Quotes About Legislation

Everyone agrees that there are individuals who are seriously mentally ill and should not have guns.

This is certainly not the first case in which a merger approved in one place hasn't gone through in the other. There was a case last year where the merger between two EU companies was approved here and blocked in the U.S.

Since Sandy Hook, I have sat back as a father and been mesmerized by the inability of the federal government to do anything substantively on gun safety.

The largest number of jobs likely to be created by the JOBS Act will be for lawyers needed to clean up the mess that it will create.

Mike Pence, of course, is a governor with executive experience and doing well in a Midwestern state, but also served in Congress. I served with Mike.

I'm very proud to be a member of the Congress. And I'm proud to serve with people like Mike Doyle.

Here's what we know: after the Secure Fence Act, we have built 600 miles of wall and fencing on a 2,000 mile border. What that has done is not in any demonstrable way made us safer.

If we don't act, drilling will be allowed only 3 miles off Florida's east coast beaches.

Sometimes Congress likes to milk an issue.

Legislation has a certain jurisdiction. It can't change mindsets and hearts.

I'm not for laws. We need a minimum of laws.

When I was minister of sport in Brazil, I tried to bring in a law that would make the chairmen of clubs reveal their accounts like other businesses. It was turned down, but I think it is an important story that will make a good film.

I do understand that, having been a minister, there is difficulty putting stuff into legislation which is being negotiated. I quite understand.

The way I see it, I'm not going to Washington to be the 60th Democratic senator. I'm going to Washington to be the second senator from the state of Minnesota.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.

The end of the world will be legal.

How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened.

From 1965 to 1967, my dad, Jack Gilligan, served in Congress and helped pass landmark laws like the Voting Rights Act.

One of the really positive things about minority government is that there is the necessity to broker policy positions. What happens is you get a hybrid of what a single party might do. And I don't think that is a bad thing.

No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.

It's obvious that we need inexpensive and safe care for young Americans; this was clear to Congress nearly thirty years ago when it passed the Child Development Act of 1971. This act would have created a national network of child-care centers with parent fees set according to income. Here's why I say would have: Though busy with the Watergate scandal and the impending loss of his job, President Nixon somehow found time to veto the Child Development Act.

In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a "crime against nature" could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor- a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years.

Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they on they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.]