Members Of The United States Senate

"Before developing a plan to issue bonds to pay for the Interstate System, General Lucius D. Clay might have been better off if he had taken a close look at a key Member of Congress, Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia. If General Clay had done so, the financing mechanism of the Administration's plan probably would have been different. In the 1954 congressional elections, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Senator Byrd was the new Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which would be responsible for the revenue portion of any legislation emerging from the Senate authorizing the proposed program. As the White House might have predicted, Byrd could be counted on to oppose the Clay Committee's financial proposal. A lifelong highway booster, Senator Byrd was also a lifelong pay-as-you-go man with a nearly pathological hatred of debt, whether personal or public."

"Senator Byrd's final year in Congress would be 1965. His final battle was against the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had dramatized the issue by leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest exclusion of blacks from voting. President Johnson used the momentum to seek immediate passage of a bill that would require Federal intervention in States that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to exclude black voters. Byrd considered the bill "vicious" and "iniquitous in effect and contemptible in design." In August, over his protests, the bill was enacted."

"Harry Byrd and his organizations were rich and valuable parts of any southern uniqueness of history and humanity. Byrd was born of the somber side of southern history. His organization, notwithstanding its faults, was truly coined from the mint of its time. If it was parsimonious, it emerged from a period when Virginia had little of which to give. If it feared deficits, it remembered the state's staggering Reconstruction debts. If it was oligarchic, it was so by reason of long inheritance. If it was regionally oriented, it bore still the scarred tissue of the Civil War. If it was rurally flavored, it respected the power of the farmer's franchise and the state's agrarian heritage. If it was slow- too slow- to change, Virginia had long been changeless."

"In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code. The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools. The federal courts ruled the closures and the vouchers unconstitutional, but Harry Byrd would not give up. He tried to persuade Governor Almond to call out the National Guard. One unverified account of the meeting suggests Byrd ordered Almond to shoot children if necessary. Almond allegedly replied, "I'll do it, Harry, if you put it in writing." White supremacists rarely give up their power without a fight. Almond finally relented, and token integration began peacefully in February 1959."

"HARRY FLOOD BYRD was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia. He attended Shenandoah Valley Academy in Winchester, Virginia, after which he became manager of the Winchester Evening Star in 1902 and later its owner and publisher. He also established the Martinsburg Evening Journal in 1907 and became publisher of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record in 1923. And while involved in journalism, he became of the largest apple growers east of the Mississippi River. He served in the Virginia State Senate from 1916 to 1925 and as Virginia Fuel Commissioner in 1918. Prior to becoming governor, he was elected chairman of the Democratic State Committee in 1921, following the death of his uncle Hal Flood. During his gubernatorial administration, lynching was made a state crime, subjecting all participants to charges of murder. In addition, the “short ballot” was adopted, limiting the list of individually elected Virginia executive branch officials to governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. The executive branch was reorganized through the abolishment of more than thirty bureaus and the merger of all activities of state government under twelve departments. And counties were given the sole right to tax land while the state was given the sole right to tax intangible property. Byrd was appointed to a vacancy in the U.S. Senate in 1933, retaining the seat through election until 1965."

"Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party."

"A talented man, Byrd chose to stand outside the broad currents of his time and to set his face against the future... He began as a force and ended as an anachronism."

"When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it overturned one aspect of the carefully constructed system of the racial police state in the South. Virginia did not accept the Supreme Court's decision. Initially, the Virginia governor Lindsay Almond counseled moderation, but the U.S. senator Harry Byrd, who controlled Virginia politics with an iron fist, reacted with fury when he heard Almond would acquiesce to the highest court in the land. "The top blew off the U.S. Capitol," Almond recalled. Byrd announced the state's strategy in 1956: "If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South." Almond was soon on board, declaring, "We will oppose with every facility at our command, and with every ounce of our energy, the attempt being made to mix the white and Negro races in our classrooms." Virginia followed that pronouncement with laws to back up its position, ordering schools to shutter rather than integrate."

