"We would be false to our trust if we allowed the time it takes to give effect to constitutional rights to be used as the very reason for taking away those rights"
About this Quote
A government that drags its feet can’t be allowed to claim the drag as proof the work was impossible. Frank Murphy’s line is a clean rebuke to a favorite trick of power: weaponizing delay. It’s not just a defense of constitutional rights; it’s an indictment of the bureaucratic alibi. The sentence is built like a legal trapdoor. “False to our trust” frames public office as fiduciary duty, not partisan spoils. Rights aren’t optional programs that can be paused when inconvenient; they’re obligations that bind the state precisely when compliance is hard.
The key move is the inversion: the “time it takes” to realize rights becomes, in bad faith, “the very reason” to revoke them. Murphy is calling out a logic that sounds administrative but functions as moral sabotage. If enforcement is slow, critics say the right is unworkable. If implementation is costly, they say the right is dangerous. Delay gets laundered into justification.
Context matters: Murphy, a New Deal-era politician and later Supreme Court justice, lived through the Great Depression, wartime emergency powers, and the normalization of “temporary” suspensions of liberty. His warning reads as a preemptive strike against the argument that crisis logistics or social resistance should narrow the Constitution. Subtext: rights don’t fail because they take time; they fail when officials treat time as a veto. The line still lands because it names a pattern we recognize: institutions starving a right of resources, then declaring it dead on arrival.
The key move is the inversion: the “time it takes” to realize rights becomes, in bad faith, “the very reason” to revoke them. Murphy is calling out a logic that sounds administrative but functions as moral sabotage. If enforcement is slow, critics say the right is unworkable. If implementation is costly, they say the right is dangerous. Delay gets laundered into justification.
Context matters: Murphy, a New Deal-era politician and later Supreme Court justice, lived through the Great Depression, wartime emergency powers, and the normalization of “temporary” suspensions of liberty. His warning reads as a preemptive strike against the argument that crisis logistics or social resistance should narrow the Constitution. Subtext: rights don’t fail because they take time; they fail when officials treat time as a veto. The line still lands because it names a pattern we recognize: institutions starving a right of resources, then declaring it dead on arrival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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