Edmund Burke: “It is not good for us, however it may be so for great statesmen, that we should be treated with variable politics.”

The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,--no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.

If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?

But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.