George Packer Quotes

In 1987, the United States celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the constitutional convention that provided the basic rules for the American political order. This convention was one of the very few historical examples in which political rules were deliberately chosen.

You well know, sir, that when the Constitution was submitted to the People of the respective States for their adoption or rejection, it awakened the warmest debates of the several State conventions.

You run Washington DC though the House. The Senate gets in the way. The President gets in the way.

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

Our President is not a King, nor our senate a House of Lords.

No check is necessary on a Legislature composed as the national Legislature would be, with two branches—an upper and a lower House.

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

I think the founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances.

Congress is the world's oldest deliberative body in the world's oldest democracy. The result of that democracy, and the Constitution on which it rests, are America's laws.

At no time during the period intervening between the ratification of the Constitution and the inauguration of the new government were the leaders in Federalism certain that the agrarian party, which had opposed the Constitution, might not render the instrument ineffectual by securing possession of Congress.

Let all Americans sit down and read this great document. Since the Constitution's ratification, it has been the framework for our great nation.

The growth of constitutional government, as we now understand it, was promoted by the establishment of two different sets of machinery for making laws and carrying on government.

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.

But Connecticut and Rhode Island have originally realized the most perfect polity as to a legislature.

That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away. Through that period, it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one.

Our Founding Fathers crafted a constitutional Republic for the first time in the history of the world because they were shaping a form of government that would not have the failures of a democracy in it, but had the representation of democracy in it.

The Constitution was written by 55 educated and highly intelligent men in Philadelphia in 1787, but it was written so that it could be understood by people of limited education and modest intelligence.

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.

First of all, there's no mention of political parties in the Constitution, so you begin American history with not only no political conventions but also no parties.

You know, we have three branches of government. We have a House. We have a Senate. We have a President.

One reason the Founding Fathers thought that states should have two senators was so that smaller states wouldn't get run over and could bring their interests to the attention of the Senate more broadly.

What the Founding Fathers created in the Constitution is the most magnificent government on the face of the Earth, and the reason is this: because it was intended to preserve the American society and the American spirit, not to transform it or destroy it.

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?

The Founding Fathers didn’t intend for the lawyers to run this country

The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics…. The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.