Political Quotes

“People every day are struggling to make sense of the most challenging times our Nation has seen in more than a century, and that is saying something. A hundred years ago, we were recovering from the Spanish flu pandemic that hit America hard and people around the globe. Ten years later, we had the stock market crash, the Great Depression, and massive unemployment. But today, we have all of those circumstances and more. We are in the middle of a pandemic. We have the resulting economic upheaval. We reached near depression-era levels of unemployment, and rather than take 3 years, as happened in the 1930s, it has happened in a matter of 3 weeks. We have the climate crisis which my colleagues have addressed so eloquently today both in terms of the challenge and what we can do about it. Luckily, the world is finally acknowledging that, but it is still too slow to respond. We have some lessons that we, I think, have learned from what we quaintly called the Great Recession of 10 years ago. As somebody who was legislating in the middle of it and watching the impact in my community and around the country, it seemed horrific. But it pales by comparison with what people are facing today and the demands for racial justice. My colleagues in introducing their handiwork of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis all acknowledged that that is at the forefront of our thinking.…”