Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise today to add my voice to my colleagues in remembering and paying our respects to our dear friend and former colleague Senator Carl Levin, whom we sadly lost last night. My colleagues have been sharing their stories and their experiences of this incredible human being, this amazing Senator, and I want to share one of my own, a story of how he made an impact on my life and my approach to being a Senator. It was back in 2009, when we had an enormous collapse of our economic system. I came here as a freshman Senator, and we were working to say what happened and how can we prevent this from happening again. A lot of what happened was enormously leveraged bets made in the Wall Street casino. A staff member of mine kept saying, you have got to read this essay by Chairman Volcker about how we take and shut down this Wall Street casino and how it puts our entire economy at risk and will do so again in the future again if we don't act After two or three times that my team member had approached me on this, I put out an email to all of the Senators and said: Here is the challenge that is presented, and here is what we need to do to protect the future economy. Would anyone join me in undertaking to establish this Volcker rule to shut down the Wall Street casino? The next day, I came to the floor of the Senate, and Carl Levin comes up to me. And he says: About your email from yesterday, about your email, I want to join you in that project.…”