Divided Government Quotes

He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it.

The best thing to hold down spending is to have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress.

The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.

An elective despotism [i.e. of the Congress] was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many.

Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s.

If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

A divided government doesn't have to be a death blow to foreign policy.

Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.

In a divided government, you can't just say, 'It's my way or the highway.'

This is good government. We have divided government. To make divided government work you can’t ask each other to compromise core principles…. We ask each other to find common ground for the common good.

Thank God for some Republican control of one branch of the government.

I'm tired of divided government. It doesn't work very well.

The truth is that America has been closely divided politically for quite some time. That was reflected in some of the challenges I had with the Republican Congress.

I've said from day one, when Donald Trump gets in there, he's going to make an equal number of Republicans unhappy as Democrats unhappy.

The job of government is to govern. They ought to get on with it.

The mission of parties is to keep the people divided into factions, that they may be unable to do anything for themselves.

President Clinton was able to achieve budget surpluses despite a divided government.

Experience has taught that a divided power in the state is impotent and at odds with itself.

Divided responsibility is no responsibility.

I may sound naive, since everyone's decided the next two years are going to be all about 2016, but I look at what's happened over the years when there's been divided government. That's when we've done tax reform, that's when we've done entitlement reform - to move this economy forward on these big issues.

A system that is built on checks and balances does not do well in an ideological climate.

Having served as the majority spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee after Republicans took the House in 1994, I've seen the promise and the peril of divided government before.

While we always strive to reach 218 with Republican votes, sometimes that is not possible with divided government, and the story of a bill that passed with 150 Republican votes is much more positive and assertive than the story of a bill that passes with 79 Republican votes.

Were we to slumber in indolence or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to cast away the bounties of Providence and doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority.