Lawmaking Process Quotes

Congress is the appropriate place to make laws about our country's immigration policy; it is not something that the president gets to decide on his own.

Representative democracy betrays the electorate when laws have no roots in the people but in oligarchies. Studies on the concept and modalities of direct democracy are therefore becoming more topical

The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.

Presidents Lincoln, Jefferson, Jackson, presidents have understood that the Supreme Court cannot make a law. They cannot make it. The legislature has to make it, the executive branch has to sign it and enforce it.

The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. It is the duty of the people, therefore, in framing a Constitution of Government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them; that every man may, at all times, find his security in them.

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

I don't order laws, I propose them.

… once you acknowledge the fact that Congress is after all made up of citizens elected to represent all of us, you must have some faith in their framing common sense laws.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

When a president makes up law as he goes, no one knows what the law is anymore.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.

Look, I'm a member of the House of Lords and I'm the first to admit that I don't understand how one gets new laws through.

I've passed on a number of bills. I've studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated...

It lies in the power of no parliament to make any kind of law or statute, without his [the king's] scepter be to it, for giving it the force of law.

Now, I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books... Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own... Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that's not how - that's not how our system works. That's not how our democracy functions. Thats not how our Constitution is written.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

It is very difficult to get legislation passed. But then the danger always is that you have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.

Laws are made by the old, exceptions by the young.

Most senators are just going to work and trying to do a job.

The political status legislation which emerged in Congress in 1990 and 1991 did not receive the support needed for enactment into law during my tenure as Attorney General.

There's such a kind of complicated line between politics and the law and we don't sit around and say, hey, you know, what would Oliver Wendell Holmes have had to say to this.

Overreaction is one of the things that congress specializes in. I can't think of anything congress does better than overreact.

The Senate is an unknowing world.

Congress no longer exercises its lawful function of lawmaking; that has gone to the committees.