On the recordJanuary 6, 2021
Mr. President, I want to begin this evening by saying thank you to the men and women of the Capitol Police, the National Guardsmen, the Metropolitan Police, and others who came to this Capitol and put their lives on the line to protect everybody here who was working inside. I want to thank law enforcement all across this country--in my home State of Missouri and everywhere else--who do that day in and day out. I just want to acknowledge that, when it comes to violence, it was a terrible year in America this last year. We have seen a lot of violence against law enforcement, and today, we saw it here in the Capitol of the United States. In this country, in the United States of America, we cannot say emphatically enough: Violence is not how you achieve change. Violence is not how you achieve something better. Our Constitution was built and put into place so that there would be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, no appeal from ballots to bullets, which is what we saw, unfortunately, attempted tonight. There is no place for that in the United States of America, and that is why I submit to my colleagues that what we are doing here tonight is, actually, very important because, for those who have concerns about the integrity of our elections and for those who have concerns about what happened in November, this is the appropriate means. This is the lawful place where those objections and concerns should be heard.…
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