to accept that are historically fallacious, and they're even biblically fallacious in many ways. And the Bible is the basis of our judicial system. It's just that most people don't know that, but we'll get to look at that. 

Rick Green [00:04:50] Well, because of how much judges have been influencing the culture lately, we got a lot of questions on this one. 

Questioner 1 [00:04:54] Since our judges are appointed for a lifetime, how do we hold them accountable? 

Rick Green [00:04:59] So where is the accountability if a judge is appointed for their whole life? 

David Barton [00:05:03] Well, the first part is they're not appointed for life. That's one of the things that people think today, and this is one of the great judicial myths that's out there that's absolutely not accurate. If you go back and look at the Constitution, Article 3 deals with judiciary. There's nothing in there about judges being appointed for life. They're not appointment for life, matter of fact, you'd have to back up before that. You go back to 1765. The king was appointing judges in America, and starting in 1765, it was Samuel Adams, the father of the American Revolution, who started ringing the alarm bell saying, hey, we got a bad problem here. The king has started appointing judge for life over here. That's a really bad deal. And Sam Adams said, and the other bad deal is these guys are not accountable. And so, as time went on, what would happen is the colonies would pass various laws, and the king's judges would strike them down, and say, you guys can't do that. 

Rick Green [00:05:50] So if they strike down a law, there's no recourse for them. 

David Barton [00:05:52] There was no recourse for them! And that's why... They specifically made sure that once they got control of government and the British were out of it, they stopped it. There's no lifetime appointments and judges are accountable. 

Rick Green [00:06:03] See David, almost all of our people believe that they're lifetime appointments. I'll go to a constitution class and I'll ask, okay, how long are judges appointed for? And I'm not kidding, 99% to 100% of the people in the room always will say yes. They're for lifetime. And that's people coming out wanting to study.

David Barton [00:06:14]  Let me go back. Sam Adams is from Massachusetts. He's a Founding Father of America, but he's specifically out of Massachusetts. And Sam Adams helped do this book right here. That's The Constitution of Massachusetts of 1780. So what happened was in 1776, they declared independence in America, and then most of the states started writing their constitutions. 1776 Pennsylvania did, 1776 North Carolina wrote their state constitution, so did Virginia. They started working on that in Massachusetts, but they didn't get it written. And they worked and sent it back for revision. And so it's really 1779 before they get it done, and it's ratified and it goes into effect in 1780. But Sam Adams has been working on this since the very beginning. Now remember, his two things about the judges, as the other founding fathers, is you can't have lifetime appointments, and these guys have to be accountable. So, when they wrote the Massachusetts Constitution... They address the issue of judges, but they address the issue of government in general. And it's a whole different paradigm from what they had under the British form of government. 

Rick Green [00:07:10] This is after the Declaration. This is before the... 

David Barton [00:07:11] This is after the declaration. 

Rick Green [00:07:12] This is before the U.S. Constitution.

David Barton [00:07:15]  And by the way... Those who are at the Constitutional Convention who did the Federal Constitution said they took ideas from state constitutions like that of Massachusetts. So here's what it says in the Declaration of Rights, right up front, setting forth fundamental principles that are never to be violated. This is how they'll operate their government. Item number five. It says, all power residing originally in the people and being derived from the people, the several magistrates and officers of government vested with authority, whether Whether legislative, executive, or judicial. Are the people substitutes and agents and are at all time accountable to the people. Now they made real sure that we weren't going to have unaccountable judges. They're going to be accountable to the people. 

Rick Green [00:07:52] And specifically including the judiciary. 

David Barton [00:07:53] Judiciary right there. There was never a design to have judges unaccountable to the people. But the other part is, well how about lifetime appointments? What they did and what they also did in the federal constitution, when you read it, it says that judges are allowed to hold, federal judges are allowed to their appointments for the, quote, duration of good behavior. That's not a lifetime appointment, that's as long as you act right, you can stay there as a federal judge. But if you don't act right we're going to take you out. Now significantly, the U.S. Constitution has six clauses on how to remove judges. There's nothing else in the U.S. Constitution that gets as much attention as those six clauses. That's more content than any other subject that the Constitution gets, six clauses on how remove judges, so if the Founding Fathers had these clauses and said, we're going to make sure judges are accountable and that they don't get lifetime appointments, Why would they have thrown a judge off the court? 

Rick Green [00:08:40] That's why I was gonna ask you if it says for good behavior and then they have all these clauses for how to deal with bad behavior, what is bad behavior then? Or what is not good behavior, I guess is the best way to ask. 

