Cord Byrd: “17,000 votes ago, I achieved a dream. I stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and prepared to cast my first vote as a…”

“17,000 votes ago, I achieved a dream. I stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and prepared to cast my first vote as a Senator from the Mountain State of West Virginia. Seventeen thousand votes later, I still feel much the same. It is a great honor, a great privilege to serve the people in the Senate. Ours is a glorious country. Its people are wise. They are brave. They are hard-working and fairminded. Once it was possible for a poor young man with no important connections, with no PR firm behind him, with no fundraising apparatus racing at full tilt, to simply go out to the people, carrying his fiddle and having a mind full of poetry, and on the strength of his energy and his convictions, to be elected to the greatest deliberative body the world has ever known. That time is light-years away from today's reality. Too often now in America it is the size of the pocketbook that elects public officials. I regret that change. It keeps people out of public service instead of welcoming them into public service. This Senate is the forum which exists to welcome and to protect the airing of all points of view. Both sides of the aisle need to work together to ensure that the Senate will stay true to its constitutional purpose. We swear an oath before God and man to support and defend this Constitution. Many times I have sworn that oath before God and man to support the Constitution of the United States. I have had a good run in this wonderful institution.…”