Political Quotes

“Mr. President, literally every month of this year, I have come to the Senate floor to do something that one of our former colleagues, Ted Kaufman, who served as our Senator for 2 years after Joe Biden became Vice President--Ted used to come to the floor not on a monthly basis but even more frequently than that to talk about what was being done by any number of Federal employees across our country, to draw attention to the fact that these are not nameless, faceless bureaucrats, these are people who do important work for each of us in a variety of ways. What I have tried to do in the last several months--I think most of this year--is to come to the floor to recognize the work not of the Federal employees at large but the work of a few of the many exemplary Department of Homeland Security employees and to thank them for their dedication to their mission and their service to our Nation, which is an important one. And the reason I have particular interest in this is that I have been the senior Democrat on homeland security the last couple of years, and I worked with Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. The two of us were privileged to lead the committee. In June I spoke about several outstanding officers in the U.S. Coast Guard, one of them a petty officer, a woman named Joscelyn Greenwell, who is stationed at Coast Guard Station Indian River Inlet in southern Delaware, which is just a little bit north of Bethany Beach and just south of Rehoboth.…”