Strom Thurmond

“ I am so entirely convinced that the jury is preeminently a political institution that I still consider it in this light when it is applied in civil causes. Laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the customs of a nation; customs are the only durable and resisting power in a people. When the jury is reserved for criminal offenses, the people witness only its occasional action in particular cases; they become accustomed to do without it in the ordinary course of life, and it is considered as an instrument, but not as the only instrument, of obtaining justice. ”

“ If a bill were introduced to repeal the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting, there would not be any question but that the Congress would not consider it because it would be unconstitutional. The qualifications of voting are reserved to the States. Why can we not look at it from that viewpoint and not try to say whether it is a good bill or a bad bill? On the right to vote bill, should there be any question whether we are going to accept this compromise? I do not think there should be any question at all, because the Constitution says a man charged with a crime is entitled to a jury trial. ”

“ Thus the State is seen as a continuing political being, controlled by its citizens and yet controlling them. The State can be bound in ways that its own people cannot be bound; it can exercise powers that no citizen or group of citizens may exercise for themselves. The State may buy, sell, hold, grant, convey; it may tax and spend; it may sue, and if it consent, be sued; it exists to create law and to execute law, to punish crime, administer justice, regulate commerce, enter into compacts with other States. Yet there is no State until a community of human beings create a State ”

“ Remember it and be of good cheer as Senators from the South fight against the so-called civil-liberty bill.
Civil liberty is indivisible.
It is the whole Constitution, the whole ideal. When you sacrifice one part for another you decrease and endanger the total. When the right to jury trial is impeached to save the right to vote there is net loss, and the same loss runs the whole constitutional gamut.
Basically, all American rights are civil rights. States’ rights are civil. The rights of Congress against the Supreme Court are civil, and of the executive against each, and vice versa. ”

“ No legislative act therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
Surely, it may be urged that precisely the same standard must be applied to other branches of the Federal Government—the executive and judicial no less than the legislative. ”

“ Americans can be free so long as they compel the governments they themselves have erected to govern strictly within the limits set by the Bill of Rights. They can be free so long, and no longer, as they call to account every governmental agent and officer who trespasses on these rights to the smallest extent. They can be free only if they are ready to repel, by force of arms if need be, every assault upon their liberty, no matter whence it comes. ”

“ The Constitution says “the trial of all crimes shall be by jury”—not all crimes except those involving contempt, but all crimes.
What power has been granted to this Congress to agree to any such proposal when it is in such complete contradiction to the Constitution? There is no power except the power of the people of this Nation by which the Constitution can be amended. The power of the people cannot be infringed upon by any lesser authority. ”

“ Rather smugly, perhaps, we Americans have taken for granted our right to a trial before a jury when we stand accused of violating the law.
So fixed in our system of jurisprudence and our common concepts of justice is the jury trial that few of us ever have stopped to consider the difference between having our guilt or innocence determined by a group of ordinary citizens and having a judge, a creature of the Government, mete out justice singlehandedly, as he alone sees it. ”

“ The jury teaches every man not to recoil before the responsibility of his own actions and impresses him with that manly confidence without which no political virtue can exist. It invests each citizen with a kind of magistracy; it makes them all feel the duties which they are bound to discharge toward society and the part which they take in its government. By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society. ”

“ In the turmoil which now seems to have engulfed the entire world, the citizens of the United States should well remember particularly that it is the people, those who go to make up the great cross-section of this country, who must guard the ramparts from the ever-increasing dangers of nazism, fascism, and communism. Our Constitution is the final safeguard of every right that is enjoyed by any American citizen. ”

“ The tradition of keeping the military subordinate to civilian authority may not be so strong in the minds of this generation as it was in the minds of those who wrote the Constitution. The idea that the relatives of soldiers could be denied a jury trial in a court of law and instead be tried by courts-martial under the guise of regulating the Armed Forces would have seemed incredible to those men, in whose lifetime the right of the military to try soldiers for any offenses in time of peace had only been grudgingly conceded. ”

“ Long books have been written on the nature of sovereignty, but they boil down to those necessities: The will to make, the power to unmake.
It was this power, this will, that the people as States claimed for themselves in 1776. Henceforth, they said, we are sovereign: The State government is not sovereign, nor is any citizen by himself sovereign. By the “sovereign State” we mean us citizens, the State; we collectively, within our established boundaries; this community of people; we alone who are possessed of the power to create or to abandon. ”

