Quotes & Sayings About Legislatures

For the same reason that the members of the State legislatures will be unlikely to attach themselves sufficiently to national objects, the members of the federal legislature will be likely to attach themselves too much to local objects. — James Madison

There is nothing wrong with someone who receives less than a majority of the vote being elected a representative. This is almost by definition the result in a system of proportional representation that elects multiple representatives from the same geographical unit and adopts voting rules that allow numerical minorities without the voting clout ever to win a race in a single-member district to elect a favorite in a multimember district. The designof multi-member institutions, like legislatures, offers many possibilities for creativity if one's desire is to maximize the number of people who feel some sense of genuine linkage with their putative "representatives. — Sanford Levinson

I am unable to conceive that the state legislatures which must feel so many motives to watch, and which possess so many means of counteracting the federal legislature, would fail either to detect or to defeat a conspiracy of the latter against the liberties of their common constituencies. — James Madison

If I were president, I would want to spend a lot of time going to the legislatures and telling them about best practices, whether it's about fighting poverty, whether it's about educating kids. The states are the laboratories where we can see what works. And I think presidents can have a much better relationship with legislatures. — John Kasich

Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools. — David Souter

Civil asset forfeiture was originally intended as a way to cripple organized crime through the seizure of property used in a criminal enterprise. Regrettably, it has become a tool for unscrupulous law enforcement officials, acting without due process, to profit by destroying the livelihood of innocent individuals, many of whom never recover the lawful assets taken from them. When the rights of the innocent can be so easily violated, no one's rights are safe. We call on Congress and state legislatures to enact reforms to protect law-abiding citizens against abusive asset forfeiture tactics. — Republican Party

There are legions of [Aquarian, New Age, One World Religion] conspirators. They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors offices, in state and federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy making in the country. — Marilyn Ferguson

Every improvement in our conceptions of justice, as well as in the machinery for the administration of justice, whereby a closer approximation to exact justice may be secured, will make for social peace, though the mere adjudication of conflicting interests will not remove the conflicts themselves nor their cause. That lies deeper than legislatures or courts can probe. — Thomas Nixon Carver

Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder. — D. A. Carson

Protecting people from their bad habits - in fact, defining which habits should be considered "bad" in the first place - is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly seized. Prostitution, gambling, liquor sales on the Sabbath, pornography, usurious loans, sexual relations outside of marriage (or, if your tastes are unusual, within marriage), are all habits that various legislatures have regulated, outlawed, or tried to discourage with strict (and often ineffective) laws. When — Charles Duhigg

We live amid falling taboos. In our crowded little hour of history we have seen how the prejudice of religion no longer can bar the way to the White House. Some of you may live to see the day when the prejudice of sex no longer places the Presidency beyond the reach of a greatly gifted American lady. Long before them, I hope you will see a woman member of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Congress and in our State Legislatures we need more women to bring their sensitive experience to the shaping of our decisions. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Legislatures represent people, not acres or trees. — Earl Warren

I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns. — Bernie Sanders

Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress. — Ken Thompson

Democrats in state legislatures are at their lowest level since the 1920s. President Obama has a can't-miss strategy to save the party in 2016. He's leaving. — Craig Ferguson

As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families. — Robert Simonds

I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance. — Jane Addams

Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took their power from the German and the Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the Ogpu, and the Cheka. — Edwin Arthur Hall

The Federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular, to the state legislatures. — James Madison

It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted. — Learned Hand

In the last two years, the amount of legislation in the House of Representatives and state legislatures has been really unprecedented, that has focused on reproductive rights. — Sandra Fluke

The media, the polls and our legislatures fortunately have short attention spans. — John Gutfreund

Nothing can be more evident, than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the National Government, in the hands of the State Legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy ... It is to little purpose to say that a neglect or omission of this kind [not letting the feds have elections], would be unlikely to take place. The constitutional possibility of the thing, without an equivalent for the risk, is an unanswerable objection. — Alexander Hamilton

Under this law (Controlled Substances Act) a bureaucrat-usually not elected-decides whether or not a substance is dangerous and how dangerous that substance is. There's no more messing around with legislatures, presidents, or other bothersome formalities. When MDMA (ecstasy) was made illegal in 1986, no elected official voted on that. It was done "in house." People are now in jail because they did something that an administrator declared was wrong. — Peter McWilliams

Truth and non-violence are not cloistered virtues but applicable as much in the forum and the legislatures as in the market place. — Mahatma Gandhi

I see a trend here where the President seems to think his job is to count votes and then try to make a deal That's what we in legislatures do. Mr. Obama's job is to travel the country, fight for the values that he cares about. — Anthony Weiner

We're an ignorant nation right now. We're not really capable, I do not think, the majority of our people, of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency, of course. I don't think we're bright enough to do the job that would preserve our democracy, our republic. I think we're in serious danger. — Walter Cronkite

Unlike the United States Congress, which mostly forbids outside employment, state legislatures are generally composed of people with other careers. — Bill Dedman

