Impeachment
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BENNET. Madam President, when I was in the second grade--which I did twice because I was dyslexic, so I don't know which year of the second grade it was, but one of those 2 years--we were asked to line up in order of whose family had been here the longest period of time and whose family had been here the shortest period of time.
I turned out to be the answer to both of those questions. My father's family went all the way back to the Mayflower, and my mom's family were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. They didn't leave Warsaw because my grandfather had a large family he didn't want to leave behind. And in the event--everybody was killed in the war, except my mom, her parents, and an aunt. They lived in Warsaw for 2 years after the war. Then they went to Stockholm for a year. They went to Mexico City for a year, of all places. And then they came to the United States--the one place in the world they could rebuild their shattered lives, and they did rebuild their shattered lives. My mom was the only person in the family who could speak any English. She registered herself in the New York City public schools. She graduated from Hunter College High School. She went on to graduate from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in one generation. My grandparents rebuilt the business they had lost during the war.
I knew from them how important this symbol of America was to people struggling all over the world. They had been through some of the worst events in human history, and their joy of being Americans was completely unadulterated. I have met many immigrants across this country, and I still haven't met anybody with a stronger accent than my grandparents had, and I have never met anybody who were greater patriots than they were. They understood how important the idea of America was, not because we were perfect--exactly the opposite of that--because we were imperfect. But we lived in a free society that was able to cure its imperfections with the hard work of our citizens to make this country more democratic, more free, and more fair--a country committed to the rule of law. Nobody was above the rule of law, and nobody was treated unfairly by the law, even if you were an immigrant to this country.
From my dad's example, I learned something really different. It might interest some people around here to know he was a staffer in the Senate for many years. I actually grew up coming here on Saturday mornings, throwing paper airplanes around the hallways of the Dirksen Building and Russell Building.
He worked here at a very different time in the Senate. He worked here at a time when Republicans and Democrats worked together to uphold the rule of law, to pass important legislation that was needed by the American people to move our country forward, a time when Democrats and Republicans went back home and said: I didn't get everything I wanted, to be sure, but the 65 percent I did get is worth the bill we have, and here is why the other side needed 35 percent.
Those days are completely gone in the U.S. Senate, and I grieve for them. My dad passed away about a year ago. I know how disappointed he would be about where we are, but there isn't anybody who can fix it, except the 100 people who are here and, I suppose, the American people for whom we ostensibly work.
In the last 10 years that I have been here, I have watched politicians come to this floor and destroy the solemn responsibility we have--the constitutional responsibility we have--to advise and consent on judicial appointments, to turn that constitutional responsibility into nothing more than a vicious partisan exercise. That hasn't been done by the American people. That wasn't done by any other generation of politicians who were in this place. It has been done by this generation of politicians led by the Senator from Kentucky, the majority leader of the Senate.
We have become a body that does nothing. We are an employment agency. That is what we are. Seventy-five percent of the votes we took last year were on appointments. We voted on 26 amendments last year--26--26. In the world's greatest deliberative body, we passed eight amendments in a year. Pathetic. We didn't consider any of the major issues the American people are confronting in their lives, not a single one--10 years of townhalls with people saying to me: Michael, we are killing ourselves, and we can't afford housing, healthcare, higher education, early childhood education. We cannot save. We can't live a middle-class life. We think our kids are going to live a more diminished life than we do.
What does the U.S. Senate do? Cut taxes for rich people. We don't have time to do anything else around here. And now, when we are the only body on planet Earth charged with the responsibility of dealing with the guilt or innocence of this President, we can't even bring ourselves to have witnesses and evidence as part of a fair trial, even when there are literally witnesses with direct knowledge of what the President did practically banging on the door of the Senate saying: Let me testify.
We are too lazy for that. The reality is, we are too broken for that. We are too broken for that. And we have failed in our duty to the American people.
Hamilton said in Federalist 65 that in an impeachment trial we were the inquisitors for the people. The Senate--we would be the inquisitors for the people. How can you be the inquisitors for the people when you don't even dignify the process with evidence and with witnesses?