"Harry Flood Byrd (1887-1966) was the most powerful political leader in twentieth- century Virginia. He served as governor from 1926 to 1930 and as a United States senator from 1933 to 1965. Byrd's political organization and pay-as-you-go philosophy kept taxes and public spending low in order to make Virginia attractive to business and industrial investors, but as a consequence road construction and support for public education and public health programs remained below national standards. For three decades Byrd's political allies dominated politics in the state. The Byrd organization collapsed following his death and the disastrous attempt by means of Massive Resistance to obstruct federal court orders in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate the state's public schools."

"There are those who end life feeling the future will nourish their cause. There are those also whose causes pass with themselves. Harry Byrd's cause belonged to the latter category. In the nation a more positive role for federal government was fast becoming an American political axiom; likewise, Harry Byrd's Virginia would soon seem but yesteryear's quaint and curious memento. But Byrd's personal cause- his honesty, courtesy, in short, his humanity- was not tied to time. The greatest men have often urged dated or debatable specifics. George Washington urged against foreign alliances; Thomas Jefferson dreamed of an agrarian utopia; Woodrow Wilson warred against bigness in American life; Robert E. Lee struggled valiantly for a divided nation. History values men as much for what they are for as for what they espouse. Let not its view of balanced budgets determine its judgment of Harry Byrd."

"Byrd interested himself in politics early, and he became a state senator and then in 1926 governor of Virginia. He is an able man (in industriousness and abstract competence he resembles Taft of Ohio) and his record as governor was in several aspects notable. He fought the gasoline and telephone companies, to drive rates down and thus save the public money; he put through an admirable antilynching bill, the first such bill in the South, making any member of a lynch mob subject to state authority and indictment on a charge of murder. As a result Virginia has not had a lynching for twenty years. Roosevelt liked Byrd at this time and wanted him in the federal Senate; as a result, when Claude A. Swanson was elevated to FDR's cabinet in 1933, Byrd got his Senate seat. He has been a senator ever since. He began to break with Roosevelt when the New Deal got underway, and within a few years had become the most important and powerful of all his enemies among Senate Democrats. For session after session he intransigently bored away at Roosevelt budgets, Roosevelt appropriations, Roosevelt administrative agencies. Yet, a gentleman, he never attacked FDR blatantly. His good manners made him the more dangerous an antagonist. He could not be dismissed as a demagogue or spiteful partisan. At the 1944 Democratic convention, he got eighty-nine votes for the presidential nomination; he was- and still is- the obvious candidate and hero of the Bourbon South that is Democrat in name only. He voted against the party's leadership on 61 percent of all roll calls in sixteen months in 1945-6."

"Senator Harry F. Byrd incarnates the cavalier-First-Family-of-Virginia tradition, except in one important particular. The Byrd family has a heredity like that of a Middle Europe princeling; indeed, for some generations, the ancestral estate at Westover resembled nothing so much as, say, an estate like that of the Potockis' outside Warsaw. Byrd's initial ancestor, William Byrd I, arrived in Virginia in 1674, and he and his son, William Byrd II, were powerful in pre-Revolutionary characters. But early in the nineteenth century the family began to disintegrate. The present Byrd, lacking nothing in aristocratic heritage, did lack something that usually attends an aristocratic heritage- money. The family, grown poor, had scattered; Byrd's father was Texas born, and he himself was born in West Virginia. Yet always the Byrds were tightly enmeshed in the old tradition. At the age of fifteen, young Byrd took over a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, that for a long time had been unable to make ends meet and put it on its feet. He never had opportunity to go to high school or college. Byrd made the newspaper a successful property, and branched out in other fields; he is a very wealthy man today, and his Shenandoah Valley home, Rosemont, near Berryville, is a Virginia showplace. His fortune derives mostly out of apples. Virginia as a whole is the fourth apple-growing state in the union, and Byrd himself, with 200,000 trees and a million bushel a year crop, is believed to control about 1 percent of all American production. The outline of Byrd's career, especially in its motivations, is strikingly like that of his friend in the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg. Vandenberg also struggled for a living as a young man, as we know, and a consequent impulse toward security has dominated his behavior ever since. In Byrd's life story we may similarly find a characteristic that distinguishes him above anything else- his extreme obsessive hatred of debt, his dogged fixation on economy. He had to struggle for bitter years to get a family property out of debt. Both the United States Senate and the commonwealth of Virginia have seen the results of this transmuted into other spheres."

