George T. Conway III Quotes

Conservatives deserve a consistent and thoughtful vision for the role of federal government in relationship to states.

The federal government should stay out of it.

Our best protection against bigger government in Washington is better government in the states.

Since my election as Oklahoma attorney general in 2010, I have been a proud member of a group of federalism-minded state attorneys general who have methodically, indeed relentlessly, worked to restore the proper balance of power between the federal government and the states.

There was a fear among the original framers that the federal government would be so strong that they might destroy the state militias.

We have become bound by a political straitjacket that frames every debate: Too much federal government. Yet our forefathers forged this system for us. The federal government can accomplish what the states, acting alone or even in concert, cannot.

With respect to our State and federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners. They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter. But this is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole.

Nullification is the Jeffersonian idea that the states of the American Union must judge the constitutionality of the acts of their agent, the federal government, since no impartial arbiter between them exists.

It is a fundamental principle of American law that the regulation of the local police of all the domestic affairs of a State belong to the State itself, and not to the Federal Government.

Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force

[The new Federal Government] would either triumph over the state governments and reduce them to entire subordination or in the course of a few years … the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular [State] governments and the general government … will produce a dissolution of the union.

The American people are rhetorically Jeffersonian and operationally Hamiltonian.

It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. –

We are still wrestling with a question that plagued the founding fathers: how to balance the role of the federal government with the separate powers of the states that constitute the republic.

I start with a concern about the growth of federal government. I start with a perspective concerned about the growth of that power, and containing it within the bounds of the Constitution.

Wringing your hands about states' rights, forget it. They're gone. Basically, the federal government can do whatever it wants. Who's going to protect the states? My court? Ha - we're feds!

There simply is no greater threat to individual liberty and the viability of our great nation than the threat that comes from the continued consolidation of power in Washington, a consolidation that flies in the face of the division of power between the federal government and the states that is required by the Constitution.

In my eight years as governor, I did everything I could to resist federal control of issues that belong to the states.

We just need to make sure that we get somebody in there that respects the Constitution, respects the rule of law, that restores the proper balance between the states and federal government. I have great confidence Jeb Bush would do that.

There are things that should be allocated to states' rights - that's Gryffindor - and certain things allocated to the federal government, which is Slytherin.

The idea of dual sovereignty rests on the premise that the power of the states to prosecute crimes existed before the creation of the federal government, and is reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.

That's what the founding fathers intended, that most decisions be made at the state level, not at the federal level.

Today neither of our two parties maintains a meaningful commitment to the principle of States' Rights. The 10th Amendment is not a 'general assumption' but a rule of law. States rights mean that states have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in areas reserved to them.

It is through states that the American people get the job done every day, often in spite of a deeply flawed bureaucratic federal government.