Political Quotes

“4 weeks ago, I was sitting where you are sitting, presiding over the Senate on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, when news broke that 19 children--all the same age as my youngest son--had been gunned down in their Texas elementary school. As I scrolled through the early reports of the carnage, all I could think of were these two simple questions: What are we doing? Why are we here? I sat up there obsessing over our willful decision as a body to ignore the slaughter that has become so regular that the news only seems to pay attention now when over a dozen die. Our collective decision year after year is to do nothing. What is the point of this job that we fought so hard to get if we just decide that saving children's lives is too hard or involves too inconvenient an amount of political risk? Shooting after shooting, murder after murder, suicide after suicide-- for 30 years, Congress stood in its political corners and did nothing. But not this time. Within 2 days of the Uvalde massacre, Senator Cornyn, Senator Tillis, Senator Sinema, and I, joined by other Members of this body, had started talking, not about our disagreements--we have plenty of those--but instead about what could be possible if we sat together and refused to give up until we figured out the set of things that we could agree on--the things that could get 60 votes--to save lives.…”