Legislative Neglect Quotes

The problem... is that most members of Congress don't pay attention to what's going on.

I'm used to being cut out of the conference meetings, but now they are cutting us out even before the bill's are written or either the House or Senate Acts.

Congress actively undermines the best of legislative practice.

Too many of my Senate colleagues overdid it. They stayed on too long - napping through committee hearings when they should have packed up and gone home.

There's a lot of bipartisan rancor, a lot of excessive delegation of legislative power from the legislative branch to the executive branch.

I deem it my duty again to call your attention to the condition of the District of Columbia. It was doubtless wise in the framers of our Constitution to place the people of this District under the jurisdiction of the General Government, but to accomplish the objects they had in view it is not necessary that this people should be deprived of all the privileges of self-government. Independently of the difficulty of inducing the representatives of distant States to turn their attention to projects of laws which are not of the highest interest to their constituents, they are not individually, nor in Congress collectively, well qualified to legislate over the local concerns of this District. Consequently its interests are much neglected, and the people are almost afraid to present their grievances, lest a body in which they are not represented and which feels little sympathy in their local relations should in its attempt to make laws for them do more harm than good.

To the extent that congressional powers have ebbed as a result of failure to develop timely and coherent responses to public problems, Congress has only itself to blame for its own predicament.

[Describing Congress:] We generally lounge or squabble the greater part of the session, and crowd into a few days of the last of the term three or four times the business done during as many preceding months.

The overarching issue, as I see it, is the elitism of America's political system; the fact that regular, ordinary Americans aren't considered in policy debates or legislation, and regularly get shafted by the powers-that-be in Washington.