Quotes About Constitutionality

Find time and space in which to think. As Lincoln began to survey the darkening landscape of the war and consider a new strategy regarding slavery, he needed time to reflect upon both the constitutionality and the ramifications of issuing an emancipation order.

The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion.

In our system of government, the Supreme Court ultimately decides on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress or of presidential actions. When their actions are challenged, both Congress and the president are entitled to have their positions forcefully advocated in court.

No matter how the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, states are making progress in developing strategies to provide more access to quality health care coverage.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

I hope that your committee will not permit doubt as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation

In 1926, Indianapolis adopted a regulation permitting African Americans to move to a white area only if a majority of its white residents gave their written consent, although the city's legal staff had advised that the ordinance was unconstitutional.

They could test the constitutionality of seizing guns by starting with taking them from the cops, ICE, Border Patrol and the FBI. We know that would save more than a thousand lives a year.

A difference must be made between a decision against the constitutionality of a law of Congress and of a State. The former acts as a restriction on the powers of this government, but the latter as an enlargement.

The court approved Hamilton's argument that this excise tax was legal and that Congress had power "over every species of taxable property, except exports."5 The decision in Hylton v. United States not only endorsed Hamilton's broad view of federal taxing power but represented the first time the Supreme Court ever ruled on the constitutionality of an act of Congress.

Muller v. Oregon established the constitutionality of labor laws (for women), the legitimacy of sex discrimination in employment, and the place of social science research in the decisions of the courts.

The foundations of modern civil-rights law are exceptionally secure. Conservative judges nibble around the edges sometimes, and people still debate the constitutionality of affirmative-action programs. But almost no one seriously argues about the basic meaning or legitimacy of core civil-rights protections.

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

Judges are the people who have to protect the rights of individuals, have to protect the rights of minorities, have to protect the rights in the Constitution, have to protect the requirement that the executive and the legislature not simply exercise raw power but adhere to standards of reasonableness and constitutionality.

Nullification is the Jeffersonian idea that the states of the American Union must judge the constitutionality of the acts of their agent, the federal government, since no impartial arbiter between them exists.

The defense of ObamaCare's constitutionality relies mainly on the truism that everyone is sure to get sick at some point in their lives, and this makes the health-care market unlike any other market.

On my first day in office as Ohio attorney general, I authorized Ohio to join the multistate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare.

The decision's significance, of course, lay in the Court's assertion of authority to review the constitutionality of acts of Congress. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," Marshall declared—a line that the Court has invoked throughout its history, down to the present. In the guise of modestly disclaiming authority to act, the Court had assumed for itself great power.

We all need good laws, and an independent, impartial, and efficient judiciary to verify the constitutionality of those laws.

'Fairness' can be an important quality for legislators to consider when they are passing public policies. But it is a subjective standard. And it has no place among judges on a court - whose duty is to dispassionately judge a law's constitutionality.