David Barton [00:08:49] Well, the best way to know is go see the guys who wrote the clauses, see what they defined as good behavior by who they throw off the court. There was a federal judge thrown off the Court because he cussed in the courtroom. 

Rick Green [00:09:01] That was enough. 

David Barton [00:09:02] Founding fathers threw him off the court. Why did they do that? Because the federal Constitution says for the duration of good behavior. They said cussing in the court room is not good behavior for a judge. You're gone. Another guy was thrown off of the court because he got drunk in his private life. Whoa, it's his private live. Had nothing to do with his judge. No? That's not good behavior for a judge, you're gone. Another guy got thrown off the court because he contradicted an act of Congress. Supreme Court does that all the time today. Congress passed an act, ah, we don't like that act, it's gonna be constitutional. No, he did that. You're gone, buddy.

Rick Green [00:09:30]  See, our perception is that to do something like an impeachment, it has to be huge. It has to a major, major deal. 

David Barton [00:09:37] Those are not major deals. See, there have been 97 impeachment investigations across history with judges. You've had 13 impeachments actually taken off the court. And the more often you have an impeachment investigation, the less often you'll have to remove a judge. Because what happens, Thomas Jefferson said, impeachment is a scarecrow. I mean, you sit out there in the middle field and that'll scare them off. 

Rick Green [00:09:55] Because all the other judges are watching that going, I don't want that to be me. 

David Barton [00:09:57] You bet ya, for example, take the judge in California that says, oh no, having under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, completely unconstitutional. What you do is you convene a hearing in Washington, D.C. Congress says. Hey, we want you to come here before the judiciary committee and explain to us exactly what your thinking is that says we can't acknowledge God when that's in the declaration and in the Constitution. What are you thinking? And other judges see him getting called before Congress to be accountable and they go, oh my gosh, we're not going to touch that. Exactly. Thomas Jefferson said whatever branch is independent is absolute also. If we let the judges be independent in that way, then we're letting them be absolute. The Congress isn't independent. We hold them accountable in elections. President's not independent. We've got elections every four years. Judges are not independent; Congress holds them accountable. 

Rick Green [00:10:39] They are accountable through Congress to us. In other words, they're accountable to us, but Congress is the one that has to do their job in ringing in the courts. 

David Barton [00:10:46] And see, that is the key thing with the courts, is that the Constitution set it up so that the other branches could check the court. Now, if the other branch has refused to do that, then judges do get lifetime appointments, and they are unaccountable if the others branches refuse to do this. 

Rick Green [00:11:00] Because we as individual citizens, you just can't do much. 

David Barton [00:11:02] We send people to Congress and the Presidency who don't care what judges do, you know, and if that's not an issue for us, it's not going to be an issue for our congressmen. It's real simple. 

Rick Green [00:11:12] David, I think we've gotten an education on judges already, but let's get another question about it. 

Questioner 2 [00:11:16] Did juries play a more important role in the judicial process of previous generations? 

Rick Green [00:11:21] Okay, well maybe this will shift us a little from the judge to the jury. What was the role of the jury in the past? 

David Barton [00:11:25] You know that it's an interesting thing about the juries because there is a long history and it actually has a lot of biblical basis on the history. Now a hundred years ago we called them courts of justice because they existed to ensure that justice occurred. Then about 50 years ago we went into what were called courts of law. We're not after judges where we're after holding up the law here the law is more important than justice is. And then the most recent thing is we've just become courts, nothing else. And when you look at the definition of courts in the legal books today, it says, a court is a place to settle disputes. Now, if you go back to when you had courts of justice, the biggest entity, the most important entity in a court of justice was the jury. And the jury was more important than the judge. And from the time of the Founding Fathers till about the 1890s, juries were inseparable from any trial. 

Singer [00:13:17] Let the torch of freedom burn 

David Barton [00:13:28] The significant thing about juries, and the Founding Fathers said this right from the beginning. John Jay and James Wilson, all these guys who wrote the Constitution, were on the Supreme Court, etc. They said that a jury is to examine both the law and the facts. So Daniel, the law says you can't pray. He prayed anyway. He's brought to trial in an American court. The jury listens to everything that's gone on, and they say, you know, you violated the law, but the law's an unjust law. You're acquitted. You didn't do anything wrong. Because you're supposed to be able to pray according to the dictates of conscience. 

