Political Quotes

“I join my colleagues in mourning the passing of a great and good colleague, someone we knew not only as a fellow worker here and a colleague but also as a friend. Every one of us had a personal connection to Dianne Feinstein. She had no enemies. She had adversaries, she differed, but she could differ and disagree without being disagreeable, as the saying goes. She established personal connections with all of us over her many years of service. I have listened to my colleagues on the floor this morning, and coming through to me is not only a sense of pain in her passing but also joy in knowing her. What strikes me is that she leaves a legacy--yes, a legacy--in legislation, in good works in California that impacted people's lives there, but her real legacy is people. Her legacy is the people who regard her as a role model, the people who were inspired to follow her into public service, the people who stood up and spoke out--and often it was truth to power as she did--because she was there. She blazed the trail. She showed how to do it. I first became aware of Dianne Feinstein in the early 1990s as a newly elected State attorney general, advocating for an assault weapons ban in the State of Connecticut--the early 1990s, and she was doing it at the Federal level. Connecticut and the Congress did it together. Then I defended our Connecticut law in the Connecticut courts with many of the same arguments that we used to challenge Federal law.…”