Simon Bolivar Quotes

Government is not a bottom line enterprise. You can get yourself elected ... but you can't fire the legislature if they won't do what you want.

In France, executive power dominates much more than in Anglo-Saxon countries

The most important benefit that I can confer on the country by my Presidency is to insist upon the entire independence of the executive and legislative branches of government

The President ... should be merely the executor of a power of decision that rests elsewhere; that is, in the Congress.

The legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law; but the maker of the law may commit something to the discretion of the other departments, and the precise boundary of this power is a subject of delicate and difficult inquiry.

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

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

The republic has been structured to guard against the cabals of a few as well as against confusion of a multitude, but how each House of Congress would maintain that balance was left to the discretion of the two bodies.

Separation of powers means that the president cannot control Congress.

In what other democracy is the President in charge of the executive and the legislature and the judiciary?

The governor has led the way, but he's not an emperor. The legislature has to act. He cannot pass a bill by himself.

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

Legislative power is always superior to the executive.

Our President is not a King, nor our senate a House of Lords.

Between a conservative republic and a constitutional monarchy there is merely a difference in form.

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.

The President of the United States is not the Sovereign of the United States. There is a very near analogy between the position of the President of the United States and that of the Prime Minister of England, and both are paid at much the same rate — the income of a second-class professional man. The Sovereign of the United States is the people;

The President of the Republic in our constitution will be like the sun which, firmly in the centre, gives life to the universe. The supreme authority must be permanent because in non-hereditary systems one needs, more than in others, a fixed point around which circle the magistrates and citizens, men and things. For a people to be free it must have a strong government which possesses sufficient means to free them from popular anarchy and the abuse of the powerful

The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of the body of the legislature against and upon the encroachments of the executive.

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.

If we carefully consider what our constitution is, we will conclude that it is, in fact, a limited monarchy.

People assume that the executive branch has more power than it actually has. Only the legislative branch can create the laws; the executive branch cannot create the laws. So, if the executive branch tries to create a branch one side or the other... you go back to the founders of the nation. They set up a system that ensures that it doesn't happen.

If you want to right-size executive power relative to the other branches of government, the best way to do that is to have a healthy Congress in which the two parties are debating, disagreeing, but also occasionally working together to pass legislation.

On form of government, there should be checks and balances, and PM should be responsible to Parliament.