Arthur Goldberg Quotes

Every time a president invokes executive privilege, there are three relevant audiences he has to think about: the courts, Congress, and the public.

There's several different forms of executive privilege. The one that is most absolute would be close advisers talking to the president himself.

The upshot of the Nixon tapes case was that any president is going to have an extremely hard time resisting a request from a law enforcement officer.

There are a lot of presidents in both parties - including President Obama - who had strong claims of executive privilege that I certainly think went too far.

Every president since George Washington has taken executive privilege seriously. Every Republican president has.

Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors.

There is not a single Supreme Court case that insinuates that the President can violate a federal statute in order to gather foreign intelligence. It was a flagrant violation of The Constitution.

I’m not your lawyer. But if I were in your shoes, I’d tell the President to burn the tapes immediately and then proclaim he’d done so as a matter of national security and executive privilege and out of an obligation to protect the office of the presidency.

Executive Privilege

The President of the United States will not stand and be questioned like a chicken thief by men whose names he does not even know.

We can't give excessive, unfettered power to a president to act alone, to bind an entire country to a set of principles, a set of rules that the president, him or herself, makes.

I think executive orders with Donald Trump would be a very blunt instrument with respect to the Constitution.

Why should we allow a Democrat President in the White House to use executive orders and not do the same with a Republican President?

Even George W. Bush, who as president pushed the boundaries of executive power, never proposed a statutory scheme to hold people indefinitely.

In a case involving his private conduct, a President should be treated like any private citizen. The rule of law requires no more - and no less.

Executive privilege is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, and thus is a very limited principle.

Naturally, the president, as a US citizen, cannot be removed from the country. Nor can the president, who is the country's chief executive, be restricted from access to classified information or provided with falsified information.

The Constitution gives the president of the United States an extraordinarily wide grant of authority to use the power of the pardon.

I didn't say 'former president,' I said 'president,' and I have the constitutional rights according to the constitution, including immunity from prosecution.

The office of the president is the most powerful in the world. It is also, at times, the most powerless.

If I have to, I will use one challenge after another to dismantle governmental operations that I consider violations of the Constitution.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.

I do not espouse the unitarian position. President Clinton's assertion of directive authority over administration, more than President Reagan's assertion of a general supervisory authority, raises serious constitutional questions.