Quotes About Congress

The case of Johnson v. M'Intosh is exactly why Congress can pass legislation as it did with the Rio Tinto land mine deal because Congress took the land from the tribes, ignores their sacred connections to it, their cultural connections and does whatever it wants with it. Congress terminated tribal status for more than 100 tribes. Basically said, you're not a tribe anymore and we're not going to pay attention to the treaties. The Supreme Court has held that when Congress breaches a treaty with an Indian tribe it's not judicially reviewable. It's called a political question.

The Court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people's decision to give Congress '[a]ll legislative Powers' enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.

I've got a pen, and I've got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive action. I've got a pen to talk executive actions where congress won't. Where congress isn't acting, I'll act on my own. I have got a pen and I got a phone. And that is all I need.

Justice White's conclusion is perhaps correct, if one assumes that the task of a court of law is to plumb the intent of the particular Congress that enacted a particular provision. That methodology is not mine nor, I think, the one that courts have traditionally followed. It is our task, as I see it, not to enter the minds of the Members of Congress - who need have nothing in mind in order for their votes to be both lawful and effective - but rather to give fair and reasonable meaning to the text of the United States Code, adopted by various Congresses at various times.

In seeking the help of the Congress and our countrymen, I pledged no easy answers. I pledged, and asked, only toil and dedication. These the Congress and the people have given in good measure.

I went to Congress to change the policies of our country. I did not go to change the behaviors of members of Congress.

In the wiretapping, despite all the momentum for a more assertive Congress, you're seeing Congress backing down, because there are many Republicans and even Democrats who are afraid of being seen as preventing the president from protecting the nation.

The American people want jobs and economic growth. Congress is doing nothing to provide that. The American people want their constitutional liberties protected. Congress is doing nothing to provide that.

No foreign policy will stick unless the American people are behind it. And unless Congress understands it. And unless Congress understands it, the American people aren't going to understand it.

People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it.

Now, six months after he sent the military back into combat to take on the terror group calling itself the Islamic State, Mr. Obama has acquiesced and sent a measure to Congress asking it to formally authorize what he has been doing all along. And now that they have gotten what they asked for, few in Congress seem all that enthusiastic about the prospect.

The environmental agenda before the Congress includes laws to deal with water pollution, pesticide hazards, ocean dumping, excessive noise, careless land development and many other environmental problems. These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship.

While Kuwait is not a democracy, giving only half the population a voice in their government is not a policy this Congress should support and one that I am glad that Kuwait's leaders are changing.

I had hoped to hear the President tonight tell the Congress and the American people exactly how he plans to tackle some of the important issues facing this country, unfortunately I did not.

We are telling veterans they must sacrifice to pay for the pet projects and contracts to campaign donors of powerful members of Congress.

The Parliament in Canada and the Congress in Washington do not have the authority to revoke the commandments of God, or to modify or amend them in any way.

All I can say is that with business and the interest of any party before me, I will consider and apply the law as it is written by Congress and informed by precedent.

"Benghazi happened a long time ago. We are unaware of any agency blocking an employee who would like to appear before Congress to provide information related to Benghazi." This is the modus operandi of the regime - any Democrat regime, actually. You stonewall it for a few months, and then after a few months go by you say, "It's an old story." Didn't Watergate happen a long time ago? It still seems to be really relevant, Watergate.

But, you know, there's another group that really runs the show. It's very shadowy, just as you've described... Those of us in the Congress of the United States are window dressing.

If we are to change America, we must change the United States Congress.

When the ACLU took my case and we got a ruling I think, for the first time, they could - the Congress could put out the report internally but they couldn't put it out at taxpayers' expense around the country. And I felt odd about that because I, in a way, I was interfering with free speech, but then, you can't always win.

During the terrorist regime in Haiti in the 1990s, the CIA, under the administration of Bill Clinton, was reporting to Congress that oil shipments had been blocked from entering Haiti. That was just a lie. I was there. You could see the oil terminals being built and the ships coming in.

Women administer the home. They set the rules, enforce them, mete out justice for violations. Thus, like Congress, they legislate; like the Executive, they administer; like the courts, they interpret the rules. It is an ideal experience for politics.

It's a shame that we have to use whatever leverage we have in Congress to get the president to deal with the biggest problem confronting our future. And that's our excessive spending.

We cut tax exemptions in 1986, it was the most admired tax reform in U.S. history. Congress and the president worked together then to eliminate scores of loopholes and exemptions and deductions; this made taxes much simpler, and allowed a major cut in tax rates.

This is a matter of Congress authorizes spending. They order me to spend.

Congress has no power to make any religious establishments.

Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.

The most significant impact is what it does in terms of the integrity of the legislative process and the executive process, as opposed to what it does for campaigns. But to remove this unheard of process in the 1990s, where members of Congress are being pushed and shoved every Tuesday to ask for $100,000, $500,000, a million dollars from corporations, unions, and individuals, this was never allowed in American history.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can't govern.

A top geneticist at Stanford says human intelligence is declining. You know what that means? We are seeing Congress at its smartest and most effective right now.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry

That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public.

I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.

We cannot make the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States someone who has risked America's secrets and lied about this to Congress and the American people about it day after day after day.

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror... so today I vetoed it.

It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books.

Campaign boot camp started as an opportunity to work in a grassroots way with people who were running for Congress. Colleagues on the Democratic National Committee were batting around different possibilities. I said, 'We should have boot camps.'

Trump has said that he wants to remove the tax deductibility of interest. If he can do that, fine. But I hope that Trump knows that it's not the President that sets tax policy. It's Congress.

There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.

For the first 10 years of my life in Congress, I had been too timid to tell the truth as I saw it. In a way I had betrayed my trust.

Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.

Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution says Congress has the ability to coin money and regulate the currency and doesn't say anything about gold or silver.

It was fascinating what a total interest he [John F. Kennedy] had in his tradecraft of being a politician. I didn't realize before that he was working on his memoirs all along, how he ran for Congress, that sort of thing.

I believe that the Constitution is not hostile to the idea that national problems can be solved at the national level through the cooperative efforts of the three coequal branches of government, the Congress, the executive and courts. But not every president, not every legislator and not every judge agrees that the federal government has the power to address and to try to remedy the twin national problems of poverty and access to equal opportunity.

Given the slow pace of Washington's bureaucracy, policymakers are often busy solving yesterday's problems. This rearview mirror approach afflicts Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.

So our focus has to be on the things that we can control, which is to take the necessary measures working with Congress to ensure that our economy grows, that we create jobs.