Political Quotes

“I am here this evening to commemorate the passing of a remarkable individual. I only met her once when I went over to speak at a gathering of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But on March 16, at the age of 85, Her Honor Judge Gladys Kessler passed away. She had been quite a trailblazer before she went on the court. She cofounded the Women's Legal Defense Fund, now known as the National Partnership for Women & Families, and she served as the president of the National Association of Women Judges. In her career, she rendered a lot of very good decisions, but the most memorable one and the one that exemplified some of the characteristics I admired the most about her was the decision that she rendered exposing in detail a conspiracy by the tobacco industry to deceive the American public about the safety of tobacco. The Big Tobacco scheme is one that we are, I think, pretty familiar with. You pay a lot of phony-baloney for-hire scientists to produce studies making false claims about your product, you hire a web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt and critique the actual real science that you don't like, and you have paid intermediaries to relentlessly attack and try to smear your opponents. In the face of this behavior, we had a remedy: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the RICO Act. In 1999, the U.S.…”