H. W. Brands Quotes

Our American concept of government rests on the idea of a dominant Congress.

We all went up to Washington on a mission to change things. What I found is that the Founding Fathers set it up where it's a little more difficult to do. We've got the Senate and the president to deal with.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

When I came here I thought I worked for the President. But I didn’t realize that I also worked for 534 other people at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who all think that they are presidents.

Legislative power is always superior to the executive.

You are apprehensive of monarchy; I of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.

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

The Constitutional framework of checks and balances matters.

Forget about war or disease or poverty. The apocalypse is when America's elected president is no longer supervised by the unelected ruling establishment.

Egypt has a presidential system. The president runs the state. Who the president is matters profoundly.

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.

We, Norton I, do hereby decree that the offices of President, Vice President, and Speaker of the House of Representatives are, from and after this date, abolished.

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.

It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.

Thank God for some Republican control of one branch of the government.

Indian president does not determine policy. Here President is not the policy maker. In the name of the president, the cabinet takes the policy decision.

It would seem that the Watergate story from beginning to end could be used as a primer on the American political system.

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

If I could only be President and Congress too, for just 10 minutes.

No other country has copied the separation and division of powers that we have.

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

Our government is composed of checks …

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.

All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and a greater.