Quotes About Legislatures

Unlike the United States Congress, which mostly forbids outside employment, state legislatures are generally composed of people with other careers.

Our work is before us. It cannot be passed to future legislatures and must not be passed to future generations. May we boldly seize the moment with singular unity. And may we build a Texas of unlimited possibility.

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

I will endorse the Supreme Court's unfairly maligned opinion in Employment Div. v. Smith, and I will argue that there is no constitutional right to harm others simply because the conduct is religiously motivated. The Court's First Amendment doctrine is wise. Legislatures can exempt the religious from some laws, but only where legislators and prosecutors ask the hard questions and where the religious entities have borne the burden of proving that exempting them renders significant harm.

The Republican Party's gerrymandering efforts were also having unintended consequences. For years the party had poured resources into state legislatures in order to redraw congressional districts and lock in Republican control. But this strategy also left incumbents susceptible to primary challenges by candidates who were more radical than they themselves were and who had their pick of billionaires to fund their campaigns.

Having seen what the Earl Warren Court did with judicial power, Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork advocated an ethic of judicial restraint and deference to legislatures. Over time, however, conservative judges focused more and more on restraining legislatures through the courts by invalidating some laws as unconstitutional. Originalism was both a "shield" against judicial overreach and a "sword" to be used against acts of Congress.

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments—the ones abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship rights—still exist, but they've been so weakened by custom, by Congress and the various state legislatures, and by recent Supreme Court decisions that they don't much matter.