Legislative Trust Quotes

A trust of the greatest magnitude is committed to this legislature and the eyes of the world are upon you.

… 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.

To refer the power in question to the clause "to provide for the common defense and general welfare" would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms "common defense and general welfare" embracing every object and act within the purview of a legislative trust.

The Constitution reflects in the most degrading and mortifying manner on the virtue, integrity, and wisdom of the state legislatures; it presupposes that the chosen few who go to Congress will have more upright hearts, and more enlightened minds, than those who are members of individual [state] legislatures.

I have confidence in the responsibility of those who occupy a seat in the legislature.

You can't possibly know everything that's in those bills ... you have to trust the leadership.

The people can never willfully betray their own interests: But they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act.

Give members of Congress a sense of equity in your administration.

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?

I know that Congress will do the right thing.