John Marshall Quotes

The legislature makes, the executive executes, and the judiciary construes the law; but the maker of the law may commit something to the discretion of the other departments, and the precise boundary of this power is a subject of delicate and difficult inquiry.

Modern administrative government springs from the inadequacy of a simple tripartite form of government to deal with modern problems …. It vests the necessary powers with the administrative authority it creates, not too greatly concerned with the extent to which such action does violence to the traditional tripartite theory of government organization.

The Obama administration is on notice - they will not be allowed to regulate what they have been unable to legislate.

We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.

Politicians love regulating. That's part of the whole power structure.

If you are a U. S. senator, you can give an ideological response to a serious problem and probably never be held accountable for it. Whereas the [state] governors are dealing with the real world—they have to run things, to make them work.

Federal bureaucracies are creatures of Congress, not the executive.

[Congress is] the chief aggrandizer of the Executive.

Every law enacted by the General Assembly shall embrace but one subject.

[Legislators] can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws and place it in the hands of others.

No Man would be so daring as to place a veto on a Law that had passed with the assent of the Legislature

Congress, rather than administrative agencies should fashion any policy that is not only of great economic importance but also one that has divided the faiths and loyalties of classes of people.

I soon found that the Senate had but one fixed rule … which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.

The government will certainly decide for itself on whose counsel they will settle the construction of the laws they are to execute. We are to look at the intention of the Legislature, and to carry it into execution while the lawyers are nibbling at the words of the law.

The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of the body of the legislature against and upon the encroachments of the executive.

We will just have to tell the House that they will have to accept our judgment and we cannot answer a great many questions that might be asked

The question of our time is rapidly becoming can government get things done?

Thousands of interests that have known no Federal regulation and control will be welded to the Government hereafter, and can only grow and develop under the hands of Congress and the President.

The 'community method' can only be applied in those areas in which the European Union actually has competence. Where the community has no competence, the 'community method' clearly cannot be applied.

A judge's role is to ensure that the legislature remains within the limits of its assigned authority under the Constitution. Judges have no authority to second-guess the wisdom of the value judgments and policy choices the legislature has made.

Congress is the most powerful branch. It can expand a progressive society, or it can block a progressive society.

The Congress is pretty powerful if it wants to be.

If you look at government policy generally, what government tries to do in all instances is to make sure that we take care of all elements that might relate to a particular issue.

We [the Supreme Court] may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers.

There has never been a major program in this country that when it was first passed, didn’t have glitches in it.