Mitch Landrieu: “Good. I am going to take every one of them. I want to tell the Republican majority something quite simple. This country…”

“Good. I am going to take every one of them. I want to tell the Republican majority something quite simple. This country, no matter your best efforts, will not be divided. No matter your vicious rhetoric about Protestants and Catholics and blacks and whites and Hispanics and women, we refuse to be divided. In a time of war, which we are in, when the country is under assault and we have men and women dying in Iraq, it is the height of disrespect and un-Americanism to come to this great floor and talk about the pettiness and say this woman Senator, who has spent 25 years in public office, and every woman who has ever served, that there is something wrong if I don't want a woman as a judge or I don't want African Americans to be here. The Senator from Utah must forget where I am from. I would like to remind him where I am from. I am going to fight for Louisiana. In the 63 years before Rosa Parks decided to sit down in her seat because her feet were so tired she could not move, a man named Homer Plessy decided he would get on a rail car that was entitled 'whites only.' He got on it in New Orleans, my hometown. He rode on the train and he knew he would be arrested. But a group of lawyers, African-American free men of color, had decided that he would be the right one. Why? Because he was white enough to pass, to get on the train, and black enough to be arrested. And that is exactly what happened.”