Though I often disagree with Republicans, I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats.
Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That's what Congress has come to.
We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.
People who vote against this today are voting against me and I will not forget.
My Democratic colleagues should not forget that President Obama's Supreme Court nominees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were both given up or down votes by Republicans.
It is uncomfortable seeing how very divisive politics has become.
For a while under Donald Trump, it was possible to believe that we could go back to a more functional, less rancorous time. This desire was expressed most eloquently at John McCain's funeral services.
The political scenario has gotten so divisive - not only in Washington, D.C., but across the country, too.
Republicans and Democrats spend so much time fighting and then they're all aghast, you know, and so it's just not the way we ought to be. The coarseness is not acceptable.
We've gotten to the point now where Republicans and Democrats have nothing in common besides being members of the 'caustic caucus,' and we can't get anything done.
Hatred plays the same part in government as acid in chemistry.
I rise today with no small measure of regret, regret because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics, regret because of the indecency of our discourse.
