#constitution

The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school. ↗

— Jon Meacham

#constitutional #constitutional amendment #extreme #failure #fuel

I don't see any justification for the federal government owning land, other than the Statue of Liberty and maybe a few parks, maybe a few refuges. But to just own land to do nothing with it I think is a disservice to the Constitution. ↗

— Don Young

#constitution #disservice #federal #federal government #few

When the Chief Justice read me the oath,' he [FDR] later told an adviser, 'and came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States" I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy. ↗

— Susan Quinn

#democracy #flexibility #roosevelt #supreme-court #art

It is ... particularly true of constitutional government that its atmosphere is opinion .... It does not remain fixed in any unchanging form, but grows with the growth and is altered with the change of the nation's needs and purposes. ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#change

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of Constitutional power. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#education #government #liberty #politics #education

It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#constitution #liberty #morality #usa #values

How could those who wrote the Constitution possibly understand its meaning better than those who had the experience of observing and participating in its operation? It is one thing to rail against the evils of politically unaccountable judges enlarging constitutional rights beyond the ideas and purposes of their adopters; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality be held captive to the extraordinary obstacles of Article V or subject to the partial and incomplete understandings of 1789 or 1868. ↗

— Jack N. Rakove

#originalism #u-s-constitution #equality

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it. ↗

— John Updike

#free-speech #politics #united-states #united-states-constitution #war

A freedom given up is not so easily regained. ↗

— Rivera Sun

#civil-liberty #civil-rights-movement #constitution #constitutional-rights #freedom

I think the court will determine that the Faith-Based Initiative that the White House has instituted in the last five years is constitutional, in the context of allowing for broad-based programs to include religious providers. ↗

— Jay Alan Sekulow

#broad-based #constitutional #context #court #determine