House Judiciary Committee Quotes

Legislative power is always superior to the executive.

[The impeachment power] is the heaviest piece of artillery in the congressional arsenal, but because it is so heavy it is unfit for ordinary use.

Congressional power has not so much been usurped by the Presidency as given up to the Presidency by Congress.

The most important benefit that I can confer on the country by my Presidency is to insist upon the entire independence of the executive and legislative branches of government

The authority of Congress must be respected …. The President must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and execute, not make the laws.

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

We have not found a way to give Congress control without depriving the President of essential power.

It is up to Congress to see to it that its powers do not slip through its fingers

Does not the President ... submit this subject to Congress for their sanction? Does he not recognize the principle ... that no treaty is binding until we pass the laws for executing it?”

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 filibuster is the most important check on raw Presidential power.

In the British government, the danger of encroachment on the rights of the people, is understood to be confined to the executive magistrate. The representatives of the people in the legislature, are not only exempt themselves, from distrust, but are considered as sufficient guardians of the rights of their constituents against the danger from the executive. Hence, it is a principle, that the parliament is unlimited in its power, or, in their own language, is omnipotent. Hence, too, all the ramparts for protecting the rights of the people, such as the Magna Carta, their Bill of Rights &c., are not reared against the parliament, but against the royal prerogative.

The imperial Presidency requires a passive Congress.

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.

Politically it is often much safer [for Congress] to let the executive do the leading.

For 22 years [as a Senator] I worried about all the power at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Now [as Treasury Secretary] I worry about all the power at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I am not responsible to the Senate and will not submit my actions to them.

Congress ... is far more than the simple, limited advisory council that most Presidents would like to maintain.

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

The framers of the Constitution did not entrust this House with the power to impeach the President of the United States in order to establish this body as a court of personal morality.

The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared.... The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

The legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law.

it would be so dangerous for the Executive in a single Person to negative a Law that the People will not accept of it.

The powers conferred by the Constitution upon the Executive enable him to shape the foreign policy of this nation almost independent of the Legislature. A scheming and unscrupulous President can involve the country in serious complications, commit it to an unwise policy, or at least render its foreign diplomacy ridiculous before Congress may have an opportunity to check him.

The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times … the President's power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a law-maker.