Rich Neal: “David Bonior's sense of America is community, and what he means by community is a place where nobody is ever to be…”

“David Bonior's sense of America is community, and what he means by community is a place where nobody is ever to be abandoned and nobody is ever to be left behind. One of the best speeches I ever heard on this House floor came the night that David led us in opposition to the NAFTA treaty, when he raised the question for all of us here that night of what the Edmond Pettis Bridge meant to a generation of Americans, and what it meant to cross that bridge, what it meant to have a sense of justice and fairness and equity in this life, a catholic sense of justice; fairness, equity, the notion that you just cannot walk by the poor, that you just cannot abandoned them and turn your back, that government is there in the end to help them. Another thing I am going to say about David, in an institution that really troubles me, because many of the people that have gotten here on both sides of the aisle, they have run this institution into the ground day in and day out with their diatribes on what has always been wrong, and then they abandon in the next breath term limits, they abandoned the line item veto, they abandon things like disturbing the Constitution based upon every whim that moves along. Not David Bonior.”