I've learned the importance of changing people's minds at the grassroots level so that whoever does run will have a much better chance of encountering public opinion that reaches a critical mass and brings about a change not only in White House policies but in the Congress and in the state legislatures and all around the world. — Al Gore

I'm not the first to have raised these democratic concerns. Many have faulted the court for its lack of clarity in certain cases and many have criticized its recent lack of deference to decisions made by state legislatures and Congress. — Mike DeWine

Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a "standing army" struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous threat to republican principles. — Joseph J. Ellis

Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations. — Diane Ravitch

If the General Government should be left dependent on the State Legislatures, it would be happy for us if we had never met in this room. — John Dickinson

I'm fully aware of the intense political pressures bearing down on education. The policies through which these pressures exert themselves must be challenged and changed. Part of my appeal (as it were) is to policymakers themselves to embrace the need for radical change. But revolutions don't wait for legislation. They emerge from what people do at the ground level. Education doesn't happen in the committee rooms of the legislatures or in the rhetoric of politicians. It's what goes on between learners and teachers in actual schools. If you're a teacher, for your students you are the system. If you're a school principal, for your community you are the system. If you're a policymaker, for the schools you control you are the system. — Ken Robinson

The late proceedings of those daring invaders to establish a national religion have opened the eyes of all lovers of liberty and religion ... I have been told they have thrown off the mask and are preaching to the people to elect none but godly men to represent them in the General and State Legislatures; ... what they mean by godly people, is people of their own stamp ... — Anne Royall

What's happened is that, almost overnight, we've switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it. — Christopher Peterson

Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request
it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the presidential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this. — Susan B. Anthony

A market - any market - requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market. — Robert B. Reich

Political union means transferring the prerogatives of national legislatures to the European parliament, which would then decide how to structure Europe's fiscal, banking, and monetary union. — Barry Eichengreen

So-called "same-sex marriage" is now recognized as a legitimate entity in the eyes of our government. Such a designation by a government, however, does not change the definition God has established. The only true marriage in God's eyes remains the exclusive, permanent union of a man and a woman, even as our Supreme Court and state legislatures deliberately defy this reality. — David Platt

Despite two decisions, in 2008 and 2010, by the U.S. Supreme Court unequivocally affirming that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms against infringement by the government, state legislatures continue to do just that - enact laws that significantly infringe this fundamental human right. — Bob Barr

Allowing unelected judges to declare laws enacted by popularly elected legislatures unconstitutional and invalid seemed flagrantly inconsistent with free popular government. Such judicial usurpation, said Richard Dobbs Spaight, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from North Carolina, was "absurd" and "operated as an absolute negative on the proceedings of the Legislature, which no judiciary ought ever to possess." Instead of being governed by their representatives in the assembly, the people would be subject to the will of a few individuals in the court, "who united in their own persons the legislative and judiciary powers," making the courts more despotic than the Roman decemvirate or of any monarchy in Europe. — Gordon S. Wood

How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one. — Harris L Coulter

The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of. — Stanley Elkins

Our work is before us. It cannot be passed to future legislatures and must not be passed to future generations. May we boldly seize the moment with singular unity. And may we build a Texas of unlimited possibility. — Rick Perry

If fighting for the legislatures meant a sacrifice of truth and nonviolence, democracy would not be worth a moment's purchase. — Mahatma Gandhi

The swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no ... when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart ... and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape ... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth - then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth. — Walt Whitman

Only physicians are likely to be regarded as competent to judge the qualifications of potential physicians, so licensing boards in the various states ... are typically composed..of physicians, ... members of the AMA. The boards, or the state legislatures ... give the AMA the power to influence the number of persons admitted to practice (by) lengthy training, ... (and) the list of 'approved' schools and hospitals (which) is generally identical with the list issued by the Council on Medical Education and Hospitals of the AMA. — Milton Friedman

Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way. — William Graham Sumner

Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular. — Thomas Jefferson

The legislatures will have better means of information. They can discover the danger at a distance; and possessing all the organs of civil power, and the confidence of the people, they can at once adopt a regular plan of opposition, in which they can combine all the resources of the community. They can readily communicate with each other in the different States, and unite their common forces for the protection of their common liberty. — Alexander Hamilton

Look not to legislatures and churches for your guidance, nor to any soulless incorporated bodies, but to inspirited or inspired ones. — Henry David Thoreau

There ought always to be a constitutional method of giving efficacy to constitutional provisions. What for instance would avail restrictions on the authority of the state legislatures, without some constitutional mode of enforcing the observance of them? ... This power must either be a direct negative on the state laws, or an authority in the federal courts, to over-rule such as might be in manifest contravention of the articles of union. — James Madison

Lawyers, before any other group, must continue to point out how the system is really working-how it actually affects real people. They must constantly demonstrate to courts and legislatures alike the tragic results of legal nonintervention. They must highlight how legal doctrines no longer bear any relation to reality, whether in landlord and tenant law, holder in due course law, or any other law. In sum, lawyers must bring real morality into the legal consciousness — William J. Brennan

Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually. — Warren Farrell

Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities ... In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task. — Joan Biskupic

I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian. — Gore Vidal

Since 2010, when the GOP took control of many State legislatures, 205 anti-abortion laws have been enacted. This is more laws of this ilk than were passed in the prior decade.16 Since 2010 more than 50 abortion providers in 27 States have ended service, though not all were due to legislation. — David A. Grimes, M.D.

