Conservative talker Mark Levin echoed his disapproval Monday of last week’s Supreme Court decision on President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care legislation, questioning the suggestion that Chief Justice John Roberts was attempting to defer to Congress’ court on this issue and restating calls for terms limits for justices.
“That’s not the job of a judge to throw it here or throw it there or throw it anywhere,” Levin, author of “Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America,” said on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” “The fact of the matter is his decision can’t be thrown anywhere. His decision, apart from Obamacare, has perverted the Constitution and opened a gaping hole and further diminishes it. So, you can’t throw that to Congress to fix right now. That was his job and he failed on his job. And if we buy the argument he was throwing it to the political branches and so forth, he concocted, he rewrote the statute. He concocted an argument to do it. We don’t believe that justices should do that.”
Levin responded to host Neil Cavuto’s suggestion that Roberts could be too aware of the political environment and that is affecting his decisions. In his 2006 book “Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America,” Levin proposed term limits for justices as a fix for a court that is too influenced by politics.
“I think he reads the tea leaves, I think it turns out he’s extremely political — to my great chagrin — I think he reads the media,” Levin said. “I think the libs know that and the libs, like the mob, will be in for the next decision. This is just the first. They’re going to want more from him. This is why I argued six or seven years ago in ‘Men in Black’ — and I’m going to reintroduce this argument: term limits for justices. If justices want to be political, then they shouldn’t serve for life because the American people deserve better than this. And that’s the bottom line. Whatever Roberts thinks — whatever we call this, a tax, a punishment, a cucumber. The fact of the matter is we, the American people, deserve public officials — whether they’re elected or appointed to serve for life or for limited terms — who are go to uphold our institutions. And if not going to do it, there’s 312 million Americans — we’ll find some who can.”
Levin also noted that the justices appointed by Republicans are always the ones who evolve while on the bench, but never Democrats appointees.
“Isn’t it interesting, all the justices you mentioned were nominated by Republicans” Levin said. “I can’t think of a Democrat president putting a Democrat on the bench anytime in the last 40, 50 years who disappointed the left. They are hard line. They go down the line not conservative or constitutionalists. All the pressure from academia — that is law schools and media — goes one way and some of them buckle. That’s why guys like [Samuel] Alito, [Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas, and in this one case, [Anthony] Kennedy, deserve our praise: They withstood the firestorm. They did a great job.”