Joshua A. Norton Quotes

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

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.

You are apprehensive of monarchy; I of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.

As for us BRITONS, thank Heaven, we have a better Sense of Government deliver’d to us from our Ancestors. We have the Notion of A PUBLIC and A CONSTITUTION; how a Legislative, and how an Executive is model’d.

Today, the most important political instrument in the hands of the opposition is the presidential veto.

Do you think states' rights would have disappeared if state legislatures still elected our United States senators? Do you think our United States senators would be difficult to contact if they were named by our state legislatures?

For more than 500 years -- since the rise of nation-states and parliaments -- a preoccupation of Western political thought has been the problem of defining and confining executive power.

Unlike a monarch, the President is not the Sovereign.

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

All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and a greater.

Our American concept of government rests on the idea of a dominant Congress.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.

President’s, liberal and conservative, have this propensity to tinker with the Constitutional system.

One of my goals, is to make the House co-equal with the White House.

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

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.

It is a president's constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate's constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent.

There is an important role for a United States senator as a check and balance on the president of the United States.

Forget about war or disease or poverty. The apocalypse is when America's elected president is no longer supervised by the unelected ruling establishment.

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.

Oh, if only I could be President and Congress, too, just for ten minutes.

The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.

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

The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years.

I like the House. The House is where you can effect the most change. It's such a fast-moving dynamic body compared to the Senate.