Quotes About Congress

I will continue to fight for legislation that forces Congress to read the bills! I will fight for a vote on my bill that calls for a waiting period for each page of legislation. I will continue to object when Congress sticks special interest riders on bills in the dead of night! And if Congress refuses to obey its own rules, if Congress refuses to pass a budget, if Congress refuses to read the bills, then I say: Sweep the place clean. Limit their terms and send them home!

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.

If congress refuses to obey its own rules. If congress refuses to pass a balanced budget. If congress refuses to read the Bills. Then I say, sweep the place clean, limit their terms, and send them HOME!

The IRS takes your money. Congress uses our money to arm our enemies. The IRS takes more of your money. Congress uses that money to fight the enemies Congress just armed.

It's politically impossible, as you know, for any member of Congress to make a public statement condemning or criticizing the policies of Israel. It would be political suicidal for them to do so. A lot of the members of Congress agree with me, some very high up in the Congress. But if they came out publically and said it, their seats would be in danger.

Well, Congress gave us a billion dollars to dig the hole, this gigantic hole. Bigger, much bigger than the hole in Geneva, Switzerland. Then they canceled the machine and gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole. Two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up. That is the wisdom of the United States Congress and it really makes you wonder: Is there intelligent life on the Earth? Certainly not in the United States Congress.

One time, the Library of Congress was giving books to local libraries around the country on Islam. The library of a guy named Walter Jones, who's a member of Congress from North Carolina, got some books and resource materials, and he got up in the press and said he didn't want any Muslim books in the library. And the people said, "Wait a minute, that's kind of anti-Muslim." He said, "Oh no, Keith Ellison is a friend of mine." And I said, "You know what? We are friends, but you're wrong about this.

We want this - and I - we hope that right when they come back, that the Congress passes the Lilly Ledbetter Act which would correct the Supreme Court decision that was just recent that essentially guts wage discrimination law. It's been in place for years. It was gutted by this Roberts Court. We want it to be reversed by legislation. We hope that Congress passes it and that is on the desk for [Barack] Obama to sign as one of his first acts once he's sworn in. So it - I could go on, we have quite a well-developed list.

When President Obama in 2011 used military power against the Qaddafi regime in Libya, he did not even notify Congress. A few in Congress mumbled, but did nothing.

One thing I will not compromise over is whether or not Congress should pay the tab for a bill they've already racked up. If Congress refuses to give the United States the ability to pay its bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy could be catastrophic.

The mistakes made by Congress wouldn't be so bad if the next Congress didn't keep trying to correct them.

President Obama is asking Congress to support a military strike in Syria. If they approve, it will be the first time Congress has officially declared war since Obamacare.

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.

President Barack Obama couldn't bring everything into existence through Congress. Because from the day that he was elected president of the United States, the United States Congress, many of the Republicans met, and they declared that they would never allow his legislative program to succeed. And for eight years they fought him.

Why do I keep performing at my age? What else am I going to do? Play golf? I tried that years ago and all I did was cuss. I can do that without the walk, cuss at Congress and let [Mark]Twain do it. "Imagine that you were an idiot. And then imagine that you were a member of Congress. Wait - I've repeated myself."

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.

I don't want to make a member of Congress do something that that member of Congress's constituents would not approve of, or would not agree to. So in that regard, I'm kind of the opposite of a lobbyist.

When Americans are worried about losing their jobs, their savings, their homes and their chance at the American Dream, Congress and the president must work together to lift our economy and restore hope. That is the course the New Direction Congress will continue in the days and weeks ahead.

I don't think we can depend on Congress. In the American political system - we have been brought up to believe that the American political system works beautifully; it is democratic; Congress represents us; the President is elected, he represents us - it doesn't work that way.

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.

Let me make it clear that I do not assert that a President and the Congress must on all points agree with each other at all times. Many times in history there has been complete disagreement between the two branches of the Government, and in these disagreements sometimes the Congress has won and sometimes the President has won. But during the Administration of the present President we have had neither agreement nor a clear-cut battle.

I doubt that I am the first member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won't be the last.

The voters in my district, and around the country, have demanded that Congress get a hold on the influx of illegal immigrants and tighten the security around our borders.

It is plain that, when it comes to inferior officers, Congress itself can pass a law sending these nominees to the President with him having the authority to put them on the bench without the advice and consent of the Senate.

Republicans in Congress boosted the economy by cutting taxes and ending programs that don't work.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

I believe that the power to declare war is most important in limiting the powers of the national government in regard to the rights of its citizens, but that it does not require Congress to give its approval before the president uses force abroad.

I've often thought that the process of aging could be slowed down if it had to go through Congress.

Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress.

I love working for the people of Indiana. I love helping our citizens make the most of their lives, but I do not love Congress.

Congress is my ideological home; I come from a Nehruvian family.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

Congress has become so dysfunctional that more and more of a burden is placed on the agencies to fill in the gaps. And the gaps get bigger and bigger because they're not constantly refreshed and tweaked.

The salary of a member of Congress ends the day that he of she leaves office.

If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.

Since September 11th Congress has created the Department of Homeland Security, more than doubled the homeland security budget and implemented a bipartisan overhaul of our intelligence systems.

The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.

It's August, which means Congress is on recess and Mitch McConnell has shimmied back into the ocean to seek a mate.

The New World Order run by the United Nations ain't gonna happen. Because they've shown their hand, and at least some corner of Congress and the American people are awake to it: they've blown it all.

I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries... What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.

We have not inherited an easy world. If developments like the Industrial revolution, which began in England, and the gifts of science and technology have made life much easier for us, they have also made it more dangerous. There are threats now to our freedom, indeed to our very existence, that other generations could never even have imagined. There is first the threat of global war. No president, no Congress, no prime minister, no parliament can spend a day entirely free of this threat. If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

Uncertainty hurts business. It annoys individuals. Why keep the whole country, including business and individuals, in uncertainty over the extent of the tax burdens to be placed upon us? How many of those who voted for Calvin Coolidge imagined for a moment that would do nothing to bring about tax relief before 1926?.... But if the Administration persists in opposing a special session then it will inevitably be 1926 before action is taken.... Coolidge and Congress should ease our minds and grease our activities by reforming and reducing taxation as soon as feasible after March 4.

The budget is like a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, then reaches in and tries to pull real ones out.

We know the legislation that passed the House. It was the worst piece of legislation frankly against working class people that I can remember in my political life in the Congress.

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.

It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action.

The Congress fights not with violent but with nonviolent means, however imperfect, however crude the nonviolence may be.

A territory cannot become a state or a nation unless Congress approves legislation and the president signs it.