"The Byrd machine is a highly efficient organization; it runs the Commonwealth as effectively as Pendergast ever ran Kansas City or Kelly-Nash Chicago, though with much less noise. In fact, from the point of view of its adhesive power in every Democratic county, its control over practically every office, no matter how minor, it is quite possibly the single most powerful machine surviving in the whole United States. Virginia, I heard it said, is the only "aviary" in the country; it is a cage the netting of which, though almost invisible to outsiders, is extremely close spun; the commonwealth is, so a friend in North Carolina told me- the remark is somewhat bitter- not only the cradle of American democracy, but its "grave." Byrd has never forgtten his Virginia interests. He pays as intimate and inflexible attention to state affairs as to federal. The machine works something like this. Its major instruments are, as always, jobs and patronage, plus the Virginia poll tax. First, through the Democratic National Committee, Byrd controls federal patronage. Next, he pretty well decides the choice not merely of governor, who in Virginia today cannot be other than a Byrd man, in turn controls the appointment of some thousands of state employees, and circuit court judges are chosen- for substantial eight-year terms- by the legislature; these in turn appoint the school trustees, county electoral boards, and trial justices. In each county there is a fixed ring of six or seven machine men. Some county officers like sheriff and tax assessor are elected but their salaries and expense allotments are, within limits, established by the State Compensation Board, also appointed by the governor under Byrd's control. The pattern makes a full interlocking circle. Nothing could be neater or more complete."

"Finally, on January 16, 1928, Byrd asked the Virginia General Assembly to declare lynching “a specific State offense” that would allow the state attorney general to prosecute lynchings in addition to local authorities; to force counties or cities in which a lynching occurred to pay $2,500 to the lawful heirs of the person lynched; and to authorize the governor to spend whatever money considered necessary and appropriate to bring to justice members of a mob. Carefully guarding himself against charges of violating local authority, Byrd added that “it should be made clear that declaring lynching as a specific State offense does not take away the constitutional rights of accused citizens for trial in localities where the crime was committed.” The governor’s caveat limited the likelihood that white Virginians would be convicted of lynching; friends and neighbors rarely recognized guilt in such cases. On February 3, state senators James Barron of Norfolk and Cecil Connor of Leesburg introduced an antilynching measure. Two weeks later, the state senate passed the bill by a vote of 32 to 0 with eight abstentions. Although grateful that the Senate had taken a step toward “outlawing this crowning infamy of the century,” the Richmond Planet, a black newspaper, lamented that the legislature had “extracted the teeth” from Byrd’s original proposal by removing the monetary penalty provision. On March 1, the House of Delegates concurred with the Senate’s version by a margin of 74 to 5; a noticeable twenty-one delegates abstained. On March 14, 1928, Byrd signed into law the nation’s strictest antilynching measure and the first that directly termed lynching a state crime. No white person was ever convicted under the statute for committing crimes against an African American. Instead, Virginia’s landmark antilynching law was used only to punish whites for crimes against other whites."

