Legislative Constraints Quotes

The President [FDR] is willing to take what Congress will give him and Congress will give him only what big business is willing that he should have.

I can't legislate to change human nature.

If we can't have the courage to tell our constituents, hey, we've got to cut back, then if we can point to something and say, I would like to vote for more benefits for you, but this balanced budget amendment or statutory spending cap or whatever the device is, is preventing me from doing it.

I can't vote my own convictions on civil rights. If I did, I wouldn't be returned to the Senate. It's as simple as that.

I believe that God has endowed men with certain inalienable rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and that no legislature and no majority, however great, may morally limit or destroy these; that the sole function of government is to protect life, liberty, and property, and anything more than this is usurpation and oppression.

The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.

It's often said of American politics that it's a huge juggernaut and the president can change the direction by two or three degrees in either direction, but not much more. In fact, I think the president's power is limited, much more than the prime minister in England.

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.

Most Americans, who think Congress has a right to do anything for which they can get a majority vote, ignore the clearly written constitutional restraints on Congress.

Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.

The Constitution does not vest in Congress the authority to protect society from every bad act that might befall it....[I]f followed to its logical extreme, [this approach] would result in an unwarranted expansion of federal power.

The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.

Being president, you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of.

When someone has to go back and work for a living under laws that they passed, they'd be more careful.

There are certain things that we can accomplish by law and there are certain things that we cannot accomplish by law or by any process of government. We cannot legislate intelligence. We cannot legislate morality. Nor can we legislate loyalty, for loyalty is a kind of morality.

Tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is, and we do not have the political power to do this. We're not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we're not going to fund any portion of [Obamacare]. Because we can't do that.

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 mark of a single currency is not only that all other currencies must be extinguished but that the capacity of other institutions to issue currencies must also be extinguished...In the case of the United Kingdom, that would involve Parliament binding its successors in a way that it has hitherto regarded as unconstitutional.

Decisions that lawmakers made decades or even a century ago have essentially locked us into ways of doing things, as the cost of changing looms more heavily than the potential benefits of trying something different.