Gingrich Campaign Press Release - Newt 2012 Responds to New York Times on the Judiciary

The following letter to the editor by Vince Haley, policy director for Newt 2012, was published in the October 31 edition of the New York Times.

"The Court and the Next President" (editorial, Oct. 29) asserts that "it may not be in the Republicans' best interests to have a sober national debate" about the judicial branch. Newt Gingrich disagrees, which is why he has put the issue of restoring the proper role of the judicial branch front and center in his campaign.

The modern Supreme Court claims that its interpretations of the Constitution are binding on the executive and legislative branches. The founding fathers believed otherwise and President Abraham Lincoln acted otherwise, issuing passports to free blacks and signing legislation that limited the extension of slavery, both in clear defiance of the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott.

Today, as federal courts have intervened in sectors of American life never before imaginable, the public has increasingly come to view them as an usurpative device for unelected rulers. This abuse of power and loss of public confidence amounts to a constitutional crisis.

In response, Mr. Gingrich supports the view that the executive and legislative branches each have an independent responsibility to interpret the Constitution, and in those rare circumstances when they believe the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have engaged in a serious constitutional error, they can choose among an array of constitutional powers to check and balance the courts.

Specifically, Mr. Gingrich believes that the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Boumediene giving captured noncitizen enemy combatants the constitutional right to access American courts to challenge their detention was wrongly decided and should be ignored by the executive branch and challenged by Congress.

VINCE HALEY

Policy Director, Newt 2012