Quotes About Constitutional

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation.

The big issue is this incremental whittling away of our constitutional rights, our most important constitutional rights, including freedom of speech. This is something that we really have to put our foot down on, and we have to fight it at every step of the way.

In most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all.

The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might.

The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.

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

We can only undo the election if the behavior meets the constitutional standard of subverting and threatening our system of government.

A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.

The United States cannot and should not discriminate on the basis of religion. The free exercise of religion is at the very heart of our constitutional guarantee for all persons of this country.

I see no constitutional problems with the identification, staving off and defusing of outside threats.

Let there be no reservation or doubt that I believe the Senate should vote on each and every judicial appointment made by the President of the United States and that no rule or procedure should ever stop the Senate from exercising its constitutional responsibility.

Change from below, the formulation of demands from the populace to end unacceptable injustice, supported by direct action, has played a far larger part in shaping British democracy than most constitutional lawyers, political commentators, historians or statesmen have ever cared to admit. Direct action in a democratic society is fundamentally an educational exercise.

Let it never be forgotten that it is not by means of war that states are rendered fit for the enjoyment of constitutional freedom; on the contrary, whilst terror and bloodshed reign in the land, involving men's minds in the extremities of hopes and fears, there can be no process of thought, no education going on, by which alone can a people be prepared for the enjoyment of rational liberty.

The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.

It is too disgusting to contemplate that a handful of men keep millions of women from being constitutional citizens of this land.

'Constitutional' is just a real pip of a word. Positively rolls off the tongue. In fact, it's downright fun to say. 'Con-stit-too-shun-al.' It's the verbal equivalent of skipping down the street with an ice cream cone in your hand. It's like a semantic bag of Lays potato chips. You simply can't just say it once.

Congress is best viewed from a distance—the farther the better—because up close, it is truly ugly. I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant? Benjamin Franklin would not have thought so.

Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.

If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

The growth of constitutional government, as we now understand it, was promoted by the establishment of two different sets of machinery for making laws and carrying on government.

It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones.

Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.

The cause of the South was the cause of constitutional government, the cause of government regulated by law, and the cause of honesty and fidelity in public servants. No nobler cause did man ever fight for!

Under the principle of equality, we should get as close to respecting equal votes of every citizen as we can, given our constitutional structure. And I think if we did that, then the will of the people would not be overturned.

A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.

Our constitutional system is founded on democracy: the will of the people, not the unchecked rule of judges.

The veto is a President's Constitutional right, given to him by the drafters of the Constitution because they wanted it as a checkagainst irresponsible Congressional action. The veto forces Congress to take another look at legislation that has been passed. I think this is a responsible tool for a president of the United States, and I have sought to use it responsibly.

Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties.

The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.

The constitutional reform is supposed to give autonomy to eastern Ukraine and to be adopted by the end of 2015. This has not happened, and the year is over. That's not Russia's fault.

As Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.'

The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.

Every president since George Washington has respected this clause in the Constitution. We want to avoid that Constitutional potential crisis. And the way to do it is for Donald Trump - it`s not about him.

What Congress and the popular sentiment approve is rarely defeated by reason of constitutional objections. I trust the measure will turn out well. It is a great relief to me. Defeat in this way, after a full and public hearing before this [Electoral] Commission, is not mortifying in any degree, and success will be in all respects more satisfactory.

Now to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life, I do this under protest and impelled by said force yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the Constitutional Sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.

Anyone who takes a seat in the Bundestag does so within a Europeanized constitutional framework.

I strongly support Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a constitutional right to a woman to make the most intimate, most difficult, in many cases, decisions about her health care that one can imagine.

I was overwhelmed by the number of calls we got from people offering to rent us houses, to take us out to dinner, to drive us around house hunting. Everyone was just indescribably kind in Havaii. Finally we moved into a house offered to us for an incredible $125 a month by a man who feels that the separation of church and state is a valid constitutional issue which should be fought for.

The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.

This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.

The people that can't win elections, outside of Barack Obama, the people on the Democrat side who cannot win elections, who do not have the votes to stop Donald Trump at all in a constitutional sense, have to now behave outside the Constitution in order to stop the duly elected president of the United States about whom they can produce no evidence that his election was fraudulent.

Justice William Brennan stated that the phrase 'under God' in our Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional because it no longer has a religious purpose or meaning.

As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.

You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there, obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there, kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.

The case for freedom, the case for our constitutional principles the case for our heritage has to be made anew in each generation. The work of freedom is never done.

I don't think we're actually using the constitutional tools that we have in an appropriate fashion.

Although the governor strongly disagrees with the court substituting its judgment for the constitutional process of the elected branches or a vote of the people, the court has now spoken clearly as to their view of the New Jersey Constitution, and, therefore, same-sex marriage is the law.