 Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. And whose first question is a question that most politicians never ask at all. What is the proper role of government under the Constitution? The President of the United States. You did that. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much. And thank you, Ken. And a special thank you as well to your national co-chairman, Steve Calabresi, David McIntosh, and Lou Lieberman. Before I begin my remarks, let me say that, as some of you may know, today is Ken Cribb's last day in our administration. Liberals all around town are breaking out the champagne. But I can't think of any better place than the Federalist Society to say, Ken, thank you, Godspeed, and God bless you. How far we've come these last eight years, not only in transforming the operations of government, not only in transforming the departments and agencies and even the federal judiciary, but also in changing the terms of national debate. And nowhere is that change more evident than in the rise of the Federalist Society on the campuses of America's law schools. To think of it, in schools where just a few years ago the critical legal studies movements stood virtually unchallenged like some misplaced monster of prehistoric radicalism. Today, you are vexing the dogmatists of the left. The Federalist Society is changing the culture of our nation's law schools. You are returning the values and concepts of laws our founders understood them to scholarly dialogue and through that dialogue to our legal institutions. Yes, you are insisting that the Constitution is not some elaborate inkblot test in which liberals can find prescribed policies that the people have rejected. You are fighting for renewed respect for the integrity of our Constitution, for its fundamental principles, and for its wisdom. And in this, of course, you've had multitudes of friends and supporters in our administration, and that includes a certain tenet of a nearby unit of public housing. Yes, how far we've come since our administration arrived in Washington almost eight years ago. Those we replaced and most of the jurists they appointed had a very different view of the law from ours. They had the liberal, they and the liberal elite, I should say. They spoke for, believed that judges should be free to reinterpret the Constitution with few fetters on them because the Constitution must not remain as one of their allies and our critics has put it, frozen in ancient error because it is so hard to amend. Well, we replied that the principal errors of recent times had nothing to do with the shortcomings of the founding fathers. They had to do with courts that played fast and loose with the instrument the founding fathers devised. Yes, some law professors and judges said the courts should save the country from the Constitution. We said it was time to save the Constitution from them. We pointed in particular to a bizarre twisting of values that had crept into our criminal law. To the confusing of criminals and victims. To an attitude that the law was not a vehicle for uncovering truth and administering justice, but a game in which clever lawyers tried to trip up the police on the rules. We said that we intended to nominate judges and justices who didn't share the skepticism of our extreme liberal friends about the fundamental values that underpin our laws and our society. We would select judges who would reaffirm the core beliefs of our free land. And we have. You know the names on the court criers list, including Renquist and O'Connor and Scalia, Kennedy, and of course Judge Robert Bork. But already we can see the new realism that these and so many others have brought to our courts. I'm happy to report that as more and more of our appointees have served, federal courts have become tougher and tougher on criminals. The average federal prison sentence grew by almost a third from 1980 to 1986. And what's more, as our judges by argument and example reversed long-standing attitudes about crime and criminals that prevailed in both federal and state courts, we also started to see crime rates drop. Between 1980 and 1987, the overall crime rate fell by nearly 7%, while nearly 2 million fewer households were hit by crime in 1987 than in 1980. Yet these statistics, heartening as they are, reflect only the surface of the changes of the last eight years, changes that have extended out beyond the judiciary and every aspect of law enforcement on the federal and even state level. Eight years ago, even the idea of a war on drugs was greeted with amused smiles in this smug capital. The last liberal administration had started to lose interest in narcotics cases altogether. Each year they brought fewer cases to trial and by their last year in office, convictions were down by half. We changed that. We hired more than 4,000 new agents and prosecutors and under the vice president's leadership, federal, state, and local law enforcement officials started working together to stop the smuggling of illegal drugs into our nation. Still, some failed to take our emphasis on crime seriously. Their friends in Congress held up our reforms of the federal criminal code for years and more recently they cut funding for the Coast Guard among the most important agencies in our battle against the international drug rings and gave the money to Amtrak. You know, I keep wondering about the liberals. Will they ever learn the difference between special interests and the national interest? While others have talked about beating back the drug lords, lords, we've delivered. During our administration drug convictions have nearly tripled and have included such notorious kingpins as Juan Ramon Mota, while cocaine seizures are up over 1,800 percent. And for the first time we are, thanks to the legal reforms I mentioned, seizing assets that have been acquired with drug money. Sometime back I visited Florida. I was told of the dozens of boats and planes that we had confiscated from drug dealers. And on a table I saw for the first time in my life what $20 million looks like. It had been seized from the drug rings too and it was stacked up on that table. The liberals have scoffed when I've said we're winning the war on drugs. But since we came to office, thanks to the work of a certain lovely lady, Americans and particularly young people have heard our plea and are just saying no to drugs. I might inject right here if I could, that that just say no came from Nancy's answer to a student's question in a school room. She was speaking to the students and a little girl said, well, what do you say when someone offers you drugs? And Nancy said, just say no. Well, today there are over 12,000 just say no clubs in the schools of America. But among high school seniors, for example, the overall number of illegal drug users has dropped and in fact the number using cocaine dropped an unprecedented 20% last year. So long as anyone uses drugs, the number will be too high. Still, we've made enormous progress. Are we hurting the drug rings? Well, the drug lords may have answered that question themselves a few weeks ago with an assassination