[trisham]

Good evening. I am here tonight to announce my intention to seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

I am sure that each of us has seen our country from a number of viewpoints depending on where we have lived and what we have done. For me it has been as a boy growing up in several small towns in Illinois. As a young man in Iowa trying to get a start in the years of the great depression and later in California for most of my adult life.

I have seen America from the stadium press box as a sportscaster, as an actor, officer of my labor union, soldier, officeholder and as both Democrat and Republican. I have lived in an America where those who often had too little to eat outnumbered those who had enough. There have been four wars in my lifetime and I have seen our country face financial ruin in depression. I have also seen the great strength of this nation as it pulled itself up from that ruin to become the dominant force in the world.

To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible, proud of its own success, generous, yes and naive, sometimes wrong, never mean and always impatient to provide a better life for its people in a framework of a basic fairness and freedom.

Ronald Reagan

announcement for Presidential Candidacy
11/13/1979

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[trisham]

"My approach recognizes the basic principle of a written Constitution. We "the people" adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning, a meaning that does not change. Otherwise we would have adopted the British approach of an unwritten, evolving constitution.
Aside from amendment according to Article V, the Constitution's meaning cannot be updated, or changed, or altered by the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the President.
Of course, even when strictly interpreted as I believe it should be, the Constitution remains a modern, "breathing" document as some like to call it, in the sense that the Court is constantly required to interpret how its provisions apply to the Constitutional questions of modern life.
Nevertheless, strict interpretation must never surrender to the understandably attractive impulse towards creative but unwarranted alterations of first principles."

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Speech to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
February 2, 2001

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