Barack Obama Quotes

We have a major crisis in the system. the Preisdent is so powerful that he overehelms the rest of the Government. .... This has been going on for over 50 years. Each president adds more and more power.... Congress is crippled and cowardly .... They don't use their appropriations power. They have been passing continuing resultions for 20 years.

In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an innovative scale.

President Obama made far-reaching, unilateral changes to our nation's immigration policy despite saying on over 22 different occasions that he did not have the authority to do so.

Almost always, executive orders are within an authority and always within the purview of Congress to change if they want to legislatively change it.

We can't wait for Congress to do its job. So where they won't act, I will.

When I'm president, we'll have executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day

Since the enactment of the War Powers Act in 1973, which I supported then and support now, Congress has been reluctant to assert its authority when presidents decide to send American soldiers into harm's way.

Here is the operating motto of the Obama White House: 'So let it be written, so let it be done!' Like Yul Brynner's Pharaoh Ramses character in Cecil B. DeMille's 'The Ten Commandments,' the demander in chief stands with arms akimbo issuing daily edicts to his constitution-subverting minions.

If Mr. Roosevelt can do what he likes without consulting Congress, and we give him our boys, God alone knows what he will do with them.

I did it in my capacity as president of the Senate.

The Jackson-Lincoln Theory of the Presidency: Occasionally great national crises arise which call for immediate and vigorous executive action, and that in such cases it is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the steward of the people and … that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it..

You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen? The Administrative Procedure Act is designed to thwart this sort of maneuver.

As bad as the Obama administration is at trying to legislate without legislators, all too often, Congress is responsible for handing them the 'pen and phone.'

It should be remembered that the president cannot, by executive order, do things that affects the public at large unless there is some Congressional basis for it.

A president with a pen in their hand is a very powerful person.

I don't think we've ever had a president who has more disdain for Washington than Barack Obama does, and he does things with executive orders or rules that you don't even see.

'This is how democracy works,' Barack Obama lectured the country before giving everyone the specifics of his expansive one-man executive overreach on immigration. If you enjoy platitudinous straw men but are turned off by open debate and constitutional order, this speech was for you.

The president is supposed to execute faithfully the laws that the legislature has written. So, the executive orders that Barack Obama president is writing are without precedent. Without precedent so with he's rewriting law. It's totally illegal.

The first thing [Donald Trump] is going to do is roll back the fiat executive orders that were unconstitutional.

It seems with every new day, we have a new veto threat from the president.

Are you willing to let any President choose what laws to enforce and what laws to change?

You can't take a post of this kind and resign because the President of the United States makes a decision he is constitutionally empowered to make. You can resign at any other time for any other reason, but not at that time for that reason.

If I get to be president, what can I do anyway? With Congress and the press, what chance do I have to make basic changes?

Why should we allow a Democrat President in the White House to use executive orders and not do the same with a Republican President?

The politicization of the presidency would pose a real threat to the institution and its function.