Quotes About Legislation

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

It seems like every week we are considering bills that would make it harder to limit the amount of carbon we are dumping into our atmosphere, and prevent implementation of clean technologies. The voters who sent us here deserve better.

There are states with photo ID requirements that don't disenfranchise eligible voters.

The Senate is an unknowing world.

I'm president of the Senate. I'm not a neophyte when it comes to understanding political alignments and misalignments.

There are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far.

Our responsibility is to focus on the House. The Senate's the Senate.

Running for Senate is a very involved process.

I'm running for Senate to create real change in Washington, which starts with getting big money out of politics and overturning Citizens United.

Senator Rubio and I don't agree on everything.

I'm focused, as you can tell, on 2014 and on doing my job as a senator.

I want to be the health care senator.

Seniority actually means something in the Senate.

I don't want to separate religion and state, I want to settle it.

I think abortion is a settled issue in New York.

DACA, to me personally, and the DREAM Act are very personal and mean an awful lot.

When it comes to the environment in our own backyard, we understand it far better than anybody in Washington D.C.

It should be a badge of shame to have an A-rating from the NRA.

It's very important to the conservative movement to be rid of the Ex-Im Bank.

In Australia you're not allowed to go down to the beach and eat anything from the rocks. You just can't do it - help yourself to mussels and things like that because there's hardly any left and the government has now legislated against it.

Resolved Therefore that the General Assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the inhabitants of this colony and that every attempt to vest such power in any other person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as AMERICAN FREEDOM.50 Men

He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price. Quaint, yes: But it happened, in America, only a quarter of a century ago.

He believed in constant conversation between the president and lawmakers, for Jefferson thought that "if the members are to know nothing but what is important enough to be put into a public message Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it becomes a government of chance and not of design."24

In the 1790s, with the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Federalists sought not just to win elections but to eliminate their opponents altogether.