Political Quotes

“I know people watching and perhaps reading the newspaper, watching cable TV, and listening to talk radio think nothing ever happens here in Washington, DC, and they would be wrong. Certainly, we can always do better, and I am disappointed we haven't been more successful, but there are some measures we can make in the right direction in important pieces of legislation that make a very profound difference in people's lives. Today I want to talk about a problem that, thanks to a bill passed by the Senate on Monday, we are helping to solve. This has to do with the untested rape kit backlog in our country. Years ago, thanks to a courageous woman named Debbie Smith, I became a lot better informed about the nature of this problem: rape kits, the forensic evidence that is taken in sexual assault cases but which remained in evidence lockers in police stations untested or was sent to laboratories and never processed. At one point, it was estimated that there were as many as 400,000 untested rape kits in our country. As the Presiding Officer knows, this is powerful evidence because of DNA testing. We can literally almost say with certainty whether there is a match between the DNA of a suspect and that in a rape kit. This forensic evidence is collected following a sexual assault.…”