On the recordFebruary 5, 2025
Mr. President, I have the bad fortune and audacity to follow one of our greatest speakers, one of the Nation's greatest orators and a preacher. I know we all appreciate the old wisdom: Never follow a preacher. I want to thank Reverend Warnock, my great colleague and friend, for that eloquent and powerful speech and particularly the ending of his speech, which evoked a time in our history that many would like to forget. A lot of Americans are forgetting. The world is trying to erase it from its memory. But it is a time evoked by Senator Warnock that couldn't be more relevant to this moment in America's history because we face a crisis in governance. It is a moral crisis, not just a political or legal crisis. It is a challenge to us, to our better angels, to our sense of mutual respect and caring, and, as he said so well, quoting Martin Luther King, that web of mutuality that binds us as a nation. Ultimately, it isn't our wealth, the number of dollars we have in bank accounts, or the economic strength of our corporations. It isn't our might militarily. We have the strongest and best military in the world. It is our common values and our commitment to our faith and our family and to each other, respect for each other even when we differ. When we come to this body, we all take an oath. I have taken that oath a number of times in my life--when I became a private in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, when I became a U.S.…
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