I often have school kids come visit me here in the Senate, which I really enjoy because I used to be the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. When they come visit me, they very often have been on the Mall. They have seen the Lincoln Memorial. They have seen the Washington Monument. They have been seen the Supreme Court, this Capitol. And there is a tendency among them to believe that this was just all here, that it was all just here. And of course, 230 years ago, I tell them, none of it was here. None of it was here. It was in the ideas of the Founders, the people whom we call the Founders, who did two incredible things in their lifetime, in their generation, that had never been done before in human history. They wrote a Constitution that would be ratified by the people who lived under it. It never happened before. They would never have imagined that we would have lasted 230 years--at least until the age of Donald Trump.
They led an armed insurrection against a colonial power. We call that the Revolutionary War. That succeeded too.
They did something terrible in their generation that will last for the rest of our days and that is they perpetuated human slavery. The building we are standing in today was built by enslaved human beings because of the decisions that they made.
But I tell the kids who come and visit me that there is a reason why there are not enslaved human beings in this country anymore and that is because of people like Frederick Douglass. He was born a slave in the United States of America, escaped his slavery in Maryland, risked his life and limb to get to Massachusetts, and he found the abolitionist movement there. And the abolitionist movement has been arguing for generations that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Frederick Douglass, who is completely self-taught, said to them: You have this exactly wrong, exactly backward, 180 degrees from the truth. The Constitution is an anti-slavery document, Frederick Douglass said, not a pro-slavery document.
But we are not living up to the words of the Constitution. It is the same thing Dr. King said the night before he was killed in Memphis when he went down there for the striking garbage workers and he said: I am here to make America keep the promise you wrote down on the page.
In my mind, Frederick Douglass and Dr. King are Founders, just as much as the people who wrote the Constitution of the United States. How could they not be? How could they not be?
The women who fought to give my kids, my three daughters, the right to vote, who fought for 50 years to get the right to vote--mostly women in this country--are Founders, just like the people who wrote the Constitution, as well.
Over the years that I have been here, I have seen this institution crumble into rubble. This institution has become incapable of addressing the most existential questions of our time that the next generation cannot address. They can't fix their own school. They can't fix our immigration system. They can't fix climate change, although they are getting less and less patient with us on that issue.
But what I have come to conclude is that the responsibility of all of us--not just Senators but all of us as citizens in a democratic republic--230 years after the founding of this Republic, is the responsibility of a Founder. It is that elevated sense of what a citizen is required to do in a republic to sustain that republic, and I think that is the right way to think about it. It gives you a sense of what is really at stake beyond the headlines on the cable television at night and, certainly, in the social media feeds that divide us minute to minute in our political life today.
The Senate has clearly failed that standard. We have clearly failed that standard. The idea that we would turn our backs and close our eyes to evidence pounding on the outside of the doors of this Capitol is pitiful. It is disgraceful, and it will be a stain on this body for all time. More than 50 percent of the people in this place have said that what the President did was wrong. It clearly was wrong. It clearly was unconstitutional. It clearly was impeachable. What President would run for office saying to the American people: I am going to try to extort a foreign power for my own electoral interest to interfere in our elections? It is exactly the kind of conduct that the impeachment clause was written for. It is a textbook case of why the impeachment clause exists.
But even if you don't agree with me that he should have been convicted or that he should be convicted, I don't know how anybody in this body goes home and faces their constituents and says that we wouldn't even look at the evidence.
So I say to the American people: Our democracy is very much at risk. I am not one of those people who believes that Donald Trump is the source of all our problems. I think he has made matters much worse, to be sure, but he is a symptom of our problem. He is a symptom of our failure to tend to the democracy--to our responsibility--as Founders. And if we don't begin to take that responsibility as seriously as our parents and grandparents did--people who faced much bigger challenges than we ever did--nobody is asking us, thank God, to end human slavery. Nobody is asking us to fight for 50 years for the self-evident proposition that women should have the right to vote. We are not marching in Selma, being beaten for the self-evident prospect that all people are created equal. Nobody is asking us to climb the Cliffs of Normandy to fight for freedom in a World War.
But we are being asked to save the democracy and we are going to fail that test today in the Senate. And my prayer for our country is that the American people will not fail that test. I am optimistic that we will not. We have never failed it before, and I don't think we will fail it in our time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source