Bob Woodward Quotes

Separation of powers means that the president cannot control Congress.

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.

I think Donald Trump understands there's a Constitution. And that those separate but equal branches of government give us a limited government. And he believes that.

Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress, and vested this power in the president.

No one branch of the U.S. government should have supremacy over the other two.

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

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the three branches of government are coequal for a reason. Neither the executive branch or the legislative branch should use the third branch to a pursue a partisan agenda.

The courts are truly the least dangerous of the three branches of our government.

The purpose of a written constitution is to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights.

The legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law.

In the government of this Commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

It has been the judiciary that has preserved the Constitution rather than the other two separated powers.

The judicial branch of the government is the least dangerous because … it has no influence over either the sword or the purse.

The Constitution was made chiefly because of the demands of Commerce.

The Constitutional framework of checks and balances matters.

President Clinton invoked executive power a bunch of times... I think once he started doing that, the courts really pushed back on him. He couldn't use it for things that actually had a better basis. He used it for things that were personal, like the Lewinsky investigation, trying to block his aides from testifying.

I took an oath to protect the Constitution, and protecting the Constitution means not letting the president bypass the separation of powers.

Only Congress can amend the law, not President Obama nor the courts.

It's not about whether we should have a conservative or a liberal. It's about, do we have someone that has the mental acumen to understand what the laws are, and not write laws but defend the laws. That's the whole purpose of three branches of government.

The courts are supposed to be the inferior branch of our three branches of government.

We are sworn to uphold the Constitution and law. And it has to be consistent and agreed upon with three branches of government - one can't overrule the other two.

I hope that the American public understands that we have three levels of government. We have the (unintelligible) the executive, but there's legislative and the judicial, and the legislative obviously need to be just doing their job.

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.

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.

In our system of democracy, our government works on a system of checks and balances. Instead of stripping power from the courts, I believe we should follow the process prescribed in our Constitution - consideration of a Constitutional amendment.