Rick Green [00:14:01] But if all they can review are the facts, then they have to say well yes you prayed and then the judge gets to decide on the law. But you're saying the way we used to do it, they used to deal with do both, facts and law. 

David Barton [00:14:08] The way we use to do is that the jurors were more important than the judge. And quite frankly, what would happen is, any time the attorneys would argue about the points of law, they would never dismiss the jury. The jury's supposed to stay there and hear everything, every bit of evidence. Now, today we rule, oh, you can't let the jury hear the evidence. You can't introduce this. You can do that. Now, back then, they had to hear everything because... The judge would have said, why, Daniel, you violated the law. You're going to the lion's den. You've got to have a check and balance on the judge. And that was juries. Twelve jurors, twelve peers say, no, why are you going to throw him in the lion den for praying to God? There's no, it doesn't matter how much education the judge has, you've got over here the check of the people. And that's the jury. 

Rick Green [00:14:43] Boy, we missed that today, I'll tell you. The jury is really almost disdained. 

David Barton [00:14:46] Well, see, what happened is in about 1890s, there in 1890s the Supreme Court came out with a new rule and says, hey, from now on, juries are not going to look at the law anymore, they'll only look at facts. 

Rick Green [00:14:56] Only facts, yeah. 

David Barton [00:14:57] We judges are the professionals. 

Rick Green [00:14:59] That's it. 

David Barton [00:14:59] We'll tell you what the law is. 

Rick Green [00:15:00] Yeah. 

David Barton [00:15:00] Now at that point, your juries become a lot more insignificant. So when an attorney says, Hey, judge, I think the law's wrong, and that, okay, dismiss the jury, get them out of the room, let's talk about this back and forth. And then you bring the jury back, you don't let them hear the law. And what happens is, if the jury today does what juries did under the Founding Fathers, said, hey, that's an unjust law. We're not going to convict on that. Then suddenly the judge says, oh, mistrial. I'm the one who does the law and you guys don't. You see, this is significant because in 1856, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, one of the most abominable laws in history. It says, if you're black and someone accuses you of having been a slave, even if you've been free your whole life, if I walk up and say, you used to be a Bye! Under that law, you instantly lost your constitutional right of habeas corpus. You lost your right to an attorney, constitutional right. You lost your constitutional rights simply because I said you used to be a slave. There was no due process, there was no exam, nothing at all. And so what happened is the law was so bad that the federal law says if a black is accused of being a former slave and he comes into court and the judge finds that he was not a former slavery, the judge gets paid five bucks. If the judge finds that he was a former slave, the judge gets paid 10 bucks. 

Rick Green [00:16:10] So you're paying the judge. You're incentivizing the judge to always find one. 

David Barton [00:16:14] So guess how many cases with judges they found the black to be not a former slave, it's like 1%. But the jury consistently freed people under that because they thought the law was unjust. You had Quakers, for example, that would help escape slaves in the South and get to the North and the Underground Railroad. They would take the Quakers and put them on trial for violating the Fugitive Slave Law, and the jury would say. They didn't do anything wrong. The law is bad. And so the jurors kept acquitting all these people. And see, then the courts come in 1890 and say, oh, jurors, you got too much power. We need to limit your power. So they do that. And at that point, jurors now become a lot less significant. And then we get to about 30, 40 years ago where we said, you know, now we don't even need juries to cite facts. Let's just do it for the judge. And if you don't like the law, we'll just strike it down for you and we'll settle the dispute. Now, the problem with that is the use of juries is part of the due process clause of the Constitution, the Fourth through the Eighth Amendments. Here's where it gets really fun. These three books I'm going to pull right here, these are really big books, and these are old books too. This is from 1590, this one also comes out of the 1500s, this happens to be the 1794 edition, but this is called the Geneva Bible. It was the Bible that preceded the King James Version of the Bible. This particular Geneva Bible that we've got right here is from 1590. This is brought to America by one of the Puritan Pilgrim families. But what makes the Geneva significant is that when you open the Geneva Bible up on the inside, it is loaded with all these commentaries down the margins right there. You see all that? This is the writings of the Reformers back in the day when they said, hey, we've been away from the Bible for a thousand years. We get lousy traditions. Time to get back to the Bible. 

Rick Green [00:17:48] So these are commentaries taking the scripture and actually applying it. So here's how we ought to be doing it in our culture. 

