Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I would like to share my thoughts with my colleagues today about the President's nominee to be Secretary of Education. I shared many of these thoughts yesterday with my colleagues on the Senate HELP Committee. Like my colleague from Maine, this nomination has been a very difficult one for me. It has been very personal. As I mentioned in committee, I take very personally the education of the children in my State. I take very personally the contributions that our educators, our administrators in the schools--all that they provide and the importance that we should all place on the education of America's children. I don't think it is an overstatement to say that I have struggled with how I will cast my vote on the nomination of Mrs. DeVos. Again, I take very personally the success of Alaska's schools and the success of Alaska's schoolchildren. We have a lot of schools in Alaska, as we all do around the country. My schools, I would challenge you all, are a little bit more diverse than perhaps in other parts of America just because of our geography. We are isolated. Eighty-two percent of the communities are not attached by a road. The communities are small. The schools are smaller. In our urban centers, what some find unusual is we have more diversity in our populations than most people could understand or even imagine. One of the neighborhoods in my hometown of Anchorage hosts the most ethnically diverse schools in the United States of America.…”