Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes

Our Constitution wisely assigns both joint and separate roles to each branch of the government; and a President and a Congress who hold each other in mutual respect will neither permit nor attempt any trespass.

Our system of government is one of checks and balances. It requires compromise.. compromise between the Executive and the Parliament, compromise between one House and another, compromise between the States and the Commonwealth and compromise between groups of persons with legitimate interests and other groups with other legitimate interests. There is room for compromise.. indeed demand for it.. in a system of checks and balances.

Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.

The courts are truly the least dangerous of the three branches of our government.

Separation of powers means that the president cannot control Congress.

We have moved toward a kind of scorpions-in-a-bottle Government where you have two branches [executive and legislative] that don't understand many of the legitimate needs of the other branch.

Congress is always looking for occasions to differ from the President.

In the government of this Commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

From time to time we must remind ourselves that the President has a role in the legislative process.

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 assumption by the Senate of powers of original negotiation of agreements with foreign nations must increasingly interfere with the discharge by the Executive of the powers invested in him by the Constitution.

There is an important role for a United States senator as a check and balance on the president of the United States.

I think Donald Trump understands there's a Constitution. And that those separate but equal branches of government give us a limited government. And he believes that.

We are sworn to uphold the Constitution and law. And it has to be consistent and agreed upon with three branches of government - one can't overrule the other two.

The executive, in our government is not the sole, it is scarcely the principle, object of my jealousy. The tyranny of the legislature is the most formidable dread at present and will be for many years. That of the executive will come in its turn, but it will be at a remote period.

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.

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.

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

The founders had a strong distrust for centralized power in a federal government. So they created a government with checks and balances. This was to prevent any branch of the government from becoming too powerful.

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.

You need the House, you need the Senate and you need the administration. And absent one of them, you're not going to get a heck of a lot done.

I am not a federal employee. I am a constitutional officer. My job is the Constitution of the United States, I am not a government employee. I am in the Constitution.

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.

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