Quotes About Constitutional

there ought always to be a constitutional method of giving efficacy to constitutional provisions. What for instance would avail restrictions on the authority of the state legislatures, without some constitutional mode of enforcing the observance of them? . . . This power must either be a direct negative on the state laws, or an authority in the federal courts, to over-rule such as might be in manifest contravention of the articles of union.

To be true to its constitutional role, the Supreme Court should refuse to be drawn into making public policy, and it should strike down legislation only when a clear constitutional violation exists. When judicial activists resort to various inventions and theories to impose their personal views on privacy and liberty, they jeopardize the legitimacy of the judiciary as an institution and undermine the role of the other branches of government.

If Charlton Heston can have a constitutional right carry a rifle, why can't grandma have a constitutional right to health care?

Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts.

The Constitution remains brilliant in its overall design and sound with respect to the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers. But there are numerous archaic provisions that inhibit constructive change and adaptation. These constitutional bits affect the daily life of the republic and every citizen in it.

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.

In my political career, I'd like to see a constitutional balanced budget amendment.

It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised - and it should be.

I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.

While 45 of the 50 States have either a State constitutional amendment or a statute that preserves the current definition of marriage, left-wing activist judges and officials at the local levels have struck down State laws protecting marriage.

Yes, we do defend our office as we do defend our homes. This is a constitutional right everybody has, and nothing's funny about that. The only reason they get mad at the Black Panther Party when you do it is for the simple reason that we're political.

[I watch] all that stuff - Game of Thrones and all the other series. How about House of Cards? As for Boardwalk Empire - that's another period of government overreach, but at least they use the amendment process! In real life, the executive branch, by violating the Constitution, is using statutes in place of constitutional amendments to diminish our liberty.

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of ... constitutional principles.

I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.

There have been 44 constitutional referenda in Australia and only eight have succeeded.

President Obama's decision to bypass the constitutional advice and consent of the Senate is not an isolated incident.

I am encouraged President Obama now says he will fulfill his constitutional obligation to seek authorization for any potential military action in Syria. This is the most important decision any President or any Senator must make, and it deserves vigorous debate

The only constitutional exception to the power of making treaties is, that it shall not change the Constitution.… On natural principles, a treaty, which should manifestly betray or sacrifice primary interests of the state, would be null.

Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.

I call the present system 'Post-Constitutional America.' As I sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.

I'm not versed enough in constitutional law to run for office. I'd have to go back to school or something.

No power but Congress can declare war, but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war?

The whole point of constitutional democracy is the peaceful transfer of power; of Al Gore passing the baton to George W. Bush, even though that election was very suspiciously called.

I'm concerned about the survival, historically, of constitutional democracy.

I think basic disease care access and basic access to health care is a human right. If we need a constitutional amendment to put it in the Bill of Rights, then that's what we ought to do. Nobody with a conscience would leave the victim of a shark attack to bleed while we figure out whether or not they could pay for care. That tells us that at some level, health care access is a basic human right. Our system should be aligned so that our policies match our morality. Then within that system where everybody has access, we need to incentivize prevention, both for the patient and the provider.

The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.

Information obtained under dubious circumstances cannot play a role in legal proceedings in a constitutional state. But everything that's available must be taken into account in threat prevention.

The Government have consistently made it clear that the mechanism in the United Kingdom whereby the European draft constitutional treaty could be implemented is approval by the House of Commons followed by a referendum of the people of Britain. There is no question of implementing it by the back door.

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.

If Americans loved judicial activism, liberals wouldn't be lying about what it is. Judicial activism means making up constitutional rights in order to strike down laws the justices don't like based on their personal preferences. It's not judicial activism to strike down laws because they violate the Constitution.

Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions - or whole bodies of religious belief - and government. Apart from constitutional law and religious doctrine, there is a sense that tells us it's wrong to presume to speak for God or to claim God's sanction of our particular legislation and his rejection of all other positions. Most of us are offended when we see religion being trivialized by its appearance in political throw-away pamphlets.

We need a strong, bold constitutional conservative who won't back down and who will fight for the values we believe in. That's what we need for our nominee, whether it is me or whether it is someone else.

I must say this concerning the great controversy over rifles and shotguns. The only thing I've ever said is that in areas where the government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it's time for Negroes to defend themselves. Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun. It is constitutionally legal to own a shotgun or a rifle.

Western civilization has been at war with tribalism for 3,000 years. And that war was brought to the New World by the English colonists. A very early point in American law Chief Justice John Marshall is asked to decide the status of Indian tribes. And what he does. He calls them savages who lack the same rights as the white people who came over here, the Europeans, and colonized their land under this, what many Americans might regard as an obscure legal doctrine called the Doctrine of Discovery. But it is still the most important doctrine in American constitutional law.

'An order is an order' was not an excuse to do the wrong thing. You couldn't just blindly follow a government order ... This whole issue of should the Supreme Court be the final arbiter of what is or isn't constitutional, was settled at Nuremberg. People everywhere need to understand and need to follow that.

And what my constitutional values are are wholly irrelevant to the job, and so neither you nor anyone else will know what they are.

It would be a stultification of the responsibility which the course of constitutional history has cast upon this Court to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.

Like some great swelling river, the powers of the federal government have today breached their constitutional levees and spilled into countless areas of life never anticipated by the founders.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

Bush proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Some saw the move as an attempt to preserve traditional values, while others saw it as a cynical ploy to ensure that Vice President... Cheney will never have to pay for his gay daughter's wedding.

It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to discover a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.

In its proper constitutional sense, the term [militia] means all the able-bodied people who can be trained and disciplined to act in the community’s defence when it’s attacked. Since it encompasses every able-bodied person, it does not refer to those—such as the police, the military, or even the National Guard—who formally compose the official defence forces of the nation. Every citizen able and willing to act in an emergency becomes a potential defender against attacks aimed at the general population.

A political conception just applies to the basic structure of a society, its institutions, constitutional essentials, matters of basic justice and property, and so on.

No one talks about the real ethics disaster in Washington. It's that many members of Congress will listen to any argument against a bill except for two: that it's not moral or that it's not Constitutional.