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Manchin honors work at Byrd Center

By Staff | Sep 21, 2012

In honor of the Constitution Day celebrations this week, Senator Joe Manchin toured the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University and recognized the center’s ongoing work to keep the Constitution at the center of the American conversation.

Senator Manchin honored the center’s work in an official statement for the Congressional Record, and presented a framed copy of his statement to the center’s director.

“I commend the Center and the University for their efforts because the ideals of freedom, as ‘set forth and realized’ in our Constitution, are what makes America the beacon of light in those ‘wild dark places of the world,” the statement says.

“This breathtakingly novel idea, of democracy on a scale not dreamed possible, is right there in the Preamble, the beginning of this great document ‘We the people.’It says, ‘We the people,’ not ‘We the parties.’ Nowhere in the words of the Constitution will you find the words ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican.’

“But I am fully confident that ‘we the people’ of the United States of America, if we are faithful to ourselves and to each other, will ‘secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity’ that we ordained and established by our Constitution. And I thank Senator Byrd, the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, and Shepherdstown University for giving us a chance to stop at least once a year to examine our Constitution and to think about what it has meant to the cause of freedom, not just in America, but everywhere in the world.”