Transcript for Judge Andrew Napolitano

[EMCEE] A few of you out there might have seen a little show called Freedom Watch.

You guys ever see that?

[applause]

Well, we got some big news.

Starting September 14th, and ya'll are the first people to hear this,

starting September 14th, Freedom Watch is gonna be on every day, 4:30 to 5:00 p.m. EST

We all gotta tune in, give support and email Fox News

let them know at Foxnews.com that you appreciate them having the Judge on

because he is taking off. He is going to be all over the place.

[APPLAUSE]

FoxNews.com, 4:30 to 5:00, every day. You guys gotta tune in.

And uh, I don't think our next guest needs very much introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, Judge Andrew Napolitano.

[APPLAUSE]

[NAPOLITANO] I hate to speak last. I have to follow two giants.

Lew Rockwell has done more to cement the intellectual foundations of the movement for liberty than anybody else today.

[APPLAUSE]

And Tom Woods has explained in his runaway, easy to read best seller "Meltdown"

how we got in this mess better than anybody else today

[APPLAUSE]

I was speaking to a group not unlike this about 7 or 8 years ago,

and in the audience was a great man and I didn't know it.

And in the middle of giving one of my favorite quotations by Thomas Jefferson, I looked in the third row.

And I met this man eye-to-eye, face-to-face for the first time.

And it was Ron Paul. And I said, and I don't know what inspired me to say this,

but it stuck and I'm glad it has, I said, "Oh my God. Here is the modern day Thomas Jefferson."

[APPLAUSE]

I'll tell you a crazy story about how I got my start at Fox.

I have not hesitated for one bit to criticize George W. Bush.

He has shown less fidelity to constitutional government than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

[APPLAUSE]

But I bear a little responsibility for his election. Now here's how this happened.

It's December of 2000. We're in the 38th day of the 42 day recount.

All vacations at Fox are cancelled. All weekends at Fox are cancelled.

I'm sleeping on the couch in my office. We're going 24/7 'round the clock live,

and I'm the expert in Florida election law, and one night I'm on-air with Brit Hume

I'm in New York and he's in D.C. Through the magic of television it looks like we're in the same room.

And all of a sudden in the middle of he and I talking, you know one of those swoosh alerts that Fox does

about 8 or 9 times a minute it seems, One of those alerts comes down

and the alert is that the Florida Supreme Court has just come down with it's third ruling on the recount.

And it has ordered that the recount resume not only in the 4 counties that Al Gore, and this will all come back to ya,

has challenged, but in all 70 counties of the state of Florida.

People were ready to pull their hair out. They want this thing to be over with.

And we understand that Governor Bush's lawyers are going to appeal this decision of the Supreme Court

of Florida to the United States Court of Appeals of the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

Hume says to me, "What do you think about that?"

And I said, "Well that's wrong. The Court of Appeals, without getting too technical, in Atlanta does not have jurisdiction to hear an appeal from the Florida Supreme Court."

And he said, "Well, what should Bush's people do?"

I said, "They should get in their cars and drive to Georgetown, which is where Justice Anthony Kennedy lives."

"He hears urgent appeals from the area of the United States where Florida is."

"They should knock on the door of his house, and file an emergency appeal. "

"With the stroke of a pen he can stop the decision of the Florida Supreme Court and then pull the other 8 justices."

End of Hume's show. I go upstairs to take a nap because in 3 hours I'm on with O'Reilly.

You need all the rest you can get for that!

[LAUGHTER]

At 7:00 my ever garrulous, ever charming, ever freedom loving colleague Shepherd Smith comes on

and another one of those swoosh alerts!

And the alert is this: "Lawyers for Governor Bush Have Just Been Sighted In Georgetown."

[LAUGHTER]

"Looking For The House Of Justice Anthony Kennedy!"

And then as only Shep can do, he looks in the camera, and he goes, "Do you know what this means?"

"This means that George W. Bush is watching Fox!"

[LAUGHTER]

"And he's getting his legal advice from Judge Napolitano."

