“ The president interprets the Constitution as president. If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, [the] president can in fact ignore the courts.
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Newt Gingrich, who hopes to be the GOP nominee, and is also crazy. (via wilwheaton)
This is actually the most purely Presidential thing Newt Gingrich has said. He really comes off as an American President saying something like that. A regular Andrew Jackson or Barack Obama. Who the fuck cares about the law when you’re the leader of the “free world”? Thus it’s always been so.
“ I was re-elected to Congress in 1829 … and soon after the commencement of this second term I saw, or thought I did, that it was expected of me that I was to bow to the name of Andrew Jackson … Such a thing was new to me and a total stranger to my principles. I know’d well enough, though, that if I didn’t “hurra” for his name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible. His famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me … that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favourite measure of the president, and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might … that I would sooner be honestly and politically damned, than hypocritically immortalized. I had been elected by a majority of 3,585 votes, and I believe they were honest men, and wouldn’t want me to vote for any unjust notion, to please Jackson or any one else … I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.
12.16.09
