Rush Limbaugh Quotes

Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charge with high duties and misdemeanors.

The greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.

We think the government is running the country, but it is just a policymaker. Unknowingly, people are inviting the government to run their lives. The only business of the government is to come up with the right policies.

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government.

The people can never err more than in supporting that by multiplying their representatives beyond a certain limit, they strengthen the barrier against the government of a few.

Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal

I deem it my duty again to call your attention to the condition of the District of Columbia. It was doubtless wise in the framers of our Constitution to place the people of this District under the jurisdiction of the General Government, but to accomplish the objects they had in view it is not necessary that this people should be deprived of all the privileges of self-government. Independently of the difficulty of inducing the representatives of distant States to turn their attention to projects of laws which are not of the highest interest to their constituents, they are not individually, nor in Congress collectively, well qualified to legislate over the local concerns of this District. Consequently its interests are much neglected, and the people are almost afraid to present their grievances, lest a body in which they are not represented and which feels little sympathy in their local relations should in its attempt to make laws for them do more harm than good.

The lobbyists are a kind of permanent other government.

The legislator commands the future.

We don’t care what the cost-benefit is. We’re going to build it somehow because Congress says it’s going to be built.

… where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.

When you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

If members of Iran's parliament are prevented from criticizing the judiciary, then they should close down the parliament.

One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.

Thousands of interests that have known no Federal regulation and control will be welded to the Government hereafter, and can only grow and develop under the hands of Congress and the President.

The EU suffers from … a structural democratic deficit. Of its seven institutions, just one—the European Parliament—is directly elected by the people, and it cannot initiate legislation.

I take my 'advice and consent' duty as a U.S. senator very seriously.

Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it's what they persuade Congress to do.

You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen? The Administrative Procedure Act is designed to thwart this sort of maneuver.

I feel lucky that I get the privilege of serving in the Senate.

I served 14 years in the state legislature and served in both the minority and majority.

My job is to enforce the laws as passed by whom? Congress. They give me my authority. That's the jurisdictional responsibilities that I have, and when litigation is used to regulate... that's abusive. That's wrong.

When the president and the prime minister decide to implement reforms, they have all the measures they need to pass them and enforce them.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

You can't go to Washington as a congressman and a senator and expect to make a difference all at once. You have to earn your way.