Sandra Day O'Connor Quotes

I think the founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances.

When it comes to the separation of powers, the Constitution makes it look pretty simple: Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them and the judiciary adjudicates them. In reality, though, the lines between the branches are a little blurrier than they seem on paper.

The Constitution only works when branches of government trust one another and cooperate.

I hope that the American public understands that we have three levels of government. We have the (unintelligible) the executive, but there's legislative and the judicial, and the legislative obviously need to be just doing their job.

You know, we have three branches of government. We have a House. We have a Senate. We have a President.

The framers of our Constitution thought it was of critical, critical importance, in establishing three branches of government, that we have an independent judiciary. Therefore was that without that, the provisions of the constitution couldn’t be enforced

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

Our government is composed of checks …

The Constitutional framework of checks and balances matters.

I think the Founding Fathers probably knew what they were doing in setting up the government to have a healthy tension between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

No one branch of the U.S. government should have supremacy over the other two.

There are checks and balances and broad separation of powers under the Constitution. Each organ of the State, i.e. the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, must have respect for the others and not encroach into each other's domain.

The founding leaders of our country believed in a three-part sharing of governmental power, with each branch jealously watching the actions of the other two.

Maintaining checks and balances on the power of the Judiciary Branch and the other two branches is vital to keep the form of government set up by our Founding Fathers.

In our Constitution governmental power is divided among three separate branches of the national government, three separate branches of State governments, and the peoples of the several States.

The Constitution calls for civilian control of the military and I am a civilian.

We have an inherently weak institution in the Presidency. It was intentionally set up that way by the founders.

In republics the executive must be strongest because everything conspires against it, while in monarchies the legislature must be strongest, because everything conspires in favour of the monarch

The framers of our Constitution came up with two major contributions to the art of government. The first was the idea of an executive not dependent on the political support of the legislature. The second was the idea of the judiciary independent of the executive and legislative branches.

If we look into the constitutions of the several States, we find that … there is not a single instance in which the several departments of power have been kept absolutely separate and distinct.

We are a Republic with different branches of government, and so the Senate and the House are going to be full partners in working with the White House.

We already have two branches of federal government that factor political considerations into their decision-making, and our Founding Fathers determined long ago that we don't need a third.

It's not about whether we should have a conservative or a liberal. It's about, do we have someone that has the mental acumen to understand what the laws are, and not write laws but defend the laws. That's the whole purpose of three branches of government.

The courts are supposed to be the inferior branch of our three branches of government.

In our system of democracy, our government works on a system of checks and balances. Instead of stripping power from the courts, I believe we should follow the process prescribed in our Constitution - consideration of a Constitutional amendment.