Quotes About Congress

[It is not the purpose nor right of Congress] to attend to what generosity and humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require.

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

A republican stands up in congress and says 'I GOT A REALLY BAD IDEA!!' and the democrat stands up after him and says 'AND I CAN MAKE IT SHITTIER!!

With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke.

The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.

Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. They're damn boring. They have no imagination, and they don't know how to imagine the future.

Many ghosts also walk the halls of the White House and the chambers of Congress. I have encountered quite a few ghosts of former U.S. congressmen who regret that, having been given a rare opportunity to foster positive change in the country, they blew it. Many cling to the earth, guilt-ridden with failure, often haunting their assembly room in the hope of impressing their contemporaries. In

June 28, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, and Biddle decided to persuade Harrison, whom he knew from legal ties in Philadelphia, into public service. The act made it mandatory, for the first time in American history, for every alien living in the United States to register and be fingerprinted.

So, you know, I think that Democrats are being more successful in Congress and I'm really going to be proud of the role I will play tomorrow as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee when this bill passes.

By the end of his second term, Bush II had issued more than 1,100 constitutional challenges to provisions of law. Further, he employed them in an unprecedented way: to effectively curtail the power of the legislative branch by threatening (via the challenge) to not enforce a law passed by Congress. In effect, Bush claimed to accomplish what the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional—a line item veto.

Without moral values, which should begin in Congress, America will lose her roots, her basis, her thesis.

Any hiring system that hands out jobs on the basis of race rather than qualifications weakens the economy. America's international competitiveness is being seriously challenged. That in such times our Congress can still vote to carry on with such a debilitating, unjust system shows the extent to which our representatives—and our nation—have been mesmerized by race.

In 1902, the Senator had been banned from the White House for punching out a colleague, mid-debate.

You could never trust a politician, Brown said, because "he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage." Presidents and members of Congress were, to him, "fiends clothed in human form," for they compromised with evil.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

All alone in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing.

There's nothing that irritates Americans more than the fact that some members of Congress think they are entitled to their own set of rules. And it's true - too many people in Washington live in an alternate reality.

Washington is designed not to solve problems. 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.

This is my fourth term and my seventh year. My first year was in 1997, the same year for Vic Snyder. It is still exciting to be there even though Washington is not run by Democrats right now, but we are working very hard.

The worst excesses of the Congress of the 1980s pale in comparison with what is going on in Washington today.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

Earmarks have become a symbol of a Congress that has broken faith with the people. This earmark ban shows the American people we are listening and we are dead serious about ending business as usual in Washington.

Of course, the genesis of a good portion of the gridlock in Congress does not reside in Congress itself. Ultimate reform will require each of us, as voters and Americans, to take a long look in the mirror, because in many ways, our representatives in Washington reflect the people who have sent them there.