A Quote by Rick Santorum
I think the Supreme Court has, as an equal branch of government, the ability to overrule Congress and the president. But I also feel it's the role of the Congress and the president to push back. I mean I think it's important that they are understood as equal branches of government.
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The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with the ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government. The Supreme Court is not the supreme branch. And for God's sake, it isn't the Supreme Being. It is the Supreme Court.
We've never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or Congress, or the Supreme Court, no matter what we learned in junior high school about how we have three branches of government, and we have checks and balances, and what a lovely system. No. The changes, important changes that we've had in history, have not come from those three branches of government. They have reacted to social movements.
In our system of government, the Supreme Court ultimately decides on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress or of presidential actions. When their actions are challenged, both Congress and the president are entitled to have their positions forcefully advocated in court.
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the three branches of government are coequal for a reason. Neither the executive branch or the legislative branch should use the third branch to a pursue a partisan agenda.
Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.
Let me make it clear that I do not assert that a President and the Congress must on all points agree with each other at all times. Many times in history there has been complete disagreement between the two branches of the Government, and in these disagreements sometimes the Congress has won and sometimes the President has won. But during the Administration of the present President we have had neither agreement nor a clear-cut battle.
I believe that the Constitution is not hostile to the idea that national problems can be solved at the national level through the cooperative efforts of the three coequal branches of government, the Congress, the executive and courts. But not every president, not every legislator and not every judge agrees that the federal government has the power to address and to try to remedy the twin national problems of poverty and access to equal opportunity.
The president's powers are always open to being questioned by the co-equal branches of government.
Supreme Court nominees should be individuals who not only understand, but truly respect the equal roles and responsibilities of different branches of government and our state governments.
That's the fundamental question. Do we have a check and balance system? Do we have three equal branches or do we have one supreme branch, not just the Supreme Court? That's the fundamental question.
Congress is the third branch of government... which makes every one of the 535 members of Congress 1/535th of that important one-third, which works out to, hmmm, well, someone else can do the math. You wouldn't think such little wheels could make so much noise.
During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times.
I think Donald Trump understands there's a Constitution. And that those separate but equal branches of government give us a limited government. And he believes that.
People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.
I realize the voters elected President Obama in 2012, but they also, in 2014, elected enough Republican senators to gain a majority in the Senate, so we control the confirmation process. And these are two supposedly coequal branches of government involved in this filling of a Supreme Court vacancy.
The president has the right to select who he wants for the Supreme Court. He doesn't have to get it cleared from Congress, Senate or anybody... No president before this has come under this kind of scrutiny ... before the committee hearings even begin.
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