Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this past weekend--and yesterday, in particular--we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is likely, if you attended any event in that celebration, that you heard at least part of his ``I Have a Dream'' speech. Many of us in the Chamber happily quoted it because of our respect for him and the eloquence of his language in that moment. We like to remember the hopeful second half of that speech, as well, because Dr. King imagined a future in which Black children and White children play together, and all people are judged, as he so famously said, ``not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.'' However, many of us forget--or worse, ignore--the first half of that speech, in which Dr. King noted the painful irony that 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation--the ``promissory note'' of our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence was for most Black Americans simply ``a bad check which has come back marked `insufficient funds.' '' Many Democratic Senators and Republican Senators helped to change that shameful fact. It was here on the floor of this Chamber, in 1965, that the U.S. Senate voted 77 to 19 to pass the Voting Rights Act, outlawing State practices that denied millions of Americans, particularly Black Americans, the right to vote. It is worth noting that it was a strong bipartisan vote and that, percentagewise, a greater percentage of the Republican Caucus voted in support of it, compared to Democrats.…”