Branch Inauguration Quotes

the government both in the executive and the legislative branches must carry out in good faith the platforms upon which the party was entrusted with power. But the government is that of the whole people; the party is the instrument through which policies are determined and men chosen to bring them into being. The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.

In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower returned from his inaugural parade and entered the White House for the first time as president late in the evening. As he walked into the Executive Mansion, his chief usher handed Eisenhower two letters marked “Confidential and Secret” that had been sent to him earlier in the day. Eisenhower’s reaction was swift: “Never bring me a sealed envelope,” he said firmly. “That’s what I have a staff for.” How snobbish, right? Had the office really gone to his head already? Not at all. Eisenhower recognized the seemingly insignificant event for what it was: a symptom of a disorganized, dysfunctional organization. Not everything needed to run through him. Who was to say that the envelope was even important? Why hadn’t anyone screened it? As president, his first priority in office was organizing the executive branch into a smooth, functioning, and order-driven unit, just like his military units had been—not because he didn’t want to work himself, but because everyone had a job and he trusted and empowered them to do it. As his chief of staff later put it, “The president does the most important things. I do the next most important things.

Martin Luther King’s legacy, as its keepers know, is profoundly at odds with the historic American order, and that is why they can have no rest until the symbols of that order are pulled up root and branch. To say that Dr. King are the cause he really represented are now part of the official American creed, indeed the defining and dominant symbol of that creed – which is what both houses of the United States Congress said in 1983 and what President Ronald Reagan signed into law shortly afterward – is the inauguration of a new order and the things they symbolized can retain neither meaning nor respect, in which they are as mute and dark as the gods of Babylon and Tyre and from whose cold ashes will rise a new god, leveling their rough places, straightening their crookedness, and exalting every valley until the whole earth is flattened beneath his feet and perceives the glory of the new lord.

On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as The Hill reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.” How many federal workers in agencies would have been newly classified at Schedule F? We do not know because only one completed the review before their jobs were saved by the election result. The one that did was the Congressional Budget Office. Its conclusion: fully 88% of employees would have been newly classified as Schedule F, thus allowing the president to terminate their employment. This would have been a revolutionary change, a complete remake of Washington, DC, and all politics as usual. If the HHS Administrative State is to be dismantled, so that it will become possible to manage the various Executive Branch agencies once again, Schedule F provides an excellent strategy and template to achieve the objective. If this most important of all tasks is not achieved, then we will remain at risk that HHS will once again attempt to trade our national sovereignty for additional power by aligning with the WHO, as was recently attempted in the case of the surreptitious January 28, 2022, proposed modifications to the International Health Regulations [434]. These actions, which were not made public until April 12, 2022, clearly demonstrate that the HHS Administrative State represents a clear and present danger to the US Constitution and national sovereignty and must be dismantled as soon as possible.

The principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation,” he declared. “Washington in his first inaugural said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality. Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that right makes might. Surely this is so.

After Vietnam and Watergate, much of the public has come to view the judiciary as more honest and competent than the politicians in other branches. Modern presidents and congressmen are far less likely to assert their own constitutional visions than were their antebellum predecessors. For example, in dramatic contrast to the pattern set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only a handful of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Inaugural Addresses have explicitly meditated upon the Constitution itself, and only a small percentage of recent veto messages have articulated objections based on the president’s independent constitutional judgment.23

I wrote Dr. Allen Guelzo for his perspective. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and the director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College. He is one of the great students of Lincoln and one of the great historians in the country. Frankly, I expected Allen to respond, “Have you just lost your mind!?” But he didn’t. Guelzo responded: Your points are entirely on the mark. I have done a quick comparative outline of both inaugural addresses, and while the existential situation of the two are different, on March 4th, 1861, Lincoln was already facing the secession of seven states, the official creation of a Confederate States of America, and demands for the surrender of federal property, there is this common thread, the sovereignty of the people. Lincoln used that principle to deny that one part of the nation, the seven seceding states, could break up the union without the consent of the American people, as well as denying that one branch of the government, the Supreme Court, could overrule the American people’s will. This was enough to make me feel better. But Guelzo continued. Trump invokes that principle. To deny that a federal bureaucracy can enrich and empower itself at the expense of the people, as well as denying that identity enclaves can overrule the fundamental unity of the American people.

We inaugurate the evening Just drumming up a little weirdness It gets late so early now The waves come in in mountain phases Linked impossibilities Branching possibilities I’d see fire where it's not supposed to be In the empty library at suppertime By the respirating basement door The dog eats out of an old tambourine on the floor I’ve been told you can live a long, long time on the love of a dog And that things get bitter and bad When the people are wrong And sleep can be had for the price of a song Late in the day When the options are gone When the seatbelt’s the only hug you’ve felt in weeks When wrong numbers are the totality of your social life The obscure strategies of wildlife Only flummox the hell out of you, kid I first saw her in a megastore The Day-Glo raven Born into a free fall Like plastic Easter basket grass Falling from an overpass The fulfillment of a tenth grade prophecy A motel masterpiece Blind to the branching possibilities Blind to linked impossibilities Teardrops were standing in my eyes Like deer before they bolt It was like I was stretching my arm through the cat door to heaven I was thinking I could lick the frosting off these summer days if nights were half as sweet Me like a banged up dog walking half sideways I adored the way she modified my mornings When I’d wake up in the calm shoals of her bed Somersaults and smoke and a universe of sleep Before she slipped into her heritage And disappeared Now every second thought is out of control I guess in a way I long to be rad When I was with her it felt wrong to be sad Did I tell you an angel finally came and shut my mouth? There was a smile and a tear in her voice too And she taught me To relight Relight and relight again They tell me you can live a long, long time on the love of a dog Things get bitter and bad And sleep can be had Late in the day when the options seem gone Please let your eyes be a friend to me again It’s just malfunctioning teardrops A cowboy overflow of the heart