Alex Padilla
Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, 2 days from today, June 14, is Flag Day in the United States. It is the day every year where we celebrate the flag, but it is not the piece of cloth that we celebrate; we celebrate core American values. And the most core American value is the one that we take an oath of office to, the Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution includes a Bill of Rights, and one of the most important pieces of the Bill of Rights is the First Amendment. It was drafted by Virginian James Madison, and it talks about the fact that there can't be laws or legal restrictions against the right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition government for redress of grievances.
That right is not something we are allowed. That right is something we are guaranteed.
My colleague and our friend Alex Padilla, born and raised in Los Angeles, loves his hometown--an MIT-educated, baseball-playing engineer who returned to his home, who served on the Los Angeles City Council and now serves in this body--has some very legitimate questions about why, in an unprecedented way, the National Guard and the U.S. Marines have been deployed into his city, over the objections of the mayor, over the objections of the Governor, in a historically unprecedented way and in a way such as to escalate tensions in his town rather than to reduce them.
So he decided to go to a peaceful public assembly. It was a press conference. It wasn't a private meeting to which he was not allowed entrance. A press conference's purpose is to share information with the public.
My colleague Alex Padilla, who goes to Wednesday prayer breakfast with me every week with a bipartisan group of colleagues, attended a public event so he could ask a question about why his hometown was being besieged by the Marines and National Guard over the objection of the mayor and the objection of the Governor.
His question was a grievance. He doesn't agree with the policies of the administration. He is guaranteed in this document the right to petition government for redress of grievances as an American, which is what we are supposed to do.
The Framers of the Constitution who put this in the First Amendment did it to protect the rights of Alex Padilla and all of us, but they did it for another reason. They did it because they believed it would help democracy work better, that democracy works better when people can speak freely. Democracy works better when people can profess their religion, when the press can operate freely. And democracy works better when people can gather peacefully and share their dissenting points of view. It makes our democracy work better.
Make no mistake, the effort to manhandle our colleague to push him out of the room for asking an inconvenient question, to handcuff him, is an attempt to shut him up. It is an attempt to shut everybody up if you have a dissenting view from this administration. That is why the administration has deployed the military in an unprecedented way. They want to intimidate you.
They want to make you decide that although you were granted this as a right, they want to make you afraid to exercise the right. As I conclude, I would just say this: On Flag Day, I would encourage Americans of all kinds, find a peaceful assembly on June 14--on Flag Day--and attend it and show that you are a brave and patriotic American that embraces the First Amendment to the Constitution, and you will not allow anyone to intimidate you.
I was a missionary in Honduras in 1980 and 1981, and it was an authoritarian society. And no one was guaranteed the right to assemble or complain. You might do it and be OK one day; the next day you might be arrested; the next day you might be disappeared or even killed.
That is not who we are. We need brave, patriotic Americans to stand up, just as Senator Padilla has done, and insist upon their right to peacefully assemble and present whatever critiques or complaints they have about policies that they find to be objectionable.
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