And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York, is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted, and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions. — John Grisham

Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical. — Oliver Ellsworth

Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice. — Abraham Lincoln

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION of 1787 was designed in part to solve the problems created by the presence in the state legislatures of these middling men. In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures. But — Gordon S. Wood

I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world. — Mark Twain

A local spirit will infallibly prevail much more in the members of Congress than a national spirit will prevail in the legislatures of the particular States. — James Madison

If laws acting upon private interests can not always be avoided, they should be confined within the narrowest limits, and left wherever possible to the legislatures of the States. — Martin Van Buren

The frame of mind in the local legislatures seems to be exerted to prevent the federal constitution from having any good effect. — Henry Knox

We are at a crossroads over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values. — George McGovern

Truth and nonviolence are both the means and the end, and given the right type of men, the legislatures can be the means of achieving the concrete pursuit of truth and nonviolence. — Mahatma Gandhi

In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons, - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society. — Emma Goldman

The great and complicated political reasons for secession, thundered about in Congress and in the state legislatures, were not their reasons, which were more like those expressed by a captive Confederate soldier, who was not a slaveholder, to his puzzled Union captors. "I'm fighting because you're down here," he said.30 — S.C. Gwynne

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead. — Dalton Trumbo

This last establishment will probably be within a mile of Charlottesville, and four from Monticello, if the system should be adopted at all by our legislature who meet within a week from this time. my hopes however are kept in check by the ordinary character of our state legislatures, the members ... — Thomas Jefferson

All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy - making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. — Rutherford B. Hayes

They wish for a general government of unity, as they see that the local legislatures must naturally and necessarily tend to retard the general government. — Henry Knox

It's going to be very important that we as women's rights advocates are involved in redistricting of both the states legislatures and of the House of Representatives and that we not lose seats but we gain seats for talented women and our country, but we're lacking behind. — Eleanor Smeal

The State Legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do; and the greatest opponents to a Federal Government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people's liberty. — James Madison

The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product. — Ralph Nader

State governments generate less revenue in a recession. As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue, legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges, in turn, answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes. — Arne Duncan

Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn't have anticipated. — Radley Balko

It's unfortunate that there's such a disconnect between what's happening on our legislatures and what the public knows about, the consequences what that means for ourselves, our mothers and our wives. — Sandra Fluke

The proper way to make policy changes is for you to convince your fellow citizens that there is a better policy outcome than the current one. And then in state legislatures, for those state legislatures to vote that change. — Ted Cruz

The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod - and thenceforward these two conducted all the policies, negotiations, legislatures, and war. — John Adams

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people. — Walt Whitman

Since most law-abiding citizens had no contact with the parole system, it was not a priority with the state legislatures. And since most of the state's prisoners were either poor or black, and unable to use the system to their advantage, it was easy to hit them with harsh sentences and keep them locked up. But for an inmate with a few connections and some cash, the parole system was a marvelous labyrinth of contradictory laws that allowed the Parole Board to pass out favors. — John Grisham

The appointment of senators by the state legislatures ... is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former. — James Madison

I consider the difference between a system founded on
the legislatures only, and one founded on the people, to be the true difference between a league or treaty and a constitution. — James Madison

Many attempts had been made by colonial legislatures to cut off or to tax the importation of slaves. — Albert Bushnell Hart

There still is a war on women in terms of politicians in Washington and the state legislatures trying to eliminate any rights we have fought to win and that the Supreme Court has afforded us. — Gloria Allred

With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms. — William E. Connolly

Do you think states' rights would have disappeared if state legislatures still elected our United States senators? Do you think our United States senators would be difficult to contact if they were named by our state legislatures? — Rob Woodall

An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with state legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment. It strikes me that God might write a book that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that a real God could produce a work that would excite the admiration of mankind. Surely politicians could be better employed than in passing laws to protect the literary reputation of the Jewish God. — Robert G. Ingersoll

legislatures at different levels of government, researchers, journalists, and judges involved in one or more aspects of the process. Each of these actors (either individual or corporate) has potentially different values/interests, perceptions of the situation, and policy preferences.
2. This process usually involves time spans of a decade or more, as that is the minimum duration of most policy cycles, from emergence of a problem through sufficient experience with implementation to render a reasonably fair evaluation of a program's impact (Kirst and Jung 1982; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). A number of studies suggest that periods of twenty to forty years may be required to obtain a reasonable — Paul A. Sabatier

The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts. — Robert Reich