Political Quotes

“Have our colleagues across the aisle forgotten that the right to a jury trial was as essential a cause of the American Revolution as was representative democracy and the denial of voting rights itself? John Adams said: ``Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and the lungs of liberty. Without them, we have no other fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hounds.' The massive suppression of trial by jury rights by British authorities was a critical cause of our Revolution. One of the charges that Thomas Jefferson leveled against the British in the Declaration of Independence was ``depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury.'' Now, today, we have not a foreign king and government trying to impose a closed Star Chamber on the American people but certain large corporations chartered by the States that seek to divest consumers and employees of their sacred trial by jury and due process rights by conditioning their employment or their market agreements on relegating them to closed-door binding arbitration sessions where all of their rights are vanquished and the whole process, from start to finish, is skewed in favor of the corporations that control and design the proceedings. This legislation, the FAIR Act, vindicates the most essential rights of the American people.…”