Louise Slaughter: “Mr. Chairman, I wish I had the eloquence and the power to try to reach out to the Members of this House today and give…”

“Mr. Chairman, I wish I had the eloquence and the power to try to reach out to the Members of this House today and give some idea of the depth of harm we are doing. But I know that the die is cast on this bill and that my words would just go into the Record and be forever lost. The Delegate from the District of Columbia was right, we had a lengthy debate on this issue in the committee, and I think frankly it is one of the best that I have ever heard. I suppose those of us who stand up on the floor from day to day and try to talk about the Constitution, the separation of powers, must sound quaint and even old fashioned because I know that the new day has dawned and the thing they are going to do is to keep their word with the contract. The question that keeps plaguing me is: What possible reason does anyone have to believe that a President of the United States is going to be infallible, benign, upright, and totally altruistic? As a matter of fact, when someone said awhile ago we did not want to raise the judiciary above the other branches, what we are doing is raising the executive above all other branches, and, as someone said again this morning, that we are giving the ultimate weapon to the executive. When our Founding Fathers decided the best way to keep politics out of government was to have three equal branches of government, they knew what they were doing.”