Constitutional Authority Quotes

I've got a pen, and I've got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive action. I've got a pen to talk executive actions where congress won't. Where congress isn't acting, I'll act on my own. I have got a pen and I got a phone. And that is all I need.

We" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people

The federal judiciary is an irresponsible body … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction ...

An act of the Congress of the United States... which assumes powers... not delegated by the Constitution, is not law, but is altogether void and of no force

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.

The power to tax and spend is restricted by the enumerated powers.

If you take a position under the Constitution that is against the majority view, you have to explain it well enough that maybe you can persuade some of that majority to agree with you.

Are you willing to let any President choose what laws to enforce and what laws to change?

A president shouldn't tell the judiciary what to do.

The king had a right to all uninhabited countries that should be discovered and possessed by any of his subjects and that the charters he freely granted to American companies had explicitly denied any latent claims of a British Parliament.

Most ex-Presidents would be glad to become ex-officio members of the Senate without a vote.

The president of the United States has a serious job with deadly serious responsibilities. Rash and impulsive decisions by him can lead to negative outcomes and distractions that undermine the strength of our nation.

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

The political system must listen to the military.

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special movements into the jaws of that which feeds them.

A committee of the Senate ought to confer with a committee of the President through a head of a department and not with the Chief Magistrate, for in the latter case a committee of that House is equal to the President.

Governing is about selecting.

It is highly improper of the President of the United States to employ extra-legal pressures in an effort to defeat the amendment …. The President has no constitutional role to play in the amending process.

I think that less presidential interference the better.

The federal government must retreat from its hyperactive involvement in areas traditionally under states' authority and refuse future temptations to regulate and legislate on every issue that happens to come to mind.

In a sensitive matter, where its own ignorance could scarcely have been greater, Congress would have been better advised to leave the conduct of foreign policy in the hands of those who have been constitutionally charged with it.

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce;... the powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and prosperities of the people.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

We are not at liberty to add one jot of power to the national government beyond what the people have granted by the constitution

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