Quotes About Congress

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!

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.

In foreign affairs, the president can do what he wants unless Congress says no. In domestic policy, the president can't do anything unless Congress says yes.

Internal self-government under a local constitution was authorized by Congress and approved by the residents in 1952, but federal law is supreme in Puerto Rico and residents do not have voting representation in the Congress.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a 'shellacking' in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

You know, I think many people have the mistaken impression that Congress regulates Wall Street. In truth that's not the case. The real truth is that Wall Street regulates the Congress.

If we were living back in 1789, your musket would be really useful in a military conflict. If you were called up to service, they said bring your musket. And indeed, the First Congress passed a law. You want to know the first gun control law in America? First Congress passed a law mandating that all able-bodied men must own a musket.

The Congress' name of 'INC' must be changed to 'Institutions Neglecting Congress'. Their habit is to misuse, abuse and reduce institutions.

While General Howe with a Large Armament is advancing towards New York, our Congress resolved to Declare the United Colonies free and Independent States. A Declaration for this Purpose, I expect, will this day pass Congress...It is gone so far that we must now be a free independent State, or a Conquered Country.

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."

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.

Under our constitutional system, the executive executes the laws that Congress has passed. It should not be executing laws that Congress has rejected.

I don't think this is a situation where you can say that Congress was avoiding any mention of the tax power. It'd be one thing if Congress explicitly disavowed an exercise of the tax power. But given that it hasn't done so, it seems to me that it's - not only is it fair to read this as an exercise of the tax power, but this court has got an obligation to construe it as an exercise of the tax power if it can be upheld on that basis.

June 1st is a date that is looming in everybody's mind with the final enforcement of the UIGEA. I actually think it may, finally, once and for all prove that it's an ineffective law. Congress created that law and now Congress has to do something to correct it.

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.

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

Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

I came to the conclusion months ago, and I said it to members of Congress, that the only way people are going to fully appreciate what this reform is if we pass it and implement it and it becomes not a caricature but a reality, and I still believe that. So I think it will be easier to sell it moving forward than it was to this point.

I worked when I was Congress on a second chance act. We have got to do a better job recognizing and correcting the errors in the system that do reflect on institutional bias in criminal justice. But what - what - what Donald Trump and I are saying is let's not have the reflex of assuming the worst of men and women in law enforcement. We truly do believe that law enforcement is not a force for racism or division in our country.

The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to parliament [or congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever.

President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most.

Frankly, nobody's every seen anything like what's happening today. When you have somebody getting a subpoena from the United States Congress to have your e-mails and all other information sent, and after - not before, after getting the subpoena, 33,000 e-mails are deleted and acid washed. And nobody even knows what that means, acid wash. It's a very expensive thing to do. Most people don't even know what it means.

Was the Vietnam conflict a war which should have, as a matter of constitutional law, required a declaration of war by Congress?

With a measly 18 percent of our Congress composed of women, the U.S. ranks just 77th in the world in terms of women in elected office, surpassed by such countries as Ezbekistan and Moldova.

Have we the means of resisting disciplined armies, when our only defence, the militia, is put in the hands of Congress?

The right of petition, I have said, was not conferred on the People by the Constitution, but was a pre-existing right, reserved by the People out of the grants of power made to Congress.

Prayer and dependence on God has been our history. How unfortunate it is now that an unaccountable and unelected and misguided judge from Wisconsin, Judge Barbara Crabb, has declared National Days of Prayer - established by the Congress - to be unconstitutional.

Pigs are smarter than dogs, and both are smarter than Congress.

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

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.

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.

A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.

Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that, every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner

Whether we like it or not, men have more of the offices, more of the higher jobs, more of the seats in Congress. Men need to re-examine what their power is. We need to understand how to use it.

Most Americans are more concerned about the economy and job creation. And they can't understand why the Obama administration or the Democrat majority in Congress wants to pass a bill like the cap-and-trade tax that will cost us jobs, that will hurt our economy, that will drive up costs for families, as well as for small businesses.

Congress is not a party which fades when not in power

I can tell you that too much money is corrupting American politics. Don't blame the American public. The U.S. Supreme Court has a lot to answer for, because it has made it impossible for Congress to reduce the corrupting influence of money on American political life.

There's not an appropriations bill in the last 10 years that the-that Democrats passed in the Congress. We haven't spent any money of your taxes in the last decade.

The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again and I'll say to them, read my lips, no new taxes.

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.

Hillary [Clinton] bleached and deleted 33,000 e-mails after a congressional subpoena. She got a subpoena from Congress and she said, this is no good, this is terrible, because those 33,000 e-mails had bad stuff.

Every politician just has to remember how he got his position in the first place. A young candidate running for Congress or any outsider interested in public office could only achieve his goals by relying on soft power. They could not force anyone to vote for them. They needed to convince their potential voters, they needed to do fundraising, they needed to be attractive candidates.

If you want to right-size executive power relative to the other branches of government, the best way to do that is to have a healthy Congress in which the two parties are debating, disagreeing, but also occasionally working together to pass legislation.

We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.

President Obama's executive actions give work permits and federal entitlement benefits to people illegally in America - in direct violation of the laws passed by Congress. This undermines the entire constitutional system of government.

But in Congress, accountability is just a catch phrase, usually directed elsewhere. Demands to personal responsibility or corporate accountability abound, but rarely congressional accountability or fiscal responsibility.

The powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress has no power to disarm the militia.

I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would be - would love to see an expose like that.