David Barton [00:17:53] What they did was said we've had the culture wrong for a thousand years, it's time to go back to the Bible. So these are the comments. One of the things they have tons of comments on is we've let the judicial system get away from what the Bible says. And it went, there was trial of Jesus, there were trials of Paul, there are trials throughout the Bible and they said, look at the policies you have with trials, look what God says about trials. And so these are all the comments here. Well part of the problem with trials was the king would head the established church and the king would say what the doctrine was. And if you said, we disagree with that doctrine, the king would put you to death. In the case of Wycliffe and Tyndall and Huss, they were burned at the stake because they simply put the Bible down in a common language where people could read it. You have other people who were killed. The pilgrims were persecuted because they didn't attend the church services and the church the king told them to go to. They had their own church. They had a home church. And the king says, you're going to be fine. Every Sunday you don't go to my church. So over and over you have people being tried because of their religious belief in courts. Now, the three courts in Britain that usually tried those guys. Were the star chamber courts, the courts of the high chancery and the admiralty courts. And in those courts the judge had everything and there was no other outside input. They would take testimony from people not sworn under oath. They would hear say testimony; wouldn't it be direct testimony. You were not allowed to have an attorney to defend you. You were forced to incriminate yourself often by torture. Rick, do you believe this? No, I don't believe that. Well I'll drive a stake through your hand and see if you believe it now. And so after enough torture you'd confess to it. So all of this happens. And as a result, these reformers really criticize the English judicial system as violation of scriptures. That's when King James came out with his Bible. Now here's, we're talking original King James here. This King James Bible comes out and interestingly, it wipes out the commentaries. It doesn't want anybody complaining about what's going on. We've been doing this for a thousand years, let's just keep doing it. So you'll find that there's very little text differences in the King James from the Geneva, the text differences deal with judicial areas. In the trial of Jesus, in the trial of Paul and other trials. It didn't read the same as the Geneva Bible did. It reads different. Now, the next thing that happens is these books right here. These books right there, these are really old. This came out in the 1500s. This is called Fox's Book of Martyrs, okay, and it's got here and it shows the first martyrs being Jesus Christ and the apostles and et cetera. So it lists martyrs, it's two volumes set listing all these martyrs that happened and consistently through here they show these guys were martyred because of bad judicial process. They were martyred because the right judicial process was not used in the courts. So this is what they have in Great Britain. These three books here, when they come to America, they say, we're not doing this. We've had bad courts. The Fourth to the Eighth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the due process clauses are all based on these three books right here. 

Rick Green [00:20:35] So the very reason they put those protections in our Constitution; it all comes from the knowledge they had of these things. 

David Barton [00:20:43] These examples, the witch trails. We always hear about the witch trial and how terrible that was, and 27 people put to death in the witch trials. And yeah, that's terrible, 27 people to put to death. But there's something else about the witch trial we never talk about, and that is three Christian ministers are the ones who got it stopped. They went to Governor William Pipps in Massachusetts, they said, Governor, look at the biblical rules of evidence to be used in courts of law. You're not doing that. 

Rick Green [00:21:02] These were pastors. 

David Barton [00:21:03] These were pastors. John Wise, and Chris Mather, and Thomas Brattle. 

Rick Green [00:21:06] Because we're always taught, when we're taught the story of the Salem Witch Trials, the pastors are the bad guys. 

David Barton [00:21:09] Pastors are the Bad Guys. It was the government putting people to death. The pastors went to the governor and said, you've got to stop this. The governor called Samuel Sewell and said look, we've been violating the scriptures. We can't do this. They called it into the trials. Sewell got up in church and repented. The governor call for a day of fasting, humiliation, prayer, seeking to avert God's judgment. Pastors brought it into it. Now the significant thing is you had 27 people put to death in the Massachusetts witch trials. Hey, there were witch trials going on in Europe at the same time, 500,000 put to the death over there. See, this is what government was doing. It was the pastors who stepped in and said, no, no, this our heritage. We don't want this kind of stuff going in the courts. 

Rick Green [00:21:47] So our guys obviously were wrong for the 27, but the pastors came in and corrected it because of what they knew. 

David Barton [00:21:53] Well, the reason it wasn't $500,000. 

Rick Green [00:21:54] Yeah, and then you compare that to 500,000 who was never correct, you know, they never got the jury system right. They never came back in the right way. See, even your surprise. 

David Barton [00:21:59] See, even US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who is on the court, he is not a Christian, he's not a conservative, even he says the due process clauses come out of the Bible, due process clause of the Constitution. So when you look at the role of juries, juries were part of helping reach justice. And by the way, in the 1890s when the court says, oh by the we don't need juries doing this anymore, we the judges will do it, do you know that's the first time ever we had courts of appeal in the United States? We never needed Courts of Appeal because the people were the final word. If the jury gave a ruling that you were innocent of something, it didn't go anywhere else. It stopped. 

