Bruce Fein Quotations

There is no pattern of demonstration that justices appointed by the president then try to defend the president's constitutional prerogatives.

History teaches that nations do not learn from history.

Mission creep is not unique to Congress. It is endemic to all arms of the federal government....

...[O]ur Founding Fathers enshrined a constitutional separation of powers for the ages undeluded by the fantasy that angels would win elections.

She's an inkblot -- the last person who is going to look at Roe v. Wade and say, 'the reasoning is flawed,' and tell us why, ... She'll just follow the path of every justice in the last 25 years who comes to the bench without a developed philosophy and ends up in the liberal camp. People whose intellect is as thin and dubious as hers will be too intellectually timid to challenge orthodoxy.

Nothing in Al Gonzales? public statements, legislative proposals or anything else suggests that this is an individual who operates outside of the political gyroscope of President Bush.

giants who change the philosophy of law and have spoken about changing ideas.

He will not be blunderbuss and say the president has carte blanche, ... On the other hand, he is not going to ignore national security. He will pay deference, but not blind deference.

He is a man who is not tortured by doubt over the correctness of his judicial philosophy.

What you find is that the U.S. Supreme Court very seldom if ever marches very far from the conventional thinking of contemporary society. They pay attention and are infected by mainstream thinking of what's moral and what's right and what's just.

Here, insofar as there is discrepancy, it is not like the others that are politically neutral, ... Here, it is patently likely to favor one candidate or another.

Katherine Harris is going to live and die on (President Bush's) coattails. She is not someone who has political legs. She is more tied to the president than the ordinary member of the House.

I think the administration is misreading the Senate and the public, because you end up losing more if your credibility is strained and people think you're playing them for dupes.

Our forefathers understood that 'trust me' was not good enough for protecting civil liberties.

plant the seeds of racial separateness and of hatred in the law.

It creates an aura for an ordinary person where maybe they will think twice about the privacy of their Internet searches.

The government has the obligation to come forth and make its own case.

The problem and the danger of the Bush administration is that they know no limits. It's a total lack of understanding of separation of power and checks and balances.

There's nothing to suggest that in 60 years, she's ever thought or written a word about the U.S. Constitution. This is an opportunity squandered.

The tipping point in Washington is when you go from being a subject of caricature to the subject of laughter. She's in danger of becoming the subject of laughter.

I've talked with him for hours. His philosophy is pretty solid. I would be stunned if John ended up resembling a Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in his approach to constitutional interpretation.

The most important thing to me, in terms of thinking about the issue of impeachment, is to recognize that the Constitution does place a value on continuity. We don't want to have a situation where you make a single error, and you're exposed to an impeachment proceeding.

The burden of persuasion is on the president to establish the program's legality.

You wouldn't need a warrant to do the initial interception, but afterwards, once you're targeting the American citizen, then you need that warrant.

They should be embracing those memos. They are squandering the opportunity to move public perception.

You can't have two ballots that are identical ... and have (them) counted in one way in one county and another way in another county,

It seems to me he is conceding that there are other NSA surveillance programs ongoing that the president hasn't told anyone about.

It makes it easier for Roberts, tougher to fill O'Connor's seat.

The attorney general's repeated refrain was, 'Trust us' - we have all the necessary checks and balances within NSA and the Justice Department.

Not only John, but the entire Reagan administration Justice Department, was inclined toward a broad recognition of executive power and executive privilege,

He's living in a time warp. The great irony is Bush inherited the strongest presidency of anyone since Franklin Roosevelt, and Cheney acts as if he's still under the constraints of 1973 or 1974.

The Department of Justice statement is fatuous. If you can't tell by looking at his opinions what kind of philosophy he would carry to the Supreme Court, how would you know to nominate him? A judge has a personal view of what the Constitution means.