Quotes About Framers

nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn't even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).

As the Framers knew, democracy can fall to charismatic demagogues, would-be monarchs, self-interested kleptocrats, sophisticated criminals, and high-functioning morons.

use of the word high is revealing. In Britain, high treason involved a crime against the Crown—as distinguished from petit treason, the betrayal of a superior by a subordinate. The Framers knew this and deliberately chose to incorporate the word high as a limitation on impeachable offenses.

This OCCUPIED amendment, this constitutional amendment, would overturn Citizens United. It would make clear that corporations aren't people, that they - the framers of the Constitution never intended to give constitutional rights to corporations, the ones that we enjoy and cherish.

That no one could know for sure in those early days what the delegates really had in mind—or even had said—did nothing to stop those in favor and those opposed from issuing definitive judgments as to the intent of the framers and its effect on the nation.

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

The framers reconciled in a somewhat rough-hewn way the need for an antimajoritarian institution such as the Supreme Court to interpret a written constitution within a broader system of government basically committed to majority rule.

The Constitution makes very clear what the obligation of the United States Senate is and what the obligation of the president of the United States is. To allow a Supreme Court position to remain vacant for well over a year cuts against what I think the intentions of the framers are and what the traditions of the Senate and the executive are.

The modern presidency, as expressed in the policies of the administration of George W. Bush, provides the strongest piece of evidence that we are governed by a fundamentally different Constitution from that of the framers.

Apparently a great many people have forgotten that the framers of our Constitution went to such great effort to create an independent judicial branch that would not be subject to retaliation by either the executive branch or the legislative branch because of some decision made by those judges.

So much for the First Amendment! The chief and primary expression of our constitutional rights is being trampled by a "right" that the framers of the Constitution failed even to enumerate, the right to untrammeled sexual practice.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

The Framers were no more interested in binding future Americans to a set of divinely inspired commandments than any of us would wish to be bound by them.

The Constitution created a framework, not a Ouija board, precisely because the Framers understood that prospect of a nation ruled for centuries by dead prophets would be the very opposite of freedom.

It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.

RFRA introduced an era of extreme religious liberty in the United States that would have been rejected by the Framers, who understood the difference between ordered liberty and licentiousness. We need to return to that distinction, or risk the end of our largely peaceful religiously diverse country.

The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

The framers assumed no general right to privacy because, to state the obvious, criminal and evil acts can be committed in privacy. Criminal codes are full of such examples—from murder to incest to rape and other crimes.

The banishment of the Constitution and republicanism, like the disembowelment of the Declaration of Independence and individualism, has been scrupulous. There is now a vast gulf between the government the progressives have constructed and the framers' Constitution.

So too the race-conscious remedies that the Court has sanctioned or imposed have increased social tensions and distorted key civic institutions. Those liberties that the framers thought so absolute that they enshrined them in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, especially political speech, and the protection of private property—became negotiable, with the connivance of a Court established above all to protect those constitutional liberties that it would be tyranny to abridge.

JOINING THE COURT in 1991, Clarence Thomas brought with him the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate.

I believe that the Framers of the Constitution made their intent clear when they wrote the First Amendment. I believe they wanted to keep the new government from endorsing one religion over another, not erase the public consciousness or common faith.