Eva Joly Quotes

The President should have full opportunity ... of opposing whatever appropriations seemed to him objectionable without imperiling the success of others.

When Congress consents to the Executive making the budget it will have surrendered the most important part of a representative government.

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 is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

No branch of government should ever be able to combine the power of the sword with the power of the purse.

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

As members of the executive, we are accountable to Parliament.

I've been in the legislative branch and now the executive branch and in each case I felt it was important we use our constitutional responsibilities to the fullest.

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.

There are checks and balances and broad separation of powers under the Constitution. Each organ of the State, i.e. the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, must have respect for the others and not encroach into each other's domain.

Separation of powers means that the president cannot control Congress.

You may think my business is to make appropriations, but it is not. It is to prevent their being made.

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

As the Texas Attorney General I saw it every day: the struggle for power between the legislative branch and the executive branch.

We as taxpayers don't have a line item veto.

The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it.

The legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law; but the maker of the law may commit something to the discretion of the other departments, and the precise boundary of this power is a subject of delicate and difficult inquiry.

The Senate is not a rubber stamp!

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.

It may be said, indeed, that the Constitution has given to the Executive the power to annul the acts of the legislative body by refusing to them his assent.

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 powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of the body of the legislature against and upon the encroachments of the executive.

The power of the purse is the only real power of government.

Actively search for spending bills that I can veto as a sign of … financial stewardship.