Quotes About Legislation

The Romans didn't base their laws on a morality derived from a Judeo-Christian ethic. Roman laws had more to do with what was beneficial for Rome and Romans.

What happens when there is a conflict between the Scottish parliament, if it was established, and the Westminster parliament? Who is supreme?

Whatever solutions there are for flood control need to be bipartisan.

In England, we don't have any guns whatsoever.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

In theory, the filibuster helps whichever party is in the minority in the Senate. In practice, it is the Republicans who have disproportionately used it to engage in cynical and anti-democratic obstructionism whenever they find themselves in the minority.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.

Being whip is working with members, educating them, and trying to move legislation forward.

It's no secret I was part of John Dingell's whip team.

The whip's office is almost more educational - educating members on the bill itself, listening to members ahead of time.

With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eye blink.

If I were a betting man, the odds are that Obama's White House and Justice Department will double down on their gun-control agenda by edict.

The Founders surely never imagined that a three-fifths majority would be the standard requirement for passing legislation in the upper chamber, and for most of American history it wasn't. But filibuster use skyrocketed in 1993, when Republicans found themselves locked out of the White House and big Democratic congressional majorities.

I opposed No Child Left Behind, I opposed the Medicare prescription drug bill, I opposed the Wall Street bailout. What the American people are starting to see is that Republican, Republicans on Capitol Hill get it and the Democrats, from the White House to Capitol Hill, just don't get it.

We do all the appropriating. They do not do any of it down at the White House. They send a budget up here, and we don't have to pay any attention it to at all. We do what we want to do.

On immigration, there are a lot of hurdles before anything arrives at the White House.

I found that there is very little interest in Washington for true election reform. That neither the White House nor either house of the Congress seems to be as committed to guaranteeing democratic participation in this country as we seem to be in other countries.

The fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won't veto any of these things.

The White House doesn't create jobs. The government together - White House, Congress - creates policies that allow for greater job creation.

It is what we prevent, rather than what we do that counts most in Government.