Legislative Quotes

… the least dangerous branch of our government.

One Representative to thirty thousand inhabitants is a very inadequate representation…

The participation of the people in their own government was the more significant, because the colonies actually had what England only seemed to have, - three departments of government.

I continued to serve in Congress until 2001.

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.

Of the over 100,000 wildfires that happen in the U.S. each year, not a single one would get started without the fire triangle: Oxygen, heat and fuel. Fire needs all three to exist. It's like the three branches of our government: Legislative, judicial and executive. The fewer there are, the safer we are.

Parliament alone is sovereign.

Parliament is relentless, it never stops.

I say this everywhere I go: I admire and respect Hillary. She has been a lawyer, a law professor, First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of State.

They're saying President Obama doesn't have any friends. The problem is that he can't get Congress to approve one.

Republicans will own Congress.

I have a Congress on my hands.

During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times.

You just can't get anything done. You can't get hearings, you can't get legislation, you can't get responses by the regulatory agencies - you can't get anything done. I'm a realist. I don't work harder and harder to get less and less.

Congress is dysfunctional.

The president can't succeed without Congress, and Congress can't succeed without the president. The image of one depends on the image of another. It is not a zero-sum game.

The role of the vice president is to break ties in the Senate and inquire daily into the health of the president.

Well, it's not a pleasant experience. And it's a terribly political process, because that thing was initiated by the Congress and by, you know, our adversaries in the Congress.

Man acts only when he is sure of the justness of his action, as we threw the bomb in the Legislative Assembly

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

Our founding fathers never intended that Congress be a career.

The doctrine of separation of powers as adopted by the [Constitutional] Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.

The American system is so constituted that it produces a conflict between the Executive and Congress every time the Executive tries to be positive and strong.

People seem to think that if a man is a Member of Parliament he may do what he pleases.

I was very productive as a senator for my state.