Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in a moment, I intend to put forward a unanimous consent request to pass my bipartisan bill with our colleague from Utah, Senator Lee, entitled the Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression Act, also known as the PRESS Act. Before I make the unanimous consent request, I want to take just a few minutes to talk about why our colleague from Utah Senator Lee and I feel this legislation is so important, and I will start with the basic proposition behind the legislation. If you don't have a free press, you don't have a democracy. My dad was a journalist. After fleeing the Nazis, he came to this country, taught himself English, worked in our Army developing propaganda that we dropped on the Nazis. He believed deeply in individual freedom and in press freedom and would always tell me: Ron, they go hand in hand. If you want to see what happens when governments undermine and eliminate the free press, look at Russia, look at Saudi Arabia, look at Iran. Information became a tool of power, abuse, and manipulation. That is what governments do when they want to keep freedom from breaking out in their countries. And so they abuse power rather than promote education, expression, and enlightenment among the countryside and the people. So--let's be clear--the threat of government overreach interfering with the free press in the United States is not some distant, far-off, hypothetical idea. It happened very recently.…”