Elaine Chao Quotes

13 years after Indonesia began devolving power from the federal government to hundreds of sub provincial units, the link between local and national political interests have become extremely tenuous… although locally elected politicians may be delivering things that people want in their own back yards, they are not, collectively meeting the nation’s needs.

It is through states that the American people get the job done every day, often in spite of a deeply flawed bureaucratic federal government.

The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.

Our nation is too different, too diverse to say that what works in Massachusetts is somehow going to be grabbed by the federal government, usurping the power of states and imposing a one-size-fits-all plan on the nation. That will not work.

No more top-down politics with Westminster dictating what's right for every community. We must all be partners in designing a better future for our country.

I don't want to be the president of the United States. I do want to work with the governors across the country to make the states more pivotal, more powerful, as they should be.

That's what I think regions are about, making central government more accountable and fairer.

Everyone, Republican or otherwise has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too young to do something.

I would support a devolution of power out of Washington for education, health care, transportation.

I think a lot of things could be handled locally.

I'm a great believer in governments doing as little as possible and people power doing the rest, so I'm in favour of governments being there to govern in the areas that need governing, not a whole heap of other things that they stick their sticky fingers into.

What is good for Alaska is good for the country. Transferring power from the federal government to the states provides opportunity to all states, not just Alaska.

Primarily, we need to change 100 years of thinking, where we try to extend the promise of American life by moving things to Washington, and let's move it the other way: less of Washington, more from ourselves.

Texans can run Texas without the federal government telling them what to do.

No government at any level has all the answers.

If the Federal government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time.

The more responsibility you can move toward local government, the better of you're going to be … City governments do better than their State governments in terms of accountability.

Central government's such as Canada's have become too small to deal with the big global issues, yet they remain too large and distant to deal with problems of local control.

Perhaps democracy should be begun at the local level first. America was many local democracies before democracy came to the national level.

This is a country that historically has had very little central government.

… state authority should not be needlessly usurped by a centralized government. But I also believe that an obligation rests with the national government to see that the citizens of every state are treated equally.

Many states have legalized medicinal marijuana. I believe the president and the Department of Justice ought to respect the will of these separate states... We are capable of self-government. We don't need some federal gendarme to come and tell us what to do. I believe comity toward the states...ought to govern the policy.

In the space of just 18 months from 1999 to 2001, one of the world’s most centralized nations [Indonesia] burst apart to become one of its most decentralized.

Our best protection against bigger government in Washington is better government in the states.

Self-government does not and should not imply the use of political agencies alone. Progress is born of cooperation in the community - not from governmental restraints.