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Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to be brief, but I would like to briefly say something that might be an odd thing for the Senator from Colorado to say, which is how grateful I am to the people of Ohio for sending Sherrod Brown to the U.S. Senate for all of these years and how much I wish that you had sent him back one more time.

I say that in part because I once lived in Ohio and was a young person there, learning something about politics in the late eighties and early nineties. Sherrod Brown was my secretary of state. He was the same person then that he is today in all the important ways and a progressive voice for the people of Ohio.

It was an amazing thing for me to come to this place and meet Sherrod as a fellow Senator and to sit in that chair and preside, while Sherrod stood--I don't remember when that was, when it would have been; Barack Obama probably was in the early days of his Presidency--and listen to the names of cities and towns all across Ohio ricochet around the marble Chamber that we are in with such joy because I had been to those places myself.

I can remember hearing him fight against the characterization by outsiders of the place he lived and the place he grew up as the Rust Bowl of the United States instead of the industrial heartland of the United States, for him to remind people in this Chamber of the important--as he was describing today--the critical contribution that working people make to this Nation every day, all day, over many years, whether they are living in the industrial heartland or anywhere else in America, because for Sherrod, workers in every State in this country count and matter.

But I want to just say thank you on behalf of the children that I used to work for in the Denver public schools. I was the superintendent when my friend Cory Booker was the mayor of Newark. We worked together in those days, and we have had the chance to work together here.

There are many times that I have been on this floor, Senator Brown, when I worried about whether the children I used to work for in Denver, who are mostly kids of color, mostly kids living in poverty, whether anybody here had their interests at heart or whether anybody here could even see them or whether we had actually become really comfortable in the sense that we were treating our kids like they were someone else's kids, not even the country's kids. More than anybody else in this place, you have lifted their voices. You have seen the kids that I represented or worked for in the Denver public schools.

The chance for you and Bob and Cory and I to work together on the child tax credit, which went to 90 percent of America's kids and cut child poverty in half, is a symbol to all of us, I think, of what is possible if we dedicate ourselves to the idea that this country has to live up to its aspirations. That is something you never have let us forget. I know you have talked about it over and over again, how one of the happiest days of your time in the Senate was the day we passed that bill. Bob mentioned that.

I will say for a lot of us who are here today, this is one of the saddest days in the Senate because the contribution that you have made here is one that is so unique and so singular, and it is entirely unfinished.

I don't feel sorry for you, but I feel sorry for the rest of us. I know we are counting on you--counting on you--to make sure that you continue to fight the fight you have been fighting from the day you arrived here, the days you were secretary of state all those years ago in Ohio, for the rest of your life.

Thanks, Sherrod, for your leadership and your friendship and for everything you have done for the American people.

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