Kent Conrad Quotes

What I worry about would be that you essentially have two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply, majoritarian, absolute power on either side. And that's just not what the founders intended.

Our Founding Fathers created the United States Senate for the purpose of protecting the rights of the minority.

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.

The Founders were far more concerned about checking Congress than the States

That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust.

As the House is designed to provide a reflection of the mood of the moment, the Senate is meant to reflect the continuity of the past—to preserve the delicate balance of justice between the majority’s whims and the minority’s rights.

The Senate is a remarkable institution. It is unique. There is no other body, no other political body, no other democratic legislature in the world quite like the U.S. Senate.

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver.

The United States Senate wasn't designed to be a majority-rule institution. It was designed to include and accommodate the rights of the minority in small states as well as large states.

Do you think states' rights would have disappeared if state legislatures still elected our United States senators? Do you think our United States senators would be difficult to contact if they were named by our state legislatures?

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

All affairs which concern this state only are to be determined by our representatives coming from all parts of the state; all affairs which concern the Union at large are to be determined by representatives coming from all parts of the Union. Thus, then, the general government is to be taken care of, and the state governments to be preserved.

What other influence over, or check upon the General Government. will the States possess, if their Legislatures do not elect the Senate or second Branch of the National. Government.

Search the Constitution and you will find no power granted to the legislative branch to make laws governing agriculture, housing, medicine, energy, private ownership or weapons, and a great deal more.

It took two years for the thirteen states to ratify The Constitution, and the last state to ratify it did so by a mere two votes [36-34].)

The filibuster is the most important check on raw Presidential power.

The great debate of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was between the men who were there and the men who were not there.

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.

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

The basis, the corner-stone of this Government, was the perfect equality of the free, sovereign, and independent States which made it.

The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do, especially in Philadelphia in 1787, four months, they argued about what a House should be, what a Senate should be, the power of the president, the Congress, the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House, it was designed for gridlock. It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily. It was designed to stop the growth of government.

As long as there are only 3 to 4 people on the floor, the country is in good hands. It's only when you have 50 to 60 in the Senate that you want to be concerned.