Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, what the House is doing today, the House of Representatives, the People's House, is so unique in history, and it is truly remarkable, because what we are doing today is we are showing that when the Constitution was drafted in 1787, that the men who met in Philadelphia in that year envisioned a system of the separation of powers, and they built into the Constitution a mechanism whereby one branch of government could reclaim the authority that had been usurped by another branch of government, and that is the genius of the Constitution. We can go back to the Declaration of Independence when Jefferson was asked by Benjamin Franklin, also in Philadelphia, to draft that document and to set forth the reasons for the establishment of this republic. One of the reasons that Jefferson put in the Declaration of Independence is that King George III had obstructed the administration of justice by refusing assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. In other words, it would be up to the individual colonies, and thus a central government in a new country, to establish and define exactly what those judicial powers are. So in the Constitution, under Article III, Section 1, Congress was given the express power to ordain and establish inferior Federal courts, which includes the power of vesting them with jurisdiction, either limited, concurrent, or exclusive.”