attempt on the Secretary of State. There were reports that the attempt was linked directly to the drug trade. And if true, this desperate move is a clear sign of the toll we're taking. But we're not satisfied. We're proposing to step up the pressure to make convicted drug kingpin subject to the death penalty. And let me offer here my thanks and congratulations to the House of Representatives yesterday a broad bipartisan coalition passed the Gekis Amendment providing for the death penalty against those who commit murder in the course of a drug felony. The McCollum Amendment denying federal benefits to those convicted of certain drug crimes and the Lundgren Amendment allowing a good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. These provisions, if they also pass the Senate, will represent a giant step forward in the war on drugs and an achievement of things we have long sought. And yet, as at other junctures in the war on drugs, once again, too many liberals oppose us. But now they turn around in charge that we're running a phony war on drugs. When I have a hunch that in November the American people will decide who's bogus and who's for real. The Senate could help us in this and our other battles against crime by besturing itself and acting on the 28 judicial nominations that we have submitted but that have not yet been confirmed. The Senate's inaction has become a matter of such serious concern that recently the Judicial Conference declared a state of judicial emergency in various districts and circuits. Too many courts are too far under strength. This is not politics as usual. In 1980, only 17 nominations had not been acted on by the end of the year and of these, all but five had been nominated on or after the end of July. Some of our nominees have been waiting for a year. For example, Pamela Reimer, who has already proven herself to have a thorough understanding of the problems of crime in the criminal justice system as a district court judge, has been waiting for Senate approval as an appeals court judge since April, even though she received the ABA's highest rating of confidence. Another impressive nominee is Judith Richards. Hope, I should say. I stopped in the middle name. Judith Richards, Hope for the D.C. Circuit. Mrs. Hope, among the most prominent lawyers in this country, has also been waiting for a confirmation hearing since April. In contrast, in 1980, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated by my predecessor to the same court on April 14th, eight years to the day before Mrs. Hope's nomination and was confirmed scarcely two months later. Despite Mrs. Hope's favorable rating from the ABA and well-recognized legal abilities, she continues to wait. I don't need to tell anyone here the principal reason for the delays. The liberals may talk about crime and drugs, but the thing that they care about is their agenda and protecting as best they can the one branch of government where their agenda has clearly held sway. The liberals are hoping that within a few weeks the American people will, as the liberals see it, regain their senses and return the nation to the hands of those who once gave it double-digit inflation, plummeting real family income, economic stagnation, international setbacks, and lectures on malaise. Or, as the liberals put it, return the nation to those who stand not for ideology, but for competence. Yes, they're hoping that within a few months they can wipe the slate clean and nominate judges who reflect their values and vision of the law. For us conservatives, the task must be to pin down just what that vision and those values are which is not necessarily an easy task in a time when liberalism has become the masked marvel of American political discourse. And while we're asking questions about the liberal agenda we must be forthright about our own. A decent respect not just for the rights of criminals but for those of the victims of crime. A respect for the real world in which the police work day-to-day and end the kind of fanciful readings of the Constitution that produce such decisions as role versus weight. So this is my message to you today. To hold the torch high, to stay in the battle, too much is left to do. The battle is far from over and all is yet to win or lose. But we stand with the founders of our nation in this ongoing struggle to protect our freedom. Thomas Jefferson reminded us that our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. And he implored, let us not make it a blank paper by construction. For as James Madison wrote, if the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation is not the guide to expounding it, there can be no security for a faithful exercise of its powers. It was true then. It is true now. It will be true always. And just this morning I have to add something and hear a little experience. I received word of one of our drug agents. He was sitting in a car. He was actually providing protection to a home where the people in that home had been threatened, their lives threatened because of their work against drugs. He was shot. And just before coming over here, I made a telephone call to the hospital. The bullet entered through the chin and came out from the forehead very close to the eye. And the voice on the phone in the hospital room turned out to be his father's because he cannot speak. It will probably be a year of continued surgery before he is able to come back among us. And he told me that his son couldn't speak but could hear. So he said, I will hold the phone to his ear and when you hear the tapping I mean he's on and listening. And so I was able to tell him of our pride in him and how much we appreciated his great sacrifice in all and how much he would be in our prayers as the time went on until he is healed. And then said goodbye and again he tapped on the phone with his finger to let me know that he had heard. And his father came on and I said goodbye to him and his father then said he had just been handed a slip of paper by his son. He said his son was thanking me for the call. Well, this morning earlier I had read some of the statements by the opposition congressman to this death penalty amendment that was passed yesterday and that I mentioned earlier. And I heard their sheer horror that the idea that we should be taking someone's life for just killing someone else in connection with drugs and I've been thinking about that ever since this telephone call. I'd like to engage some of them in personal confrontation. In fact, I'll go out of my way to do it. I want to thank you all not only for your warm welcome but thank you for what you are doing and God bless you all. Mr. President, it's traditional for the Federalist Society to present its guests with a copy of the Federalist Papers. In this collection of Madison, Hamilton and Jay set forth the fundamental purpose of our constitutional order to channel the energies of government to foster human liberty and to allow all Americans to enjoy its blessings. In appreciation of your understanding of the genius of this plan we would be honored if you would accept this volume. Thank you very much.