Political Quotes

“Mr. President, there has been a lot of discussion this evening by my colleague from New Jersey and by my colleague from Rhode Island about the issue of climate change and its impact. I come from a part of the country where climate change is there; it is with us; it is real. It is something that we look to as Alaskans with a reality of this world view. I spend a lot of my time here in the Senate focused on not only the U.S. Arctic but the Arctic as a whole, the eight Arctic nations that we intersect with. So I would like to take a few minutes this evening to speak about the happenings in the Arctic--our new reality--as we are seeing greater opportunities but also greater challenges in an area that I find to be an extraordinary place on our globe. It was maybe a little more than 150 years ago when Massachusetts Senator and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Charles Sumner, argued the geostrategic importance of Alaska to our young Nation at the time. Senator Sumner spoke about how the Aleutians represented this gateway to Asia. This was a maritime route to the west coast that was roughly 1,000 miles shorter than the southern route through the Sandwich Isles, which was popular at the time. It was about 70 years later that Gen. Billy Mitchell, who was the father of the Air Force, testified before Congress and said that he believed that in the future, whoever controls Alaska controls the world.…”