I always received much more satisfaction as a defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed to the sta...
Congress has turned its back on America's working families. There are Teamster families in every congressional district in America, and those families vote. Those who would oppose these families have done so at their own political peril.
We're going to be very strong with employers in all of our aspects, because I think there's been too much of this idea let's try and get along here, and we've eroded some of our standards.
We have to get very militant with some of these employers to say there's no shortcuts, our people have a right to a fair day's wage for a fair day's pay, and we've got to get that done. And that's going to happen.
Wage theft, worker rights and workplace discrimination should not be swept under the rug. The United States cannot have a functional economy where all the gains go to the corporate class while all the pain goes to regular workers.
I believe the two biggest mistakes made by the Founders were giving Federal judges life-time appointments and permitting them to be confirmed without the agreement of two-thirds of the members of the United States Senate.
I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most ...
What person here illegally (and in his right mind), will go to the government, announce being here illegally (e.g. plead guilty), provide all sorts of information as to where that person lives etc. to get a work permit only to be a target for deporta...
I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it's a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.
Every time we rock our babies in the night, we bring order back to a disordered world. Every time we look down at our children and cry, we make the world one shade brighter. That's what children do to us - and for us.
I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set...
Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specifi...
The Constitution I uphold and defend is the one I carry in my pocket all the time, the U.S. Constitution. I don't know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it's not this one. I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama uph...
I feel like Barack Obama, kind of in a political sense, embodies that same kind of spirit as a Q-Tip or a Santogold or a Common. I feel like there is a synergy going on here in this country and abroad. I feel like the doors are open, and it's time to...
I think the shyness one feels in childhood is often overcome with time. There are children who hide behind their parents' legs, but you don't see grown-ups hiding behind people. It just doesn't happen. I mean, not that often. People develop social sk...
When you take a stand out of deep conviction, people know. They may not even agree, but they ask, 'Do I want someone who is willing to take a hard stand and someone I can trust to do that when the chips are down?' They want that.
Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops t...
The work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
I worry when athletes are simply used by their universities to produce revenue, to make money for them, nothing to show at the back end. I grew up with a lot of players who had very, very tough lives after the ball started bouncing for them. And that...
The GAO just released a report that said 22 percent of federal programs fail to meet their objectives. The truth is we don't know how taxpayer money is spent in Washington, D.C., which is why I think we ought to put every agency budget up on the Inte...
I think we've found a better solution on North Haven and Vinalhaven: Instead of paying increasing expensive electric bills every month, with the money going out of our community, out of state, and even out of the country, the wind turbines bring the ...