Majority Control Quotes

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Holding Congressional hearings is the purview of the majority, and during the first years of the Obama administration, Democrats could not be bothered.

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.

The majority of people wherever found ought in all questions to govern the minority.

How can this full, perfect, just and supreme voice of the people, embodied in the Constitution, be brought to bear, habitually and steadily, in counteracting the fatal tendency of the government to the absolute and despotic control of the numerical majority?

When you get too big a majority, you're immediately in trouble.'

Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.

We [Congress] are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. […] That’s not how we were meant to govern. Our entire system of government — with its checks and balances, its bicameral Congress, its protections of the rights of the minority — was designed for compromise.

Majoritarian is when a majority takes a decision. It is not dictatorship. It is about which issue is major.

The conception that government should be guided by majority opinion makes sense only if that opinion is independent of government. The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed.

With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.

And American voters understand that if we want to keep fighting to move in the new - in a new direction, we've got a long way to go. And we need to make sure we continue with Democrats being in the majority.

Abandoning traditions of responsibility and civility won the GOP control of both houses of Congress in 1994. Rejecting any compromise brought Republicans the perks and power of majority control for the first time in 40 years. Thus did the politics of total resistance become their path of least resistance.

Control by the majority. Everything else about our government is appendage, it is ornamentation.

We should not allow the minority to control the majority by requiring super majorities on budget related votes.

A majority can do anything.

I would go on the record with my respect for Mike Madigan, which will probably upset a lot of friends. He's enormously skillful at what he does. The only speakers of any House who survive are the ones who can keep their majority and keep everyone going largely in the same direction. Mike Madigan is superb at that.