Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker once said that the courts were intended to be the “inferior” branch of government and criticized the power of the Supreme Court to declare presidential acts unconstitutional.
In an interview with CaffeinatedThoughts.com in 2014 about his candidacy for an Iowa state Senate seat, Whitaker argued the view that “unelected judges” were deciding policy issues in place of elected representatives in Congress.
{mosads}“The courts are supposed to be the inferior branch of our three branches of government. We have unfortunately off loaded many of our tough public policy issues onto the court and they’ve decided them,” he said in remarks highlighted Thursday by The New York Times.
Whitaker, who has taken the helm at the Justice Department following the ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, also took aim in the interview at major Supreme Court rulings when asked if there were he disagreed with, including the one that established the process of judicial review.
“I would start with the idea of Marbury v. Madison. That’s probably a good place to start and the way it’s looked at the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional issues,” Whitaker said in the interview, adding that there are “so many” Supreme Court decisions he disapproved of to choose from.
Whitaker’s views on a number of issues, including the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference, surfaced this week after he was put in charge of the investigation following the firing of Sessions and the announcement that deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would no longer oversee the probe.
In a 2017 interview, Whitaker asserted that evidence had already proved that the Trump campaign had no involvement with Russia during the 2016 election, despite Robert Mueller’s investigation remaining ongoing.
“The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” Whitaker said on a right-leaning talk radio show, according to The Daily Beast.