Tina Smith: “I will wait for my colleague to receive her hugs of gratitude, and I have a few words I would like to say. Mr.…”

“I will wait for my colleague to receive her hugs of gratitude, and I have a few words I would like to say. Mr. President, I wanted to just take a moment to add my thanks and congratulations to our colleague Senator Laphonza Butler. You know, I look around this Chamber, and this is a Chamber that is filled with people who were once lawyers or Members of Congress, Governors or Lieutenant Governors--all incredibly fine and honorable professions--but there are not that many people in this room who came here because they were organizers. This is something that Senator Butler and I talked about when she first came to the Senate. Now, organizers are different because we understand that the power of accomplishing important things comes certainly from our leadership and the work that we do, but fundamentally it comes from the people we work with every single day, the folks that are out there on the ground, living the lives and doing the work. If you understand that your power to do good work comes from those people, then you approach everything, every problem, from a different perspective. I know this is where Senator Butler comes from as an organizer at SCIU and in her life, and I want to pay tribute to that because I think that kind of approach to problem-solving is something we can all learn from.…”