Joe Lieberman: “I rise to express my severe disappointment in the Senate's failure to invoke cloture on the Local Law Enforcement…”

“I rise to express my severe disappointment in the Senate's failure to invoke cloture on the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act--also known as the Hate Crimes bill. I am proud to be a cosponsor of this bill, but I am not proud of what the Senate did to that bill today. One of the things we try to do in this Chamber, as lawmakers, is to adopt laws that express and encode our values as a society--to, in some sense, put into law our aspirations for the kind of people we want to be. Clearly, one of the bedrock values, one of the fundamental values, of America is equality--equality of treatment before the law, equality of opportunity but, beyond that, a broader notion of tolerance in our society. It is part of what brought generations of immigrants to this country--the idea that they would be judged on their personal merit, not on anything related to their personal status or characteristics. Starting with our Declaration of Independence--our nation's documentary explication of the values underpinning our experiment in self-government--our country's leaders have laid out a vision of a nation born and bred in notions of tolerance and equality. We know for a certainty that our nation did not live up to that vision when it was first articulated, but in each successive generation we have tried hard to meet the ideals we set out for ourselves. And in each successive generation we have come a bit closer to meeting that goal.”