Political Quotes

“I want to thank my colleagues from Arizona and Texas for, really, the first historic activity. It was a historic month last year. In the wake of the Uvalde shootings, we came together in one meeting--and this is a very diverse group of people, Senator Murphy from Connecticut being one of them. We came together in one meeting, and we developed enough trust to say that we thought we could do something that hadn't been done in a generation: trying to come up with a bipartisan bill that addresses what we considered to be some of the root causes of community safety. We did it in 30 days with bipartisan support, and we sent it to the President's desk. I am sure Senator Cornyn and Senator Sinema are doing the same thing, but I watch it virtually every day. I watch what is happening on the ground. I look at funding for school safety, funding for school hardening, funding for veterans courts, funding for VA courts, funding for family courts, more funding to make sure that background checks are done quickly, and identifying young people who, yes, a couple of hundred should not have a gun out of about 150,000 who have actually tried to purchase a gun over the last year. The short story is it was a very successful bill. I have been involved, in the last Congress, in every bipartisan bill that went to the floor. I took the heat back home, and Senator Cornyn took the heat back home, but we worked on it, and we had trusted partners who understood the intent.…”