I am also the product of a place called Paint Creek. Doesn't have a zip code. It's too small to be called a town along the rolling plains of Texas. We grew dryland cotton and wheat, and when I wasn't farming or attending Paint Creek Rural School, I was generally over at Troop 48 working on my Eagle Scout award.

Washington's insatiable desire to spend our children's inheritance on failed stimulus plans and other misguided economic theories have given record debt and left us with far too many unemployed.

The foundation for future prosperity is built on the bedrock of good jobs and great schools. We are building a strong foundation one job at a time and one educated Texan at a time.

Crucial to understanding federalism in modern day America is the concept of mobility, or 'the ability to vote with your feet.' If you don't support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol - don't come to Texas. If you don't like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don't move to California.

The God we serve does not seek out the perfect, but instead uses our imperfections and our shortcomings for his greater good. I am humbled by my own limitations. But where I am weak, He is strong.

Every life is precious.

The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we inhabit are not only critical elements in the quality of life we enjoy - they are a reflection of the majesty of our Creator.

Dark economic clouds are dissipating into an emerging blue sky of opportunity.

Campaigning and governing are two very different activities, and there is no reason to assume that how Trump conducted the former will dictate how he approaches the latter.

I did not believe in the Iraq war.

Our inability to govern ourselves at home, to deal with everything from infrastructure to our debt to tax policy, is reducing the appeal of the American model.

How can we pressure China on North Korea if China's one of the two largest holders of American debt?

No amount of sanctioning will persuade North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, nor will China step up and solve the problem for us.

There is no way to know for certain what accounts for North Korean decisionmaking, given how closed a country it is.

For President Bush, the first, the 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, I spent all 4 years of his presidency on the staff for the National Security Council.

Vietnam was not a war of choice the United States had to fight. It was clearly not central.

I tend to be one of those who does not equate democratization with the holding of elections. The emphasis ought to be on such things as rule of law, economic reform, and promotion of a free media - in short, essentially independent, free institutions.

Any time you use military force, you have got to have a clear purpose that military forces can achieve.

What is obvious is that Donald Trump is comfortable with an approach to running his presidency based on what worked for him in the private sector.

Trade accords had been a staple of the post-World War II world, providing a mechanism for economic growth, development, and association with friends and allies, and a means of reining in would-be adversaries who otherwise would have little incentive to act with restraint.

Trump is the first post-World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits.

Donald Trump's United States is not isolationist. He has authorized the use of limited military force against the Syrian government in a manner his predecessor rejected.

When great powers fade, as they inevitably must, it's normally for one of two reasons. Some powers exhaust themselves through overreach abroad, underinvestment at home, or a mixture of the two. This was the case for the Soviet Union. Other powers lose their privileged position with the emergence of new, stronger powers.

There's a pattern in Bush 43's presidency of being attracted to the big and the bold, and my whole reading of him is that he was instinctively uncomfortable with what you might call a modulated foreign policy - a foreign policy of adjustment, of degree.