Cory Booker: “I rise today with a lot of joy. I get a chance to speak about someone I have known for decades. I am rising to speak…”

“I rise today with a lot of joy. I get a chance to speak about someone I have known for decades. I am rising to speak about Julien Neals and my hope that he gets to serve on the U.S. District Court of the great State of New Jersey. I have spoken to many of my colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee about Julien Neals. He is someone I have not just known for a long time, but even though he is not quite my height, I look up to him. We worked together when I was mayor of the city of Newark. So today what I really want to speak about is not simply his impressive career, his distinguished resume, but I really want to talk a bit about who he is. I am not sure how many of my colleagues know this about the city of Newark, NJ, but when I became mayor in 2006, we inherited a lot of very complex, very serious challenges, and for the sake of our residents, we needed to make change quickly and very urgently. So I brought in this guy named Julien Neals, whom I didn't quite know that well, but he was so well highly recommended. He moved from the private sector, where he was with a very prestigious New Jersey law firm, and decided to lead the transformation in New Jersey's largest municipal court. He knew that it was a court system that had to change, and he stepped up. He changed it. He changed the way our court operated.…”