Rick Green [00:22:31] I've already learned more in 30 minutes with you on the judiciary than I did in three years of law school, but let's still try to get one more question. 

Questioner 3 [00:22:37] Shouldn't our judges be neutral with no political agenda? 

Rick Green [00:22:41] So should the courts, or the judges I guess, be influenced by the political process? 

David Barton [00:22:46] Well, judges should be influenced by political process, because it is not their duty to make law. It is their duty, to enforce the laws, interpret the laws. Not to decide whether they would have done the law differently. Quite frankly, when you go back a few years ago, when all the stuff with War on Terror was going, and Congress went to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, says we are given the authority to make all the regulations for land and sea forces, and for all the tribunals of those who are combatants against the U.S. And the court came up and said, ah, we don't like that. We think that they should be civil trials. And so the court went through and rewrote what Congress did because the court didn't like it. It wasn't a matter of constitutional or not. It's a matter, we got a different opinion on what the policy should be. 

Rick Green [00:23:26] It's back to what you said earlier in the program about it's a place to settle disputes. They were settling that public dispute. 

David Barton [00:23:31] They were settling the dispute; that's not their role. Their role is not to settle disputes. Congress makes the laws, and if Congress quotes explicit constitutional language to do it or dead, and the court said, well, we don't like that. We want a different policy. No, no, no. That's making the court a political body. They're supposed to take their guidance from Congress, uphold that, enforce it. What the court is asked to do is, was the jury decided right? Was the law applied fairly? Not whether the law was up or down, on good or bad. And see, that is where the court has really gotten out of bounds and turned itself into a political entity. I point back to the 2010 election. The people of Iowa really made themselves very clear on this. And in Iowa, after 161 years of marriage, meaning one man and one woman, by unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Iowa said, well, with the 161 year is wrong, we want something different. And so the people stepped up, and there were retention elections that year. And out of the seven Supreme Court justices, three were up for retention elections. In other words, you can check in or out, you don't have a choice. They don't want an opponent, but you can vote no, I don't want this judge to come back. And I was interviewed a lot in that because I did several meetings an hour at a time, and my line was real simple. Hey, these judges have just made themselves legislators. They're no longer judges. They decided to create policy out of thin air. I recommend that you send those three guys home so they can run for the legislature because that's evidently where they want to be. 

Rick Green [00:24:49] So that wasn't politics influencing the judge. That was that was the judge influencing and making policy. 

[00:24:53] Creating politics, exactly. And that is wrong. That is absolutely wrong. They're not to do that. The Federalist Papers right here, the question came up of will judges be able to make policy? And this book right here the greatest commentary ever on the Constitution written by guys who did the Constitution and guys on the first Supreme Court, they said there's not a syllable in the Constitution that authorizes the judges to judge the spirit of the Constitution. No, no, they don't have a wit of authority to do that. And so when you have, like you do in so many states where you can elect judges or retain them, the people then do become the final authority. Judiciary, it's not to be an independent branch of the people. No way, shape, fashion, or form, and they're not to the ones that shape politics. You know, they had an election in Missouri where the people said, hey, we don't want this tax increase. A judge came in and said, yes, you do want this tax increased even though you voted it down, and this is what your tax increase is going to be. Sorry, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution says nobody can institute a tax increase except the House of Representatives. Not even the Senate nor the President can increase taxes, only the House, and yet this judge says, but I want to increase the tax. I think there needs to be more money for education, so we're going to order a statewide tax on everyone. You have case after case after a case of judge coming in, making policy, or not liking what the people decided, or are not liking what the Congress did, not a matter of being unconstitutional. They call it unconstitutional because they don't like it, but then they implement their own opinions. And that is never, ever, ever to occur right back to this Constitution. The people. Are in charge of the government, they're in charge of all three branches, they are in charge of judges as well. 

Rick Green [00:26:23] Thanks for listening today, folks. Many of you have the DVD set of the American Heritage series. You can get the sequel, which is building on the American heritage series. A lot of new material, some fantastic programs you want to have in your library. You can it at our website today at wallbuilders.com. 

Questioner 1 [00:26:38] We stand undivided, forever united, fighting hand in hand for the liberty we've earned, for glory and honor, for our sons and daughters.  Ever mindful of the lessons we've learned. Let the torch of freedom burn.