“ THURMOND: I will yield for a question.
Mr. O’MAHONEY. I shall frame it in the form of a question. Does not the Senator agree that we are all weary and worn down; that most of us are almost as tired as is the Senator himself; and that perhaps when we return in January in the full vigor of our bodies and minds we shall be able to do a better job than we can do at this session of the Congress? I am going to introduce a jury-trial amendment in the next session in the firm belief that this jury-trial amendment accomplishes nothing; that it does not at all help the advocates of civil rights. ”

“ The jury, and more especially the civil jury, serves to communicate the spirit of the judges to the minds of all the citizens; and this spirit, with the habits which attend it, is the soundest preparation for free institutions. It imbues all classes with a respect for the thing judged and with the notion of right. If these two elements be removed, the love of independence becomes a mere destructive passion. It teaches men to practice equity; every man learns to judge his neighbor as he would himself be judged. ”

“ If the South loses to superior power, either in the form of votes in Congress or any other form of force, let it not be said that the South gave its consent. Someday, if it is not then too late, the rest of the country may come to its senses. The South may be able to hasten that day by resisting wreckers of the Republic. If the people of the United States realized what was being done to their country, they would not offer up the South as a sacrifice, nor compromise with liberty. ”

“ It is incredible that those who like to boast that they are liberals and protectors of individual rights are crying the loudest for the currently misnamed civil-rights legislation which would deny alleged violators the right to trial by jury. The politically inspired anti-South force bill package has induced such a state of hypnosis in the self-styled liberals that they want to replace constitutional guarantees of civil liberties with their own false notions of civil rights. ”

“ Throughout history many transgressions by the military have been called slight and have been justified as reasonable in light of the uniqueness of the times. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that today the peoples of many nations are ruled by the military.
We should not break faith with this Nation’s tradition of keeping military power subservient to civilian authority, a tradition which we believe is firmly embodied in the Constitution. The country has remained true to that faith for almost 170 years. Perhaps no group in the Nation has been truer than military men themselves. ”

“ Read the role of big States in which the Negroes can be expected to poll 5 percent or more of the total vote—not only New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but such States as Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, and California. It then becomes clear what is at stake in the civil-rights struggle—nothing less than the future balance of political power in the Nation.
But, Mr. President, are we going to compromise the Constitution, whether we lose an election or not? Which is more important—to win an election or to preserve the Constitution? ”

“ A guaranty of trial by jury, squeezed into a civil-rights law by vote of a Senate subcommittee, has been hailed as a southern victory.
This victory—though it is little more than solace in a string of defeats—in fact belongs to the American Republic. Southerners are not alone in danger. If the Federal Government can deprive southerners of the right of trial by jury, on the ground that they are unfair to Negroes, it can do the same to citizens of other regions on equally flimsy grounds. ”

“ There was a day when the absence of such rights in other countries could fill an American with incredulous pity. Yet today, over vast reaches of the earth, governments exist that have robbed their citizens by force or fraud of every one of the essential rights American citizens still enjoy. Usage blunts surprise, yet how can we regard without amazement and horror the depths to which the subjects of the totalitarian powers have fallen?
The lesson is plain for all to read. No men enjoy freedom who do not deserve it. No men deserve freedom who are unwilling to defend it. ”

“ The jury system as it is understood in America appears to me to be as direct and as extreme a consequence of the sovereignty of the people as universal suffrage. They are two instruments of equal power, which contribute to the supremacy of the majority. All the sovereigns who have chosen to govern by their own authority, and to direct society instead of obeying its directions, have destroyed or enfeebled the institution of the jury. The Tudor monarchs sent to prison jurors who refused to convict, and Napoleon caused them to be selected by his agents. ”

“ Yes, the world that we know is being re-fashioned. But so be it, and although the disappearance of familiar patterns and habits of living brings a momentary shock, there must be no regrets, no longing backward glances. Neither can we afford to hang our heads, wring our hands and insist that we cannot defend democracy without destroying it. After all, the only disaster that will overtake us is the disaster that comes from indecision and inaction.
I like to remind myself of the origin of the Bill of Rights. ”