Paul Begala Quotes

The administration of George W. Bush, emboldened by the Sept. 11 attacks and the backing of a Republican Congress, has sought to further extend presidential power over national security. Most of the expansion has taken place in secret, making Congressional or judicial supervision particularly difficult.

The Whigs have cast me off, and they shall repent it.

I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon. They called it the imperial presidency when he was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated.

You don't say, like the Bush crowd, 'I got this guy over here and I don't like him and I'm gonna get him, whether you back me or not.'

People who vote against this today are voting against me and I will not forget.

As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I've met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.

The modern presidency, as expressed in the policies of the administration of George W. Bush, provides the strongest piece of evidence that we are governed by a fundamentally different Constitution from that of the framers.

It's ironic, isn't it, that one day you're one of the most conservative members, and then some individual gets mad at you, and they decide to throw millions of dollars against you because you didn't vote exactly the way they want every day.

I stood respectfully as Ronald Reagan was sworn in to his second term though I disagreed with him on many issues. I stood as well for the inauguration of George W. Bush's second term though I thought his war in Iraq was a tragic mistake.

In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an innovative scale.

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

In a way I never did with George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, I will write about the actions of the Trump presidency with the working assumption that our nation must be protected both by and from the president.

When George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney, it was a reassuring sign that the Texas governor would have an experienced, prudent voice at his side.

Billions have been spent for one purpose and one purpose only: to obscure and distract from the fact that Mitt Romney is backing the identical agenda George W. Bush did.

Nearly every president in the past 100 years has declared national monuments, from Teddy Roosevelt creating the Grand Canyon National Monument to George W. Bush preserving 10 islands and 140,000 square miles of ocean waters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.

Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has been disturbed over what he sees as the erosion of presidential powers since the Watergate scandal and has urged Bush to take a stronger stand against what Cheney sees as congressional intrusions into the executive branch.

I think George W. Bush has a warm, engaging personality. But, you know, the presidency is more than just a popularity contest.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people.

Obama hasn't lost his standing because of tricks played by the Republicans. He hasn't lost his standing because the media's not fair to him. He hasn't lost his standing or his approval number because the media spent four years attacking him like they did George W. Bush. This is all on him.

When you're in politics sometimes you step on toes and they come back and kick you in the backside.

The interesting thing is that it seems like George W. Bush would have been happy being the president of anything. He could have been president of Major League Baseball.

From 2002 to the end of his presidency, George W. Bush routinely was accused by the Left of 'creating chaos:' chaos in Iraq, chaos in Afghanistan, chaos in the Muslim world, chaos among our allies.

Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.