Leadership Quote by Grover Cleveland

Cleveland’s sentence does what good presidential rhetoric often does: it sounds like a neutral procedural observation while quietly accusing his opponents of bad faith. “Nearly 20 years” isn’t just a timestamp; it’s an indictment. He’s marking a long period in which the laws sat in “almost innocuous desuetude” - a lawyerly way of saying they were effectively dead, ignored because enforcing them would have been needless or politically costly. Then, suddenly, “brought forth”: the phrase evokes something exhumed, not discovered, as if the law is being dragged out of storage for a purpose other than justice.

The intent is twofold. First, to delegitimize the current revival of these statutes by framing it as opportunistic rather than principled. If a law can sleep for two decades without consequence, Cleveland implies, its abrupt reappearance is less about public order than about power. Second, to position himself as the sober guardian of constitutional restraint: he isn’t attacking the idea of law, he’s attacking selective law.

The subtext is classic late-19th-century governance: patronage, factional combat, and the use of legal machinery as a political weapon. Cleveland’s diction - “existence,” “desuetude,” “brought forth” - performs seriousness, signaling to elites that he’s speaking in the register of courts and constitutions, not stump speeches. It’s a warning wrapped in formalwear: when forgotten laws are revived on command, the real issue isn’t their text, it’s who gets to aim them.