Executive Discretion Quotes

John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.

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.

The peculiar danger of executive power is that it executes.

The Executive [Abraham Lincoln] is frequently compelled to affix his signature to bills of the highest importance, much of which he regards as wholly at war with the national interests.

My belief was that it was not only the President's right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws. Under this interpretation of executive power I did and caused to be done many things not previously done by the President.

Trump hasn't really done anything yet to abuse his powers. I don't even know if he knows what all his powers are as president. And that worries me. He will learn. After he learns how the presidency works, he could become much more dangerous, because his personality doesn't change. Once presidents find their powers, they don't give them up. They use them.

There is … no minister who would not think it safer to act by orders than from his own discretion.

I think where I get frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it.

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.

I have never pretended to be a legal scholar, but when scores of lawyers are lining up to agree with the Supreme Court that the president has the power to make choices when it comes to whom to deport and whom to let stay, then I tend to agree with them.

What a President may do as a matter of expediency or extremity may never reach a definitive constitutional decision.

Vice President Joe Biden believes that illegal immigrants are citizens. Obama believes that some Americans who join Islamist groups are citizens, while others are not. Who is an American? Whomever the executive branch deems an American. Who isn't? It depends on whether Obama ate his Wheaties or not.

I am charged with violating pledges which I never gave; and because I execute what I believe to be the law, with usurping powers not conferred by law; and above all, with using the powers conferred upon the President by the Constitution, from corrupt motives and for unwarrantable ends.

If Mr. Roosevelt can do what he likes without consulting Congress, and we give him our boys, God alone knows what he will do with them.

House Speaker John Boehner says President Obama should have clearly outlined his exact plans before bombing Libya. Apparently it's only Iraq where you don't have to do that.

[…] over the past decade, we’ve argued in court in favor of administrative latitude in decision-making. Now, by asserting the primacy of states rights, we’re flipping that argument on its head. How do we go back to all these cases where we’ve been arguing for executive discretion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”?

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion … and you allow him to make war at pleasure. … If today he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may see no probability he would say to you, “Be silent!, I see if you don’t.”

Being a president is an impossible job - it's naive to think someone can do the job and not bend the law here and there.

In very rare circumstances, the executive branch might choose to ignore a court decision.

The President should have full opportunity ... of opposing whatever appropriations seemed to him objectionable without imperiling the success of others.

Executive privilege is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, and thus is a very limited principle.

These powers ought to exist without limitation, because it is impossible to foresee or to define the extent and variety of national exigencies, and the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them.

I've said it before: Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. You know, he's been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we've fought for decades.

The President may be right in how he reads the Constitution. But he also may be wrong. And if he is wrong, who is there to tell him so? And if there is no one, the President, of course, is free to pursue his course of erroneous interpretations. What then becomes of our constitutional form of government?

I don't have a right to pick the president's cabinet on substance.