Lindsey Graham: “One thing will happen when this is over. There will not be hate between us. We will come together, and we will work…”

“One thing will happen when this is over. There will not be hate between us. We will come together, and we will work together where we can, and we will disagree when we have to. I want to clear up the Record the best I can and explain what my motion does what I think is very needed. One, there is no objective evidence that the Committee on the Judiciary or anyone else, as we see, that the States are ignoring violent assaults based on people's race, sex, gender, national origin, religion or disability. There is no State, there is no repeated pattern of where one gets to pound on a particular group and nobody does anything about it. That is a fallacy. Let me tell my colleagues about the legal consequences of what we are about to do in my opinion, and my colleagues need to read the statute themselves. This allows the Federal Attorney General, unlike the current statute, it is not merely including sexual orientation and disability in a list of existing Federal hate crime legislation. It is changing fundamentally the way that the legislation operates to allow the Attorney General, whoever he or she might be, to reach out and preempt a State lawsuit.”