Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak in favor of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Senator Whitehouse and I have been working on this together for years, along with Senator Portman and Senator Ayotte, so this bill has been bipartisan from the beginning. I thank my colleagues, and I also thank Senator Grassley and Senator Leahy for their leadership in bringing this to the floor and all members of our committee, including the Presiding Officer, who have contributed to this bill. Our Nation is facing a serious problem with drug addiction, and I am glad to join my colleagues today to talk about how we can tackle this problem and work toward a solution by passing this bipartisan bill. Just last week I was out in Montevideo, MN, and we gathered together some people from the town. It is a town of a couple thousand people. Our goal was to just talk about this problem. I was shocked that early in the morning on a Saturday we had 50 people there. We had every doctor in the town there, to my knowledge. We had the sheriff there, the police chief there. At one point a regular citizen who was there, who had suffered from some diseases and had been in the hospital, actually emptied out her purse and tons of medications and opioids came rolling out onto the table that she hadn't used. It was an image I will not forget and an image I bring to the Senate floor to remind us there are too many of these drugs out in our communities.…”