Congressional Authority Quotes

When a treaty must depend for its execution ... on a law or laws to be passed by Congress ... it is the Constitutional duty of the House of Representatives to deliberate on the expediency of carrying such treaty into effect.

Congress is the appropriate place to make laws about our country's immigration policy; it is not something that the president gets to decide on his own.

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.

Congress shall not have power, without the concurrence of two-thirds of both Houses, to interdict the commercial intercourse between the United States and any foreign nation or the dependencies thereof.

We are not under the command of the military. They are under ours as a Congress.

What do we do with a president who can basically change what Congress passed by attaching a letter saying I don't agree with this part or that part?

James Madison was pessimistic about the country when he could not get accepted his proposal to allow the Congress to veto state laws.

The House [of Representatives] has become not so much a legislative assembly as a huge panel from which committees are selected.

The Senate cannot confirm an individual... who would support a scheme that violates our Constitution, eviscerates congressional authority.

Citizenship is no light trifle to be jeopardized at any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of its general or implied grants of power.

Gentlemen, I shall be glad to see this mob on Capitol Hill. I will fix their heads on the iron palisades around the square to assist your deliberations. The leaders I will hang as high as Haman to deter forever all attempts to control the legislature of the Congress by intimidation and design.

As a member of Congress, I believe Congress must provide oversight of actions by the Executive Branch as our system of checks and balances requires.

The Constitution gives the Congress absolute authority within the District of Columbia on any legislative issues whatsoever.

You run Washington DC though the House. The Senate gets in the way. The President gets in the way.

I've been in Congress 14 years. I've been on the Appropriations Committee in which we are in charge of trying to move legislation.

The Constitution authorizes Congress to tax Americans to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. But in Washington, the professional political class has hijacked that authority to rig up a tax code that provides for the well-being of Washington, not the country.

If you look at the architecture of Washington, D.C., it is not by mistake that the dome over the Capitol is the very center of the federal city. The White House and the Supreme Court are set about us, satellites to the supreme power of the people expressed in the legislative authority of Congress.

The Congress decides when to make war and the President decides how to make war.

We only have one president and one secretary of state, but our founding fathers very clearly insisted that Congress play a significant role in foreign policy.

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.

Congress ... is far more than the simple, limited advisory council that most Presidents would like to maintain.

The basic work of Congress is done in committees.

The Constitution provided an invitation to the President and Congress to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.

Anything my staff does in my office is pursuant to congressional rules.

If you want to change a law, you have to pass a law. Presidents don't write laws. Congress writes laws.