Barack Obama Quotes

That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.

If the President does it, it can't be illegal.

I don’t know if President (George W.) Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making.

Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas-where we all understood he wanted authority to act-but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

The Daily Beast reports today that if Steve Bannon is denied a security clearance, the President could simply overrule that denial and order that security clearance.

As a general matter, if the president wants to withdraw from a treaty, he simply gets to do that. And that's part of the powers of the office.

Why should we allow a Democrat President in the White House to use executive orders and not do the same with a Republican President?

Every time a president invokes executive privilege, there are three relevant audiences he has to think about: the courts, Congress, and the public.

The domestic policy of any president, U.S. or otherwise, is his or her own concern, as long as democratic norms are followed.

A president with a pen in their hand is a very powerful person.

How exactly the obstruction-of-justice statutes interact with the president's broad powers to supervise the executive branch under Article II of the Constitution is a genuinely difficult question.

Even George W. Bush, who as president pushed the boundaries of executive power, never proposed a statutory scheme to hold people indefinitely.

There are a lot of presidents in both parties - including President Obama - who had strong claims of executive privilege that I certainly think went too far.

Charged with faithfully executing the laws, the president is, in effect, the nation's highest law enforcement officer.

A President has a great chance; his position is almost that of a king and a prime minister rolled into one.

The only person who counts in the administration is the president of the United States.

There may be a sense in the electorate, especially among independents that President Obama has overreached in some ways.

Almost always, executive orders are within an authority and always within the purview of Congress to change if they want to legislatively change it.

I don't think we've ever had a president who has more disdain for Washington than Barack Obama does, and he does things with executive orders or rules that you don't even see.

The Constitution gives the president of the United States an extraordinarily wide grant of authority to use the power of the pardon.

He's the president. I'm the general. Unless I want to get impeached, I got to do what he says.

The president has the right to select who he wants for the Supreme Court. He doesn't have to get it cleared from Congress, Senate or anybody... No president before this has come under this kind of scrutiny ... before the committee hearings even begin.

It is ridiculous to sue the president on a Wednesday because he oversteps the law, as he has done a dozen times illegally and unconstitutionally, and then on a Thursday say that he should overstep the law, contradict the law that passed in 2008 and deal with this himself.

When the president acts in absence of a congressional grant of authority, he can rely only upon his own independent powers. When the president takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.

The president's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts.