Federal Government Intervention Quotes

My belief has always been... that wherever in this land any individual's constitutional rights are being unjustly denied, it is the obligation of the federal government-at point of bayonet if necessary-to restore that individual's constitutional rights

A crippling fallacy that characterizes our modern media is the idea that every event that rises to the level of news must connote some wider societal or political crisis that can only be remedied by government intervention. Tragedies, natural disasters, acts of unspeakable evil aren’t simply to be reported and explained for what they often are: the products of individual will or negligence, irremediable human malignity or some complex set of scientific interactions. Instead each event—from lethal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately sorted into its prelabeled moral narrative file, each one full of similarly useful sententious parables. They become props in the larger drama that is being constantly written for us by the preachy puritans who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to illustrate the virtue of their cause and the malevolence of that of their critics.

Queens is so often treated as a stepchild and labeled as an outer borough. At the very least, if I could help bring more attention to what we need, and what the federal government needs to do to improve the quality of life of people right here in Queens - any way that I can do that, I'm very happy to do that.

Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president - pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little.

A lot of the people in Northern California and parts of Oregon have decided that we are not on the same page as San Francisco and Portland and Los Angeles. I don't know if six states is a solution because is Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country really going to give California 10 new senators?

I do know that all of the Michigan delegation worked very hard as related to the revival of the auto industry. There was really a choice between bankruptcy and liquidation. There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars. There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government. [The auto bailout was] bipartisan from the get-go. [Without it,] Michigan would have hit 40 percent unemployment rates.

Millions of Americans would still despair in the eight long years of the Depression that lay ahead and many of their individual dreams would be dashed on the rocks of economic hardship. But collectively, the country was in a new place, with a new confidence that the federal government would actively try to solve problems rather than fiddle or cater to the rich. Hope was no longer for Pollyannas; the cynics about the American system were in retreat.

When I started to get involved in the crime issue, people said, "it's a local issue." I said, "No, there are lots of ways the federal government can help." And the best way the federal government can help, and did in the Crime Bill, is to find programs that work around the country and help them spread.