On the recordJune 24, 2020
Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to speak about the bill that we voted on earlier today and the debate that has ensued prior to that vote and I am sure afterwards. This is a moral moment for the country. I believe most would agree with that. The question is, How will our Nation respond at this moral moment? The brutal murder of George Floyd by a police officer ``shames us before the world.'' I am quoting an NAACP official who said it for all of us. His murder did shame us before the world, so did the murder of Rayshard Brooks and Breonna Taylor, and we can go on from there, with so many names that we haven't heard before, and many that we will hear over and over. A lot of us feel that shame. Countless millions of Americans feel that shame. They feel that sadness and they feel that anger all these weeks since that terrible moment that we all witnessed, and so many other moments before and after that. As they feel that shame and express anger and frustration, and as they protest and proclaim, as they march and mobilize, as they use their voice and cast their votes, they demand change, but not simply change in and of itself, a certain kind of change--the kind of change we see rarely in Washington these days and, frankly, rarely over the course of American history, but I think we might be in one of those moments now. They demand transformative change. They demand, and appropriately so, systemic change to a criminal justice system that is infused with racism.…





