William Barr Quotes

The power to make war is vested in Congress and not in the President. Congress has no constitutional authority to grant such authority to the president.

We have not found a way to give Congress control without depriving the President of essential power.

The imperial Presidency requires a passive Congress.

Congressional power has not so much been usurped by the Presidency as given up to the Presidency by Congress.

Federal bureaucracies are creatures of Congress, not the executive.

Without the authority of Congress, the President cannot fire a hostile gun in any case except to repel the attacks of the enemy.

Congress ... is far more than the simple, limited advisory council that most Presidents would like to maintain.

If our forefathers had wanted Congress to be the Commander in Chief, they would have said so.

The office of the President is not such a very difficult one to fill, his duties being mainly to execute the laws of Congress. Should I be chosen for this exalted position, I would execute the laws of Congress as faithfully as I have always executed the orders of my superiors.

The powers that are surrendered [by Congress] to one President remain to be used by others.

The Constitution provided an invitation to the President and Congress to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.

The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times … the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a law-maker.

It is up to Congress to see to it that its powers do not slip through its fingers

I don’t know if President (George W.) Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making.

Every American war has brought a struggle between Congress and the Executive over war powers. The Constitution is somewhat annoyingly ambiguous on the point declaring that the President is Commander in Chief but empowering Congress to provide for the common defense, declare war, and raise and support armies.

You are apprehensive of monarchy; I of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.

The King had no independent authority to wage or declare war, to negotiate or ratify treaties. By assigning a substantial share of these responsibilities to a single executive outside the legislature, the architects of the Presidency created an office far more powerful than the British Monarchy at that time.

Almost always, executive orders are within an authority and always within the purview of Congress to change if they want to legislatively change it.

When the president acts in absence of a congressional grant of authority, he can rely only upon his own independent powers. When the president takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.

Hillary Clinton's plan would trigger a constitutional crisis unlike almost anything we have ever seen before. In effect, she would be abolishing the law-making powers of Congress in order to write her own laws from the Oval Office. And you see what bad judgment she has. She has seriously bad judgment.

Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.

Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress, and vested this power in the president.

The authority to declare war rests in Congress, not in an out-of-control president.

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.

The Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield