Legislative Abuse Quotes

Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

The Alien & Sedition Acts are a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.

There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president.

Surveillance legislation passed in good faith has been stretched well beyond its original purpose.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

The Patriot Act is the most egregious piece of legislation to ever leave Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts. John Ashcroft and every member of Congress who voted for it should be indicted.

The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.

If you got something [legislation] you want to slip through here, just give it to me, old pal. I'll make it Irish for you.

The public has been much abused, the time of legislative bodies uselessly consumed and the rights of citizens ruthlessly invaded under the now familiar pretext of legislative investigation.

Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

Maybe the Jefferson case will give members of Congress second thoughts the next time they get ready to legislate away the rights of ordinary Americans.

It's absolutely shameful that Rep. Grijalva would try to use tribes as political pawns to implement the misguided agenda of extremist environmental groups.

Americans were outraged and horrified by this president's reckless spending and his endless assaults on the Constitution, but no issue drove them to rise up and fight back like Obamacare - both the abominable legislative monstrosity itself and the tyrannical, corrupt manner by which Obama crammed it through the legislative process.

We have elected officials who say they're going to run for office to serve the people. But in reality, they legislate themselves into wealth. They go into office, and after one, two terms, they're worth millions upon millions of dollars, and that has to stop.

Sir, I here enter my solemn protest against a low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legislation. It is only fit for shops and counting houses.

A single branch of Legislation is a many headed Monster which without any check must soon defeat the very purposes for which it was created, and its members become a tyranny dreadful in proportion to the numbers which compose it. And possessed of power uncontrolled, would soon exercise it to put themselves free from the restraint of those who made them, and to make their own political existence perpetual.

... a consolidation of unchecked and despotic power in the House of Representatives ...

The only time the Democrats and the Republicans are together is when they are voting for their own pay raise.

Hurray! Congress is to adjourn! Only four more days of Congressional burglary on the Treasury!

When legislation is rewritten in secret and passed without members even present, let alone voting ... something is wrong.

Congressmen have their noses right in the trough and they're slurping it up for their districts at the expense of all the taxpayers.

The President of the United States has only yesterday signed into law the most monstrous piece of legislation ever enacted by the United States Congress. It is a fraud, a sham, and a hoax. This bill will live in infamy. To sign it into law at any time is tragic. To do so upon the eve of the celebration of our independence insults the intelligence of the American people. It dishonors the memory of countless thousands of our dead who offered up their very lives in defense of principles which this bill destroys. Never before in the history of this nation have so many human and property rights been destroyed by a single enactment of the Congress. It is an act of tyranny. It is the assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty.

What I have absolutely no sympathy with is the legislator, the man who seeks, for his own profit, to exploit the weaknesses of those who are unable to help themselves and then to fasten some moral superscription upon it. This I loathe so much that I cannot conceivably explain how much it is.

The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less informed part of the community. They have seen, too, that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding.