Political Quotes

“this week we commemorate the 143rd anniversary of Juneteenth, the day our Nation's moral pendulum swung from slavery to freedom. On June 19, 1865, our Nation turned a significant corner. We ushered in what President Lincoln called in his Gettysburg address a ``new birth of freedom.'' We ended an oppression endured by generations of Americans and threw off the chains that shackled our common bond of freedom. We laid the roots for a constitutional revolution that, through the Civil War Amendments, transformed our founding charter from one that defended oppression, to one that embraced equal rights and human dignity. Over a century later we have made significant progress, but the struggle to secure basic rights for all remains unfulfilled. Just a few months ago, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination found that racial disparities continue to challenge our commitment to equality. I was not surprised to see that the U.N. report rebuked this administration's poor civil rights record. After 9/11, the Bush administration eroded many of the most precious rights and liberties held by all Americans. Just last week, the Supreme Court in the Boumediene opinion, beat back one of these most egregious attempts, restoring the Great Writ of habeas corpus to its rightful place as a mechanism to guarantee liberty from arbitrary confinement.”