Co-Equal Branches Quotes

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.

We are an important check on the powers of the executive. Our consent is necessary for the president to appoint jurists and powerful government officials and, in many respects, to conduct foreign policy. Whether we are of the same party, we are not the president's subordinates. We are his equal!

The president doesn't hold all the cards. The cards are evenly split up!

Each branch is given, by the Constitution, a little space in the other's territory .... Each one is a little dependent on the other.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

I think the Supreme Court has, as an equal branch of government, the ability to overrule Congress and the president. But I also feel it's the role of the Congress and the president to push back. I mean I think it's important that they are understood as equal branches of government.

The president's powers are always open to being questioned by the co-equal branches of government.

Joint hearings ... destroy the check and balance that we have by having a House and Senate act independently.

I think the founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances.

It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution.

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

The Executive is a co-ordinate and independent branch of the Government equally with the Senate; and I have yet to learn under what constitutional authority that branch of the Legislature has a right to require of my an account of any communication ... made to the heads of departments ...