A Quote by Elizabeth Price Foley

Federalism isn’t about states’ rights. It’s about dividing power to better protect individual liberty.

Elizabeth Price Foley

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About Better Dividing Federalism Individual Individual Liberty Liberty Power Protect Rights States

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Elizabeth Price Foley
American - Lawyer
Born: 1965

People don't seem to understand that the separation of powers is not about the power of these branches; it's there to protect individual liberty - it's there to protect us from the concentration of power.

Jonathan Turley

And it's absolutely hypocritical for the political party that talks about states rights, to suddenly ignore states rights, that say that the federal government or federalism has no business in this kind of business.

Gary Ackerman

Virginia States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not those seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. The time is long past — if indeed it ever existed — when we should permit the noble concept of states' rights to be betrayed.

Robert Kennedy

Judges are the people who have to protect the rights of individuals, have to protect the rights of minorities, have to protect the rights in the Constitution, have to protect the requirement that the executive and the legislature not simply exercise raw power but adhere to standards of reasonableness and constitutionality.

Jed S. Rakoff

I typically don't use the distinction 'positive' and 'negative' liberty, because negative sounds bad and positive sounds good, and I don't think that the terminology ought to prejudice us one way or the other. So I think the more descriptive term is 'liberty rights' versus 'welfare rights'. So, liberty rights are freedom-of-action type rights, and welfare rights are rights-to-stuff, of various kinds...And, property rights are not rights-to-stuff. I think that's one of the key misunderstandings about property. Property rights are the rights to liberty within your jurisdiction.

Randy Barnett

The government was set to protect man from criminals-and the constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed at private citizens, but against the government-as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

Ayn Rand

Wringing your hands about states' rights, forget it. They're gone. Basically, the federal government can do whatever it wants. Who's going to protect the states? My court? Ha - we're feds!

Antonin Scalia

The Bill of Rights is a remarkable document because it weaves into the fabric of our democracy the idea that government has a responsibility to protect individual liberty.

Ted Lieu

Rights are not the language of democracy. Compromise is what democracy is about. Rights are the language of freedom, and are absolute because their role is to protect our liberty. By using the absolute power of freedom to accomplish reforms of democracy, we have undermined democracy and diminished our freedom.

Philip K. Howard

The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.

Judith Lewis Herman

Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.

Ronald Reagan

If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.

Ilana Mercer

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence - to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

Ayn Rand

The central genius of the American Constitution lies in its use of structure to protect individual liberty. It does not rely solely, or even primarily, on grants of substantive rights.

William Barr

Whenever a Republican gets in office, all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and state's rights aren't necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. They're actually about maximizing freedom.

Jonah Goldberg

Religious-liberty protections are one way of achieving civil peace even amid disagreement. The United States is a pluralistic society. To protect that pluralism and the rights of all Americans, of whatever faith they may practice, religious-liberty laws are good policy. Liberals committed to tolerance should embrace them.

Edwin Meese

A Quote by Elizabeth Price Foley

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