Lori Lightfoot Quotes

I never believed that my service in the U.S. Congress should become a permanent career.

Honorariums are really dishonorariums. So long as they continue, public trust in Congress will sink even below its minimal level today.... Public officials should have only one paymaster: the Government. When the Government pays too little, the temptation to find other paymasters becomes far harder to resist.

Anybody who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Donations to political parties, candidates and elected officials should not be a means to gain personal or policy favours or buy access to politicians or civil servants…. Political parties, candidates and politicians should disclose assets, income and expenditure to an independent agency.

As a matter of general sound public policy, I am very certain that there is a requirement that where a public official is under inquiry or investigation, especially an elected official, and it appears that his scale of living or the total of his bank deposits far exceeds the public salary which he is known to receive, he, the elected public official, owes a positive public duty to the community to give a reasonable or credible explanation of the sources of the deposits, or the source which enables him to maintain a scale of living beyond the amount of his salary.

Sex scandals, while embarrassing, are far less depressing than financial corruption. I would way rather have an important elected official who patronized prostitutes than one who spent $60,000 of the taxpayers’ money on sushi and lobster.

The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or party.

… once you acknowledge the fact that Congress is after all made up of citizens elected to represent all of us, you must have some faith in their framing common sense laws.

... we, the people, elect leaders not to rule but to serve.

Tolerance of corruption, explicit and implicit, has made it impossible to govern…. We need absolute transparency of all the assets of government officials.

I feel strongly that the state would not be well-served by having a governor and speaker of the House from the same family and have never planned to run for governor if that would be the case. With Speaker Madigan planning to continue in office, I will not run for governor.

I have enormous respect for people who do run for office.

No matter what a candidate for president may say during the campaign, once someone is sworn in, they are constrained by the Constitution - about what the Constitution allows and doesn't allow, what the law allows and doesn't allow.

I think our democracy has it exactly right: two terms, eight years. It's enough. Because it's important to have one foot in reality when you have access to this kind of power.

In order to maintain public trust in government, elected officials must answer for what they do and say; this includes 140-character tweets.

I think it's scary that that our elected officials aren't operating under the principles of human rights, under the principles that this government and this country was founded on.

We only have politicians who are concerned with being reelected.

We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn't solve the problem of creating outside dependencies.

We need to focus on reducing property taxes. We need to focus on education funding. We need to focus on getting term limits on elected officials.

I believe in term limits. I believe the country would be hugely better off if we had more turnover in Congress.

When we see the corrupting influence of political decision making in our public health professionals, we should ask questions.

Whoever is running the country should not be in the pay of a foreign interest. The best way is to see tax returns.

The emoluments clause is in the Constitution for a reason: We, as Americans, need to know that the president acts in our best interests, not his own self-interest.

When I was attorney general, we had the strongest public integrity unit in the country.

The Constitution's Emoluments Clause bars the president from earning any compensation from a foreign government. Mr. Trump ought to consider a partial disinvestment from his company by either selling outright or rejecting the proceeds of any stakes with foreign government partners.