Cal Cunningham Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

Congress could always stop the President if Congress thinks that what the President has done exceeds the President's authority or is just wrong for the United States.

Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has been disturbed over what he sees as the erosion of presidential powers since the Watergate scandal and has urged Bush to take a stronger stand against what Cheney sees as congressional intrusions into the executive branch.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

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

An attorney general has to stand up [to the President], and sometimes he will be replaced.

Federal bureaucracies are creatures of Congress, not the executive.

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

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

The Executive is a co-ordinate and independent branch of the Government equally with the Senate; and I have yet to learn under what constitutional authority that branch of the Legislature has a right to require of my an account of any communication ... made to the heads of departments ...

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.

The Senate is not a rubber stamp!

The vast importance of the trust, and the operations of treaties as laws, plead strongly for the participation ... of the legislative body in the office of making them ... It must indeed be clear to a demonstration that the joint possession of the power in question, by the President and Senate, would afford a greater prospect of security, than the separate possession of it by either of them

The President … does not originate laws or resolutions; he takes no part in the deliberations on them during their progress; he does not act in relation to them indirectly by advice or interference of any sort, until they have passed both houses: it is only when their operations are concluded that his power begins.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

At present the direction of our affairs, foreign and domestic, has again come to be almost wholly in the hands of the Senate, because there are in the Senate a few courageous men who have dared to take control from the Executive.

People assume that the executive branch has more power than it actually has. Only the legislative branch can create the laws; the executive branch cannot create the laws. So, if the executive branch tries to create a branch one side or the other... you go back to the founders of the nation. They set up a system that ensures that it doesn't happen.

It's important to remember that whatever the presidential candidates of either party say, they will have to interact with the United States Congress, particularly the Senate, when it comes to crafting policy... we play an important role. And I'm going to continue to play that role, whoever is president.

The Obama administration demonstrated time and again a disturbing willingness to bypass the separation of powers and disregard Congress as a Constitutional watchdog.

One of my chief criticisms of U.S. international policy is that Congress has largely abdicated its foreign policy-making responsibilities to the executive branch.

When it comes to the separation of powers, the Constitution makes it look pretty simple: Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them and the judiciary adjudicates them. In reality, though, the lines between the branches are a little blurrier than they seem on paper.