Tim Kaine Quotes

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

The Constitution provided an invitation to the President and Congress to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.

Separation of powers means that the president cannot control Congress.

Federal bureaucracies are creatures of Congress, not the executive.

Without the authority of Congress, the President cannot fire a hostile gun in any case except to repel the attacks of the enemy.

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

The President ... should be merely the executor of a power of decision that rests elsewhere; that is, in the Congress.

The power to make war is vested in Congress and not in the President. Congress has no constitutional authority to grant such authority to the president.

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

The filibuster is the most important check on raw Presidential power.

We [the Supreme Court] may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers.

It should be remembered that the president cannot, by executive order, do things that affects the public at large unless there is some Congressional basis for it.

Almost always, executive orders are within an authority and always within the purview of Congress to change if they want to legislatively change it.

Our Constitution wisely assigns both joint and separate roles to each branch of the government; and a President and a Congress who hold each other in mutual respect will neither permit nor attempt any trespass.

When the president acts in absence of a congressional grant of authority, he can rely only upon his own independent powers. When the president takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.

What do we do with a president who can basically change what Congress passed by attaching a letter saying I don't agree with this part or that part?

If you want to right-size executive power relative to the other branches of government, the best way to do that is to have a healthy Congress in which the two parties are debating, disagreeing, but also occasionally working together to pass legislation.

As a member of Congress, I believe Congress must provide oversight of actions by the Executive Branch as our system of checks and balances requires.

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

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

The respective powers of the President and Congress of the United States, in the case of war with foreign powers are yet undetermined. Perhaps they can never be defined.

[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.

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

Congress has chosen to recognize that a president may be forced to pursue legitimate foreign policy objectives by covert means. Such recognition, however, does not mean it surrenders the right to be informed of covert measures so that it can express its views as to the legitimacy of the goals or the wisdom of seeking to achieve them.

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