democratic oversight Quotes

The ability of the press to print their stories without the government trying to get them to betray their sources is as essential to a free press as the ink it is printed with. Otherwise, who will hold accountable those who hold power over us?

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.

Not only do we have a right to know, we have a duty to know what our Government is doing in our name. If there's a criticism to be made today, it's that the press isn't doing enough to put the pressure on the government to provide information.

Abuses of the freedom of speech ought to be repressed, but to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?

I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.

I have absolutely no problem with the press criticising policies and the things that we do, the things that we say.

I'm not going to go on this fishing expedition that they want me to, that the Democrats want me to, the president has a duty and obligation to comply with the law. But again he's exempt from almost all of these things.

I'm not the first to have raised these democratic concerns. Many have faulted the court for its lack of clarity in certain cases and many have criticized its recent lack of deference to decisions made by state legislatures and Congress.

I think it's something that the citizenry needs to be vigilant about - participating in democracy, and that includes issues like what's going on and how much secrecy and transparency there should be. That's an on-going thing - in a democracy you want checks and balances and oversight, but you need a covert agency to protect the country. It's a very tricky balance and I think it changes as the world changes and I think we all need to be mindful of that.

[James] Comey's got a good background but there's nothing there, so far as it appears. Nothing there. So he wrote the letter to the eight Republican committee members copied to the Democrats saying 'you know some emails have turned up, we've looked at a lot of emails now it turns out there are even more emails - we don't know what's there, so there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that could be of interest to anyone until we conduct our multi-week, multi-month investigation.

The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached.