Legislative Bias Quotes

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.

You have laws to protect oil men, so why not artists?

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters [employers] and their workmen, its counselors [members of the legislature] are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.

In every society where property exists there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor. Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected; they will either be made by the member to plunder the few who are rich, or by the influence to fleece the many who are poor.

As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief?

The influence of banking mania on State legislatures could not fail to be corrupting.

A majority of Senators placed on the Committee on Interstate Commerce were men whose sympathies were with the railroads.

Do not understand me as intimating that the black race are by nature more depraved than the whites, for I believe the whole human family without regard to race or complexion are creatures of circumstance we are all more or less influenced by the surroundings. Abuses of matrimonial obligations by the blacks have not only been tolerated by the whites, but has been for ages encouraged and sanctioned by influencial [sic] legislative bodies. Therefore the wonder is that it is no worse.

Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.

The tax laws are written by men with considerable net worth, and with little understanding of what wage-earners must do to make ends meet.

The Supreme Court consistently favors organized money and the political privileges of the corporate class. We have a Senate that is more responsive to affluent constituents than to middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of income distribution have no apparent effect at all on the Senate's roll call votes.

The legislation of one nation is sometimes intentionally made to bear heavily upon the interests of another. That legislation, adapted, as it is meant to be, to the special interests of its own people, will often press most unequally upon the several component interests of its neighbors.

The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

If you look at U.S. Congress, 80 percent of them have never left the U.S.A., so I'm not surprised about Russophobia in Congress.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.

Our respectable legislators will make a most alarming fuss about every bank that is chartered, while manufacturing companies shall pass muster by the dozen, without a single question being asked or answered. Those who strain at a gnat, are marvelously adroit at swallowing a camel.

I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men—on an issue that affects millions of women.... I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be struggling for this legislation. If men could get pregnant, maternity benefits would be as sacrosanct as the G.I. Bill.

Some members of congress have dealt so long with the military and with the defense contractors that they begin to think they are without faults.

How can Israel say that everyone is equal before the law - that you're equal before the law - when the law defines Judaism as the cultural, national and legislative basis for the state?

....I am sure that the dangers of this system (the Federal Constitution) are real, when those who have no similar interest with the people of this country (the South) are to legislate for us - when our dearest rights are to be left, in the hands of those, whose advantage it will be to infringe them.

I am biased against stupid members of Congress who would put your economy at risk.