Cathy McMorris Rodgers Quotes

Our economic freedom is founded on individual property rights; government should never be permitted to take those away.

I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

We need a Federal government that does what the government needs to do and stops doing what the government ought not to be doing.

The government is already into our lives a whole lot more than they should be. If I were president, I'd roll everything back. Everything!

Before my tenure, people didn't seem to think that citizens had a right to limit the size of their government.

Government has no other end but the preservation of property.

We can restore liberty by taking government out of our bedrooms, our bloodstreams, our bladders, our brains, our businesses and our back-pockets.

We just simply want to get back to basics, get - restore essentially the constitutional foundation of the country, and that means the federal government becoming less onerous, less involved in every - basically every item of our lives. And what that means is there does have to be some transition.

Whenever I tour my district and I ask small businesspeople 'what can I do to help?,' they tell me to just get government out of the way and they'll create the jobs and grow on their own.

Folks know that while I respect Barack Obama and do not cheap-shot the president, I am very skeptical of his big government, nanny-state philosophy.

Get government out of our way, and let freedom and the spirit of the American people shine through.

We must guard against the overreaching hand of big government trying to take away our freedom. And we must always protect the environment in a manner consistent with our values.

Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.

Activist government overreach and ongoing economic stagnation have shown us why Washington should not try to displace what is best left to civil society.

Almost any government activity can also be seen as taking property 'without just compensation.' The basic model of an unconstitutional 'taking' would be if the government threw you out of your house.

These things I believe: that government should butt out.

The government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy.

At some point, the government expands into the private sphere so far that you live in a place with a whole lot less freedom. I didn't like that that was the direction of travel for our country, and decided to come to Washington to try and be a small part of bringing it back.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

We should have a very limited federal government.

I've always been fond of the saying that when it comes to oversight and reform, the federal government does two things well: nothing and overreact.

When a profit-seeking company proposes to take citizens' private land away for its own gain, people should stand up for their rights.

I believe that government is too large, costs too much, spends too much, and has too much regulatory power in our lives.

Washington politicians think that government can make better decisions than you and me. But we know better. We know it's smaller, less intrusive government that will lead to real economic prosperity. We know it's business-friendly policies, not more red tape, that will create real growth.