American Constitutions: the Relations of the Three Departments as Adjusted by a Century ...1884 - 76 pages |
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Popular passages
Page 61 - The Congress is the legislative department of the government; the President is the executive department. Neither can be restrained in its action by the judicial department; though the acts. of both, when performed, are, in proper cases, subject to its cognizance.
Page 13 - A respect for truth, however, obliges us to remark that they seem never for a moment to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.
Page 28 - as the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.
Page 41 - If the opinion of the supreme court covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control the co-ordinate authorities of this government. The congress, the executive, and the court, must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the constitution.
Page 26 - According to the plan as it now stands, the President will not be the man of the people as he ought to be, but the minion of the Senate. He cannot even appoint a tide-waiter without the Senate.
Page 42 - Resolved, That the President, in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.
Page 20 - Missouri, providing that no bill " shall contain more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed...
Page 10 - Experience had proved a tendency in our governments to throw all power into the Legislative vortex. The Executives of the States are in general little more than Cyphers; the legislatures omnipotent. If no effectual check be devised for restraining the instability and encroachments of the latter, a revolution of some kind or other would be inevitable.
Page 28 - In this point of view, a senate, as a second branch of the legislative assembly, distinct from, and dividing the power with, a first, must be in all cases a salutary check on the government. It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one would otherwise be sufficient.
Page 12 - The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.