Legislative Response Quotes

More than 70 percent of seniors are asking for more time. It is long overdue for Congress to listen and make sure that seniors have a prescription drug plan that works for them.

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

What Congress does is respond to pressures that are upon it.

Censure is a limp noodle across the wrist of the president. I think the way we vote on the articles will express the way we feel stronger than any censure vote.

The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.

Now that judges embrace forcibly starving someone to death, Congress should use its appropriation power to starve the judicial budget.

I think the Congress will do the right thing. I think that they've - you know, they got into certain arguments and they start worrying about assessing blame, and there is a little demagoguery, but in the end, something this important, they'll do the right thing. So this really is an economic Pearl Harbor. That sounds melodramatic, but I've never used that phrase before. And this really is one.

Legislatures react. Executives initiate.

One of the reasons I thought a censure resolution was appropriate was because if somebody had censured Nixon or even if a resolution of either house had passed, saying what you're doing is unacceptable to Congress, that shot across the bow might have straightened him up.

All of us want to see the details of any legislative plan if there's going to be a legislative response, but Congress, I believe, is in the mood to do whatever it takes to win this war against terrorism.

If you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing, but what you do is really important.

My career in Congress is a story of before Sandy Hook and after Sandy Hook.

Every time they have tried to cut appropriations, they get a wakeup call.

The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress…

President Obama and the congressional Democrats have certainly been responsive.

One cannot tell the High Court what to adjudicate. They must judge, and then the legislature must act accordingly.

The economic meltdown that would define every aspect of Obama's economy came to a head well before he became president, of course, and so did the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after.

I'm wary when legislators say the solution to school shootings is mental health care, because it suggests that people who are mentally ill are violent, and that's just not true.

After the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Congressman Frank changed his tune completely.

We hope that the elected officials will respond positively to a ground swell of letters, phone calls, e-mails and visits from parents. The law clearly states that the responsibility for giving a sound basic education to our children lies with New York State.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school - and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

we are not legislating on this subject in response to our own judgment … but in response to some sort of judgment which has been expressed outside

The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product.

Stephen Colbert's recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: "This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don't like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved."