Political Quotes

“I first note that we are horrified watching images and following the news out of Utah and we are sending all of our thoughts to Mr. Kirk, to his family, to survivors there. Mr. President and colleagues, there are a host of ways that democracies die. Institutions like universities and the legal profession capitulate to the leaders and the regime. They stop being forums for free speech and dissent. The legal system becomes perverted into a vehicle to punish opponents of the regime and to immunize loyalists. The press is threatened with sanction or retribution for telling the truth. They fold and they just silence criticism. Business leaders are offered lucrative deals for making loyalty agreements with the government using their economic power to back the regime. I wish this weren't true, but all of those things are happening in America today. It is why many of us come down to this floor fairly often to talk about our belief that we are sleepwalking into some version of, at best, deeply illiberal democracy where rights and dissent are functionally irrelevant or, at worst, authoritarianism where political opposition just vanishes. But today, I want to talk about another common part of this story about how democracies evaporate. And that is the subjugation of the legislative branch to a corrupt executive branch. Put another way, in healthy democracies, the legislature or the parliament sees itself as a check on runaway Executive power.”