During remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) spoke about the removal of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) from a DHS briefing.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00President, two days from today, June 14, is Flag Day in the United States.
00:05It's the day every year where we celebrate the flag, but it's not the piece of cloth that we celebrate.
00:11We celebrate core American values, and the most core American value is the one that we take an oath of office to,
00:19the Constitution of the United States.
00:22The Constitution includes a Bill of Rights, and one of the most important pieces of the Bill of Rights is the First Amendment
00:29that was drafted by a Virginian, James Madison.
00:32And it talks about the fact that there can't be laws or legal restrictions
00:42against the right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition government for redress of grievances.
00:55That right is not something we're allowed.
00:57That right is something we're guaranteed.
01:01My colleague and our friend, Alex Padilla, born and raised in Los Angeles, loves his hometown,
01:09an MIT-educated baseball-playing engineer,
01:13who returned to his home, who served on the Los Angeles City Council,
01:19and now serves in this body, has some very legitimate questions about why in an unprecedented way
01:29the National Guard and the United States Marines have been deployed into his city
01:35over the objections of the mayor, over the objections of the governor,
01:40in a historically unprecedented way, and in a way such as to escalate tensions in his town, rather than to reduce him.
01:49So he decided to go to a peaceful public assembly.
01:55It was a press conference.
01:56It wasn't a private meeting to which he was not allowed entrance.
02:01A press conference's purpose is to share information with the public.
02:06My colleague, Alex Padilla, who goes to Wednesday prayer breakfast with me every week,
02:12with a bipartisan group of colleagues, attended a public event,
02:16so he could ask a question about why his hometown was being besieged by Marines and National Guard
02:25over the objection of the mayor and the objection of the governor.
02:31His question was a grievance.
02:33He doesn't agree with the policies of the administration.
02:38He is guaranteed, in this document, the right to petition government for redress of grievances.
02:46As an American, this is what we are supposed to do.
02:50The framers of the Constitution that put this in the First Amendment
02:53did it to protect the rights of Alex Padilla and all of us, but they did it for another reason.
02:59They did it because they believed it would help democracy work better.
03:04That democracy works better when people can speak freely.
03:08Democracy works better when people can profess their religion,
03:12when the press can operate freely, and democracy works better.
03:16When people can gather peacefully and share their dissenting points of view.
03:21It makes our democracy work better.
03:25Make no mistake, the effort to manhandle our colleague,
03:30to push him out of the room for asking an inconvenient question,
03:34to handcuff him, is an attempt to shut him up.
03:37It's an attempt to shut everybody up if you have a dissenting view from this administration.
03:45That's why the administration has deployed the military in an unprecedented way.
03:50They want to intimidate you.
03:52They want to make you decide that although you are granted this as a right,
03:57they want to make you afraid to exercise the right.
04:00And so, as I conclude, I would just say this, on Flag Day, I would encourage Americans of all kinds,
04:10find a peaceful assembly on June 14th, on Flag Day, and attend it,
04:18and show that you are a brave and patriotic American that embraces the First Amendment to the Constitution,
04:25and you will not allow anyone to intimidate you.
04:30I was a missionary in Honduras in 1980 and 81, and it was an authoritarian society,
04:37and no one was guaranteed the right to assemble or complain.
04:43You might do it and be okay one day, the next day you might be arrested,
04:46the next day you might be disappeared or even killed.
04:50That's not who we are.
04:52We need brave, patriotic Americans to stand up just as Senator Padilla has done
04:57and insist upon their right to peacefully assemble
05:00and present whatever critiques or complaints they have about policies that they find to be objectionable.
05:07With that, I yield the floor.