Constitutional Remedy Quotes

Political gerrymanders existed in colonial times and continued through the framing. The Framers provided a remedy for the problem: the Constitution gives state legislatures the initial power to draw federal election districts, but authorizes Congress to “make or alter” those districts

Impeachment is a dangerous measure that could easily lead to instability.

On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.

Impeachment is not a Constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a Constitutional crisis.

[The impeachment power] is the heaviest piece of artillery in the congressional arsenal, but because it is so heavy it is unfit for ordinary use.

Impeachment was not so much designed to punish an offender as to secure the state….

Impeachment is not a remedy for private wrongs; it's a method of removing someone whose continued presence in office would cause grave danger to the nation.

That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

The natural cure for an ill-administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men.

Conditions may, and are not unlikely to arise, some day, when the exercise of the power to impeach and remove the President may be quite as essential to the preservation of our political system as it threatened to become in this instance destructive of that system. Should that day ever come, it is to be hoped that the remedy of impeachment, as established by the Constitution, may be as patriotically, as fearlessly, and as unselfishly applied as it was on this occasion rejected..

[A]s it must be admitted that the remedy under the Constitution lies where it has been marked out by the Constitution; and that no appeal can be consistently made from that remedy by those who were and still profess to be parties to it, but the appeal to the parties themselves having an authority above the Constitution or to the law of nature & of nature's God.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the disease incident to republican government.