Executive Limitations Quotes

I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration.

The presidency is a place that is hemmed with all sorts of constraints and limitations. I don't think the American people quite know that the presidency is really a juggling act of competing pressures.

The thing is that we live in a presidential system with a parliamentary constitution. Congress has a lot of weight in Brazil, and the president cannot always do when he wants; he does what he can.

The American Constitution is a written instrument full and complete in itself. No Court in America, no Congress, no President, can add a single word thereto, or take a single word threreto. It is a great national enactment done by the people, and can only be altered, amended, or added to by the people.

The president doesn't hold all the cards. The cards are evenly split up!

Control is not a luxury that most Presidents are allowed.

All recent U.S. presidents have learned the hard way that, despite their immense power, they remain at the mercy of uncontrollable global forces that render their personal views and campaign promises largely irrelevant.

Legislative power is always superior to the executive.

The president doesn't get a line-item veto, so all the budgetary approps stuff is with Congress.

[The American President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues.… The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

It is a handicap to any man to succeed a member of his own party as President. He has little patronage with which to reward his personal supporters.

The Constitution grants only Congress - not the president - the power 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States.'

I do not believe any president can bind a successor president to give up his fundamental role as protector of the country.

The traditions and courtesies of the Senators and Representatives stand in the way of the Executive, however, as defined by the Constitution, and no man who is trained in the congressional school fails to suffer by them in a way that men of merely executive experience know nothing of.

Never has any one office had so much power as the President of the United States possesses. Never has so powerful a leader been so impotent to do what he wants to do, what he is pledged to do and what he knows he must do.

Executives do not on the whole do well with comedy. They can't understand it, they can't read it, they can't spot it.