Lyn Nofziger Quotes

We have a major crisis in the system. the Preisdent is so powerful that he overehelms the rest of the Government. .... This has been going on for over 50 years. Each president adds more and more power.... Congress is crippled and cowardly .... They don't use their appropriations power. They have been passing continuing resultions for 20 years.

The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared.... The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

… presidents launch [military] campaigns with inadequate planning, and Congress feels no obligation to back them when things go awry. And because this takes place under the auspices of the non‐legal constitution, the judiciary cannot decide cases that set rules for the future, which allows the disasters to recur.

If we are willing to concede the President dictatorial authority where we happen to agree with him, as liberals have tended to do over the years, we will have little chance of tying his hands when we do not....You will see why many of us in the Congress understand how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation ran amok.

If the president is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist.

With his arrogant usurpation of power and refusal to follow well-established wire-tapping laws, I believe this president is not living up to [his] oath. By shunning the oversight of the courts and ignoring the express language of the laws passed by Congress, this president is, in my judgment, defiantly and stubbornly ignoring the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress.

If the president can make whatever policy he likes, we are governed not by law, but by the arbitrary whims of one man ...

We have the President assuming powers that are never going to end.

Congress gave the President a blank check to wage an undefined war against an undefined enemy for an undefined period of time. We shouldn’t have given him that authority.

Trump abuses every privilege in the same way. It's kind of like King George. Take a legal concept and then stretch it beyond all recognition, and that's what you have Trump doing.

These last few years we've seen an unacceptable abuse of power, having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.

I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with [the president] trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that's what I intend to reverse when I'm President of the United States of America.

Congress could always stop the President if Congress thinks that what the President has done exceeds the President's authority or is just wrong for the United States.

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to patriotism.

I think concerns with a member of Congress with a cabinet official being active in business. I don't see why it wouldn't apply to the president.

The president is now having to deal with a Congress. He's never had to do that before. The president in the past, he has just done whatever he wanted. He had a big rubberstamp here up on Capitol Hill, whatever he wanted, they stamped OK. That's not the way it is now.

If you think of big, legislative accomplishments, most of them kind of get initiated with the president putting something out there and Congress working on it.

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.

A fondness for power is implanted in most men, and it is natural to abuse it when acquired. This maxim, drawn from the experience of all ages, makes it the height of folly to intrust any set of men with power which is not under every possible control; perpetual strides are made after more as long as there is any part withheld.

In going too far, they [presidents] have taken away the individual rights of American citizens.

Freedom is whatever the president says it is, pending revision.

This bill would renounce the safe, proper, and acceptable role for Government as a referee of disputes between the governed. It would interpose the Government as a biased protagonist, armed with the awesome authority of the Federal Government, in addition to rulemaking and umpire powers. The broad grants of power to the Attorney General to initiate and intervene in civil actions would go far toward transforming him into George Orwell's 'Big Brother' of '1984,' in the year 1964.