Constitutional Constraints Quotes

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

It [the Constitution] didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you, it says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted.

The Warren Court wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution... I intend to succeed where they failed.

Even the country's first president chafed at the limits placed on him by the writers of the U.S. Constitution. From the nature of the Constitution, ... I must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto.

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.

At the same time the Constitution sets in stone the Stability Pact and risks preventing member States from implementing a policy of growth. So we are not able to do things at the European or the national level.

A Supreme Court decision does not establish a "supreme law of the land" that is binding on all persons and parts of government, henceforth and forevermore.

Congress constitutionally lacks general police powers.

Altering the Constitution has become the daily business of the Federal Government which the document is supposed to guide and limit. Both Congress and the judiciary assume, and exercise, countless powers they aren't entitled to.

The American people want a large government that can do all kinds of things ... that are not within the enumerated powers [of the Constitution.]

Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government's powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget.

I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution.

In case of urgency, the President may issue provisional laws when Althingi is not in session. Such laws must not, however, be contrary to the Constitution. They shall always be submitted to Althingi as soon as it convenes.

The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed.

This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

More fundamentally, however, the answer to petitioners' objection is that there can be no impairment of executive power, whether on the state or federal level, where actions pursuant to that power are impermissible under the Constitution. Where there is no power, there can be no impairment of power.

When a president decides he's going to do something, a vast array of forces contrary to his purpose begin to organize to thwart him.

Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.

The constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime President.

As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated, even a state of war is not a blank check for a president to do whatever he wants.

Precisely because the State has the monopoly of coercion it can be allowed the monopoly only of coercion. Only if the modern State can be held within a strictly limited agency of duties and powers can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.

Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.

Let us face reality. The framers (of the Constitution) have simply been too shrewd for us. They have outwitted us. They designed separate institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages frail bridges(or) tinkering. If we are to turn the founders upside down we must directly confront the Constitutional structure they erected.

Obama's immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient. I don't think a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself.