The Americans, plainly, did not desire, by this separation of the legislative body into two branches, to make one house hereditary and the other elective; one aristocratic and the other democratic. It was not their object to create in the one a bulwark to power, whilst the other represented the interests and passions of the people. The only advantages which result from the present constitution of the United States are the division of the legislative power and the consequent check upon political assemblies; with the creation of a tribunal of appeal for the revision of the laws.英文原著 · 《Democracy In America-1》
I recapitulate the substance of this chapter in a few words: The existence of democracies is threatened by two dangers, viz., the complete subjection of the legislative body to the caprices of the electoral body, and the concentration of all the powers of the Government in the legislative authority. The growth of these evils has been encouraged by the policy of the legislators of the States, but it has been resisted by the legislators of the Union by every means which lay within their control.英文原著 · 《Democracy In America-1》
This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however, like Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its head, or rather, in the two heads into which it ran out-the Legislative Assembly, on the one hand, and the President on the other. Run through the Constitution and it will be found that only those paragraphs wherein the relation of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined, are absolute, positive, uncontradictory, undistortable.英文原著 · 《The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte》
With confidence, therefore, that you will experience this conviction, and, when experienced, will lend your aid to introduce its influence into legislative practice. I subscribe myself, with much esteem and regard, My dear Sir, Your obliged and obedient Servant, New Lanark Mills ROBERT OWEN英文原著 · 《A New View of Society》
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.英文原著 · 《AUTOBIOGRAPHY》
He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without & convulsions within.英文原著 · 《AUTOBIOGRAPHY》
That is valuable to me, and I've already told Garrett that it could be valuable to him... somebody at his side with one foot in the executive branch and one in the legislative.美剧 · 《House of Cards》
But we know for a fact that, in emergencies, the executive will contemplate actions that do not have clear legislative authority and might be constitutionally dubious.美剧 · 《House of Cards》