Donald Trump Quotes

We need to put people on the bench that understand the Constitution is not a living and breathing document. It is to be interpreted as originally meant.

Many voters think about the makeup of the Supreme Court when they are choosing a president. The justices deal not only with constitutional issues but also with social issues that were unknown to the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution more than 200 years ago.

Non-interpretivism (nonoriginalism) is merely a political argument for values non-interpretivists prefer to those in the Constitution.

Roosevelt got a chance to name an amazing nine justices of the Supreme Court. He was not namby-pamby on this question. He wanted people who shared his views, he wanted liberals, and he wanted lots of them.

What I don't like is judges legislating from the bench. And as president of the United States, I will appoint justices who uphold the Constitution and who don't see themselves as a super legislature.

Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

The nation will be shaped for decades by decisions that are made by President Bush and the Senate about the future of the Supreme Court.

Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each successive wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

A constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time and another some subsequent time when the circumstances may have changed…. the meaning of the Constitution is fixed when it is adopted.

When we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution ... we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in what was said a hundred years ago.

Now the Senate is looking for 'moderate' judges, 'mainstream' judges. What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text? Halfway between what it says and what we'd like it to say?

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

Though the critics are loud and the temptations to join them may be many, mark me down too as a believer that the traditional account of the judicial role Justice Scalia defended will endure.

I believe Judge Kavanaugh will be a justice whose adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law will be a credit to the Court and all Americans.

Through the selection of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Damon Leichty, President Trump has already remade the judiciary, moving our country away from activist judges and toward individuals who will uphold the Constitution.

I've got that hands-on experience with federal judges and how important it is to have judges like Neil Gorsuch, who will take a rule-of-law approach to the decision-making process. I think he's eminently qualified.

I think that one reasons I like Brett Kavanaugh is he was clearly one that was gonna interpret the Constitution.

President Trump continued his strong commitment to nominating conservative judges to the bench who respect the rule of law with his selection of Holly Brady for the U.S. District Court for Northern Indiana.

A Supreme Court nomination and appointment is not a roving commission to rewrite our laws.

The Warren Court wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution... I intend to succeed where they failed.

As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to 'do what the people want,' instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.

[Progressives] think the Constitution is like Felix the Cat's magic bag: Look in there long enough and hard enough, and you can find anything.

I intend to go right on appointing highly qualified individuals of the highest personal integrity to the bench, individuals who understand the danger of short-circuiting the electoral process and disenfranchising the people through judicial activism.

I feel that the justices that I am going to appoint - and I've named 20 of them - the justices that I'm going to appoint will be pro-life. They will have a conservative bent. They will be protecting the Second Amendment. They are great scholars in all cases, and they're people of tremendous respect. They will interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted. And I believe that's very, very important.