[APPLAUSE]

And the rest is history.

I have a couple of beliefs, firm beliefs which Jefferson called truisms.

A truism is something that is so obvious that it doesn't have to be proven.

And here they are. The first of my truisms is

that God created every human being on the planet in His own image and likeness.

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And because He is perfectly free, He has created us in a state of perfect freedom.

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And that in order to protect those freedoms, and for no other purpose, we have established a government.

And the only legitimate role of the government is to protect human freedom.

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Every individual has an immortal soul capable of glorifying God infinitely and eternally.

The government is just an artificial organization based on fear and force.

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If you don't believe me you can take the words of the first two American presidents.

George Washington said it was based on force and John Adams said it was based on fear.

I think they knew what they were talking about.

Now, there was a time when everybody in America believed all this.

Tom Woods has just given us a brilliant and succinct analysis of how we lost these beliefs.

and consequently lost the freedoms that the beliefs animated.

I'm going to tell you some stories that are even gloomier.

There is a happy ending but the stories are gloomy.

You know all these things.

We start out as colonists.

We start out with a king and a parliment that wants money from us.

What else do governments want, besides power and money?

And our children.

The parliment enacts the stamp act and the stamp act requires that every piece of paper in your possession

every book, every deed, every mortgage, every lease, every poster you're going to nail to a tree has to have a stamp on it.

You had to go to a British government office in the colonies and buy the King's stamp.

Question: How did the king know if every piece of paper in your possession had the king's image on it?

Answer: The parliment enacted the Writs of Assistance Act. What the heck did that do?

That let British soldiers write their own search warrants.

It authorized them to authorize themselves to enter any home, any building, any dwelling

obstensibly for the purpose of looking for the stamps.

Of course while they were there

they frequently helped themselves to what they wanted

including the home itself.

We fought a revolution.

We won the revolution.

[APPLAUSE]

We wrote a constitution.

But before we wrote it, we had an argument.

The argument was in Philadelphia in 1787

where it was hotter than it is here in Galveston today.

And the argument was this.

Where do our freedoms come from?

There was, even in Philadelphia in 1787, a big government crowd.

You know their names.

Alexander Hamilton.

John Adams.

These guys argued that our freedoms come from the government.

That the government is the one who says we can speak freely

and travel freely and worship as we wish

and as long as the government says that

and the government is compelled to say that, we're safe.

Jefferson, who wasn't there, but Madison who was

made the argument that our freedoms come from our humanity.

Not from the government.

That as God created us in His image and likeness

freedom is our birthright.

It is as natural to us as the fingers on the ends of our hands

or the nose in the middle of our face.

[APPLAUSE]

The argument that freedom is our birthright was not a new one.

Jefferson had made the same argument 12 years earlier

when he wrote in The Declaration of Independence

that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

And among these is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

When he wrote that,

and when every single delegate to the Constitutional Congress pledged their lives, fortunes,

and sacred honors to support that,

he wedded the American soul to the concept of natural rights.

That our right to think as we wish,

to say what we think,

to publish what we say.

The right to worship as we see fit.

The right to protect ourselves, even against the government.

[APPLAUSE]

Just as an aside, do you know what that means?

That means if the state of Texas

or the state of New Hampshire

authorizes you to carry a gun,

you can carry that gun no matter who walks into that room.

[APPLAUSE]

I don't even know that kid's name but he's a new American hero.

Back to the litany of rights.

The most unique American right after the right to life

is the right to be left alone.

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Thus the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says

the government can't write it's own search warrants

Can't knock on your door.

Can't break it down.

Can't arrest you.

Can't take your property.

Can't look at your personal papers, effects or things,

unless they present real evidence of real crime to a judge.

So the constitution puts a neutral judge between the government and the government's target,

no matter how guilty is the target.

No matter how threatening is the target.

No matter how feared is the target.

No matter how widespread is the belief of the guilt of the target.

Any government and every government that wants to get to that target

must first go to a judge and present evidence of probable cause.

[APPLAUSE]

That's what the law used to be.

