I consider abortion to be a deeply personal and intimate issue for women and I don't believe male legislators should even vote on the issue.
Alan K. Simpson
Representative government demands an ongoing conversation between legislators and constituents.
Alan Siegel
I've been not only articulating the dissatisfaction with Albany, I've been acting on it. I've been very aggressive in bringing public integrity cases and public corruption cases and bringing cases against sitting legislators.
Andrew Cuomo
Congress has shortchanged not only foreign aid but foreign policy. A mistaken notion that diplomats are unimportant and hence undeserving of support grips conservative legislators, especially.
Anthony Lewis
Under a democratic form of government, the people elect legislators and ministers to fulfil their policies. The role of the ministers is to give directions. The role of the bureaucracy is to implement those directions. If those who have to do the implementation are on strike, no policies can actually be implemented.
Atishi
Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy.
Barney Frank
As attorney general, I can either look into it or I can ignore it because they're a bunch of powerful legislators... and I'm afraid they're going to cut my budget.
Ben Chandler
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
Ben Okri
Let me make it clear: The Disbursement Allocation Program is not pork barrel. Of the DAP releases in 2011 and 2012, only nine percent was disbursed for projects suggested by legislators. The DAP is not theft. Theft is illegal.
Benigno Aquino III
The Constitution overrides a statute, but a statute, if consistent with the Constitution, overrides the law of judges. In this sense, judge-made law is secondary and subordinate to the law that is made by legislators.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Ted Kennedy will go down in history as one of the giants of the U.S. Senate and one the most accomplished legislators in American history.
Bernie Sanders
William Andrews Clark was caught in a bribery scandal during a campaign for the U.S. Senate - he was said to describe the Montana legislators this way: 'I never bought a man who wasn't for sale.'
Bill Dedman
In Illinois, where legislators are paid $45,000, plus as much as $10,000 for leadership work, about half are full-time politicians.
In the Illinois State Capitol, in Springfield, farmer-legislators write the agriculture laws.
Like most other states, Illinois has little regulation of the economic interests of legislators and relies on public disclosure to keep the lawmaking honest.
My job as governor is different from the legislators. They represent their districts. I have to represent all 6.6 million Tennesseans and come to the best decisions I can.
Bill Haslam
Legislators are interested in their pet projects, getting re-elected, and popularity contests.
Bud Grant
Gay marriage passed in New York because four Republican legislators crossed party lines. They did it in part because they had true bipartisan financial support.
Campbell Brown
Sometimes, government officials and legislators disagree on policies or issues. Yet, we invariably want the best for Hong Kong people.
Carrie Lam
Concerned about re-election, interest-group reactions, the media, or fundraising, many legislators have found it in their interest to refuse to cooperate with members of the opposing party - or to treat them as enemies in some kind of war, in which the whole point is to defeat and humiliate them. But the American people have been the real losers.
Cass Sunstein
Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.
In Maine, we are fortunate to have a Clean Elections system that allows legislators to turn down corporate special interest money. At the national level, Congress should follow Maine's example by empowering the voices of small donors.
Our nation was founded with a bunch of founding legislators who joined together to move our country out of the blocks and get us started, and every generation since then has found a way to advance the ball down the field.
I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.
Through educational programs, community engagement and legislative efforts, players, owners and the NFL are working with law enforcement, advocacy groups and legislators to transform our communities.
Florida is one of the first states that sort of gives the legislature a very clear criteria for re-drawing electoral district maps. Basically, all the criteria do is tell the legislators that you can't draw a seat that helps yourself or a political party. That's really critical.
There are no tests similar to SATs to tell us how much undergraduates know. State legislators, who appropriate billions of dollars each year to higher education, are naturally interested in finding out what they are getting for their money.
If legislators come to believe that police power is an ever-present constitutional trump card they can play whenever it suits them, overreaching is inexorable.
But do not understand me as saying, or for one moment suggesting, that women legislators should confine themselves to doing only social service work. Not at all.
When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.
Democracy demands that judges confine themselves to a narrow sphere of influence - that is why the late Alexander Bickel called the judiciary the 'Least Dangerous Branch.' In a world governed by a proper conception of their role, judges don't play at being legislators - they leave that job to our elected representatives.
Henry M. Jackson, congressman and senator from 1941 until his death in 1983, achieved far greater renown than most legislators, ran for president in 1972 and 1976, and was for much of the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful men in America.
'Fairness' can be an important quality for legislators to consider when they are passing public policies. But it is a subjective standard. And it has no place among judges on a court - whose duty is to dispassionately judge a law's constitutionality.
Let us tell our legislators in advance, that this is a right, restraints on which, we will not, cannot bear; and that every attempt to restrain it is a palpable wrong on God and man.
In 2006, I appeared before a House subcommittee considering real estate reform. It was like visiting the capital for the 'Hunger Games' as an outsider in a glamorous and byzantine fairy tale: I couldn't believe how beautiful all the congressional aides were, and I never understood the system of bells and alarms warning legislators to vote.
You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.
We're going to march on Washington with a host of Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, legislators.
As legislators and as Members of Congress, it is our obligation to speak up for those who are being ignored in our society. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) does just that.
When legislators do something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, there's always the suspicion that they're in somebody's pocket.
I applaud Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison and the legislators in the Nevada State Senate who have introduced SB 26 to fight the BDS movement in Nevada.
In the U.S., free speech and the press are protected by the First Amendment. It has a clarity unmatched by modern legislators and declares that 'Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or the press.'
Only when legislators judge that the risk of continuing to support Trump outweighs the risk of abandoning him will they begin to jump ship.
This source of corruption, alas, is inherent in the democratic system itself, and it can only be controlled, if at all, by finding ways to encourage legislators to subordinate ambition to principle.
I am proud to join the many state legislators, governors, businessmen and hard-working Americans who have worked to build support and momentum for the idea of the Health Care Compact, and I am proud to introduce the common-sense bill for this sensible solution.
The basic architecture of Dodd-Frank makes sense. At the same time, as a number of regulators and legislators have observed, the act was a complex effort that produced thousands of pages of rules.
There's this idea of America that some people have to win and some have to lose, so certain things are in place to make this happen. Some people have to be the next legislators and political elites, and some have to fill the prisons and work in McDonald's. That's how America works. It's a machine which needs people up top and people down low.
I believe Congress has a duty to do so as well; not simply as a body of legislators, but more importantly as a community of friends, neighbors, parents and Americans.
The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept.
For years, comprehensive tax reform has eluded legislators.
