Sam Brownback: “I want to speak from the heart on two matters: one on my good friend, Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash 5 years…”

“I want to speak from the heart on two matters: one on my good friend, Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash 5 years ago. Several speakers have spoken already, very eloquently, about Paul Wellstone, a wonderful man. He and I disagreed on many issues in this body, and yet we had a wonderful relationship because of the nature of the person he was. He practiced the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable. It is a tough art to do, particularly in legislative bodies it can be very difficult. But he did it, and he did it very well. And he had a number of friends on both sides of the aisle from wide across the political spectrum. Because of that attitude--and here is something I really want to say to my colleagues--Paul and I could get together on what I deemed to be the most important piece of legislation that I have been a part of here, as far as a primary sponsor, and that is the human trafficking work that he and I started--actually, his wife got him focused on it, and she was killed in the same plane crash--where we started seeing people trafficked into the United States and different places around the world, and we wondered what is going on with this dark underside of the globalization that is taking place.”