Until a president from the Lone Star State

persuaded the supposedly freedom loving Republican party

that it could do away with the 4th Amendment.

Remember the Writs of Assistance Act?

We fought against a king when his soldiers knocked on our doors

with self-written search warrants.

The most abomidable piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act,

which made it a crime to criticize everybody in the government but the Vice President

because the Vice President was Thomas Jefferson who welcomed their criticism,

but the most abomidable piece of contempory legislation is the Patriot Act.

[APPLAUSE]

You think that the 4th Amendment protects you? Look again.

The Patriot Act lets federal agents write their own search warrants.

And the Patriot Act makes it a felony for the recipient of those search warrants to tell anyone.

Let me get this straight.

What part of "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,"

What part of "The People shall be secure in their persons, places, houses and things," does Congress not understand?

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The Bush administration prosecuted an 86 year old librarian

because the FBI served her with a self-written search warrant

to find out who had borrowed books from a public library,

and she told her 74 year old assistant.

So they prosecuted her for speaking.

They have made it a crime to tell the truth.

Question in an open courtroom to the 86 year old lady under oath:

"Did you receive a self-written search warrant?

If she answers yes and tells the truth she goes to jail for 5 years for speaking the truth.

That's the nature, the incidious nature, the damnable nature of this piece of legislation

that the Congress has imposed on us

and which regretably, my dear friends, is still the law today.

None of them read it.

I spoke to a group of members of Congress in another state

not far from here. I don't even want to tell you who it is.

And some of them came up to me afterwards and said, "Well, we voted for this thing,

but we didn't know that it let federal agents write their own search warrants,

or that it made it a crime for people to tell anyone."

So I asked the question that you all know the answer to.

"Did you read it?" "No, of course not."

In the case of the Patriot Act, they actually have an excuse for not reading it.

Because the Republican leadership in the House took this 315 page piece of legislation

which I have read 3 times and which takes 20 hours to read

and put it on the House intranet,

the internal internet for House members and their senior staff, for 15 minutes before it was time to vote.

The attorney general told the House of Representatives

that there was a terrorist behind every bedbug and under every tree

and next to every toilet, and we have to sort of,

can't worry about these fine points of the Constitution.

We need these powers to go after these people now!

There have been 6 prosecutions under the Patriot Act.

3 have been for pornography, 2 have been for corruption

and 1 was the old librarian from Bridgeport.

Has any of that made you safe?

Of course not!

But it has made you less free.

Now this did not start with George W. Bush.

It started with John Adams.

The Alien and Sedition Act. Think about it.

The very same generation and in many cases the very same human beings

that wrote, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,"

just 9 years later enacted legislation that authorized the punishment of speech.

Jefferson allowed the statute to expire.

But human beings were put in real jails

hotter than this room we're in today

because they dared to criticize the president.

And several of them were put in jails for criticizing the President's enormous waistline.

When Jefferson was president,

he caused the Congress to enact legislation which proported to pay them back for their time in jail.

That's how odious he found it.

But this idea that the American republic,

the American constitutional form of government

is the greatest force for good in the Western world

only makes sense if the guarantees in the constitution are real guarantees.

And if the people we elect to the government really believe this,

When I was on the bench and lawyers would come before me from the government,

whether they were prosecutors in criminal cases or whether it was a civil case where somebody sued the government

because a policeman ran them over or they fell on the sidewalk

I can't remember the government asking me to enforce the Constitution.

The government asks judges to avoid and evade the Constitution

because the government hates freedom.

Freedom is an obstacle to the government's aquisition of power.

And that's all the government wants.

[APPLAUSE]

I look around this room and I see so many bright and happy faces

that are happy that we are part of this crusade.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger.

YOU ARE THAT GENERATION!

THIS IS THAT HOUR!

NOW IS THAT TIME!

[APPLAUSE]

Whenever you deal with the government,

whenever you deal with the government, take your cell phone.

and make sure it has a camera,

because the camera is the new gun.

The same government that fears freedom fears the disinfectant of the light of day.

And that's what the camera does to them!

