Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I would like to offer my grateful thanks to the Presiding Officer and Senator Schatz and Senator Boxer, who I know was down here earlier. All of you are true heroes, as well as some of our other colleagues who have manned the quiet hours of the overnight. I know Senator Heinrich and Senator Booker spent long hours on the floor arguing with great voracity and passion about the cause that brings us here today. I am humbled to pick up where many of my friends have left off and thankful for the bringing of all of us here today. In thinking about this event and thinking about how to frame this debate, I asked some of my friends in Connecticut how they were thinking about this issue of climate change. I received a number of different responses--one that maybe didn't actually stand out but was emblematic about the way my State of Connecticut thinks about climate change--a State that has most of its population right along the shoreline. All of our economic assets essentially buffer the State from the rising coastal levels. Our State has now gone through--as the Presiding Officer's has--four record and once-in-a-lifetime storms in a period of a handful of years. This is a State that has been called to action. A rabbi in the greater New Haven area wrote me a very simple note. He became an activist on the issue of climate change after Superstorm Sandy. Senator Booker was down here, and clearly his State was hit with the worst of it, but Connecticut was hit hard too.…”