On the recordJanuary 17, 2018
I rise today to thank my colleague Senator Flake for his words and to join with him in standing up for the First Amendment. When I was at home over the last recess, I read Senator Flake's book, and one of the many things I took away from that book, which I thought was quite an amazing book, was the fact that when he was growing up, his family had a 3-by-5 card on their refrigerator. They looked at it every day, and it said: ``Assume the best and look for the good.'' The way he has articulately talked about our Constitution today, he is assuming the best, as we all should do, about the citizens of this country and that they will look at this document and care about this document and understand why the First Amendment is so important to our freedom. For me, this started at home. My dad was a reporter his entire life. He went from a hardscrabble mining town in Ely, MN, to go to a 2-year community college, and then got a journalism degree at the University of Minnesota. He got his first job at the Bismarck paper in North Dakota. He served during the Korean war and finally ended up at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. He went from that mining town and saw the world. He got to interview everyone from Ronald Reagan to the Chicago Bears coach, Mike Ditka, to Ginger Rogers.…