[APPLAUSE]

Occasionally there are some of my former colleagues

who wear black robes who have done the right thing.

When the Bush administration said we can take people to Cuba

because we don't have to obey the constitution or the treaties

or the laws. We can torture them and best of all we don't have to worry about those pesky federal judges

The Supreme Court said by a vote of 8 to 1 that you can't.

When the Congress enacted legislation that said if the president declares you an enemy combatant

you don't have the right to habeas corpus, meaning you can't force the government to come before a neutral judge

and justify its unlawful confinement of you and the Supreme Court by a vote of 5 to 4 said, "You can't."

When the president said he could lock up Americans and throw away the key,

because they were too dangerous to talk to their parents or spouses, their lawyers, or other prisoners,

but he could keep them in jail for as long as he wanted

without even charging them with a crime, by a vote of 6-3 the Supreme Court said, "You can't."

In fact, every single time that people took the Bush administration

to the Supreme Court over its so-called War on Terror, the government lost and freedom won.

[APPLAUSE]

I remember having a debate with one of my more....

irritable colleagues, and he said to me, "What is your problem with this, uh Patriot Act?

"And what's your problem with Gitmo?"

I looked at him and I said, "You know, you like all this stuff."

Bush was president at the time.

"You like all this stuff because you trust the president."

"What happens when these powers are passed on to a President that you don't trust?"

And he looked at me and he said "Well, when I am sent to Gitmo, will you come to visit me?"

And I said, "Bill," [LAUGHTER]

And I said, "Bill, no!" [LAUGHTER]

Thomas Moore, one of my heroes, my personal patron saint, the patron saint of lawyers,

was arguing on his own behalf in his own trial, which we all know he lost, for treason.

The act of treason, the alleged act of treason,

was the refusal to agree that the king is the head of the church on earth.

That was the act of treason.

And Moore, in presenting his closing argument to the jury, said to them, "Some men say

the earth is flat, and some men say it is round. But if it is flat, can the king's command make it round?"

"And if it is round, can a law of parliment make it flat?"

He was of course, appealing to the common sense of his jurors.

He was also appealing to their understanding of the natural law.

That our rights are ours, by virtue of our humanity.

That God has given order to certain events in the world and there are things that the government can't change.

And if our rights come from our humanity, then no law, no proclamation no executive order,

no command, no piece of legislation that no one has read but the printer who put it on paper,

can take those rights away.

[APPLAUSE]

In World War I Woodrow Wilson and the progressives arrested people that they called anarchists.

They were mostly Eastern European Jews from Boston to Baltimore

who spoke...spoke against the war.

And they enacted legislation which is still called law today called The Espionage Act of 1917

which makes it a crime to speak against the government's war effort.

When the New York Times, of which I'm not particulary fond but never the less

revealed the government was spying on people without warrants

something that the Attorney General under oath a year before had denied they were doing,

he threatened them. He threatened to prosecute them under the Espionage Act.

Imagine that! The government was going to prosecute some newspaper for speaking the truth

on the basis of a 1917 law written in an era of hysteria against Eastern European Jews.

FDR locked up 150,000 Japanese-Americans

and in New Jersey 10,000 Italian-Americans,

not because they did or said anything but because they belonged to a racial or ethnic group that he feared.

That he feared that they might not be loyal.

They were as American as he was. In fact, they were more American than he was!

[APPLAUSE]

And of course we know that Abraham Lincoln slaughtered 600,000 Americans.

His troops raped women, and robbed banks,

Destroyed courthouses. Burnt towns.

And they all got away with it.

All in the name of big government. Of order. Of safety.

I hear the devil coming from around the tree,

And the Devil stopped to talk to me.

And the devil said, "Give me your liberty, and I'll keep you safe."

Don't ever let anyone make that diabolical bargain in your behalf.

[APPLAUSE]

There is one fear, there is one fear that is a good fear.

And Jefferson reminded us of it.

When the people fear the government, that is tyranny.

When the government fears the people, that is liberty!

God bless you! [APPLAUSE]