Voter Initiative Constitutional Amendment: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, First Session on S.J. Res. 67 ... December 13 and 14, 1977

Front Cover

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 165 - The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited to it by the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Page 130 - Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well : I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading :...
Page 129 - With regard to that we may add that when we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters.
Page 88 - The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the Government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.
Page 130 - ... called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation.
Page 9 - In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence.
Page 126 - Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
Page 88 - If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this ; you must first enable the government to control the governed ; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Page 7 - IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES MAY 15 (legislative day, MAT 13), 1987 Mr. ROTH introduced the following joint resolution; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary JOINT RESOLUTION Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to limiting campaign expenditures. 1 Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives...
Page 387 - ... per cent of the entire vote cast at the last preceding election for all candidates for the office which the incumbent sought to be removed occupies...

Bibliographic information