Calvin Coolidge Quotes
I soon found that the Senate had but one fixed rule … which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.
Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933, 30th President of the United States (Republican, MA), Description of his learning about the Senate when he had become Vice President
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
His main reason for believing this is that all appropriations bills must be initiated by the House of Representatives. Lobbyists therefore often give the House more attention than the Senate.
The assumption of one supreme authority being necessary for a state, has been the most common assumption in almost all cultures and times before the American Revolution. What is amazing is that the Founding Fathers rejected this notion in favor of our complex system of checks and balances restrained by a Constitution which no society had ever tried before. England in contrast as it became more democratic, simply shifted the supreme, uncontrollable entity from the King to the Parliament which it is even today. Parliament can do virtually anything unrestrained by anything except their judgment and tradition.
After his presidency, Calvin Coolidge was approached to determine his interest in becoming the president of his alma mater, Amherst College:
President Abraham Lincoln had pocket vetoed his own party's reconstruction bill in the midst of an election year.
Calvin Coolidge was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 30th president of the United States from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from New England, born in Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of Massachusetts. His response to the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. The next year, he was elected the 29th vice president of the United States, and he succeeded to the presidency upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative and also as a man who said very little and had a rather dry sense of humor.