"Byrd evinced no particular proclivity to endorse a state antilynching law in the wake of Raymond Bird’s death. But when a lynch mob struck in Virginia for the third year in a row, Jaffé pushed the hesitant governor to act. In the early morning hours of November 30, 1927, a Wise County mob, estimated at three hundred to four hundred people, lynched Leonard Woods on a platform that straddled the Virginia-Kentucky border. For days and weeks, authorities in both states quibbled over whether to charge the lynching to Kentucky or Virginia. Virginia’s governor condemned the act, but appeared satisfied that “Virginia has no legal jurisdiction.” In a private letter to Byrd, Jaffé pleaded with him to “find the means of forcing a showdown on this outrage.” Byrd replied that he would like to discuss the matter with Jaffé, but expressed reservations about such a law’s compatibility with the state constitution. Sensing reluctance on the part of the governor, Jaffé used his editorial page to condemn the inaction of local authorities and to urge publicly that Byrd take action. Jaffé argued that “lynching goes unpunished in Virginia because, deny it as one will, it commands a certain social sanction.” Jaffé explained that the eradication of mob violence mandated laws that punished not only the principal participants, but also all persons who “advise, encourage or promote” lynching. The Norfolk editor urged the commonwealth to strip mob members of the right to vote and hold office, and argued for strict fines and punishments in addition to those for murder. “In short,” concluded Jaffé, “lynching must be recognized as a State cancer, requiring direct State action. It must be rid of its social cachet and stamped with the State’s curse.”"

"Incontestably what runs Virginia is the Byrd machine, the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America. A real machine it is, though Senator Harry Flood Byrd himself faced more opposition in 1946 than at any time in his long, suave, and distinguished public career."

"Byrd entered the Senate at a time when his America of farms and small towns, formerly insulated from the shocks of world affairs and modernization, was dying. Rather than adjust to the revolutionary changes that occurred over the course of his lifetime, he chose to contest their inroads, becoming a cipher whose predictable negativism and welfare legislation revealed a parochialism that bordered on meanness and miserliness. Driven by a desire to preserve the old order, Byrd spent over thirty years fighting ever-increasing federal bureaucracies and budgets, protecting states' rights from intrusions by Washington, and defending racial segregation. Focusing attention on waste in government and pressing for reductions in federal spending, he won some minor skirmishes, but he lost most of the battles. His political philosophy of unregulated individualism and limited government was no longer appropriate for the modern world. Much of his personal value system remained sound- hard work, thrift, initiative, and responsibility- but the demands of the highly technological, mass consumer, global society called for modifications to this individualistic ethic through community planning, resource management, public assistance for the dependent, aid to education, and international commitments. Without a political opposition that might have forced him to reevaluate his position, Byrd could not overcome the limitations of his upbringing and his experience. He remained caught in the time warp of the early twentieth century when the nation was still closely tied to the libertarian principles of the old yeomanry."

"If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance to this order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South."

"I favor a strong military but, if wartime spending is to be made a part of our budget in peacetime, and continued for many years, our system simply will not stand it."

"At the dedication of the Shenandoah National Park [July 3, 1936], President Roosevelt, [Secretary of the Interior] Harold L. Ickes, and I were riding together from Panorama to Big Meadows. I suggested to Mr. Roosevelt that it would be a fine idea to connect the two parks, Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, by extending the Skyline Drive. He quickly agreed that it was an excellent idea but stated that we must begin up in New England. The President then said to me, "You and Ickes get together for the right-of-way." The New England governors were contacted but were not interested. In the meanwhile I was made chairman of the right-of-way commission. And that is how it got started."

"There are gentle men in whom gentility finally destroys whatever of iron there was in their souls. There are iron men in whom the iron corroded whatever gentility they possessed. There are men—not many to be sure—in whom the gentility and the iron were preserved in proper balance, each of these attributes to be summoned up as the occasion requires. Such a man was Harry Byrd."

"I construe my election as a mandate to me as a businessman to institute the best methods of efficiency and economy in State affairs, so that the people may obtain in the public service a dollar's value for every dollar spent. Useless offices must be abolished, duplicated services must be consolidated, and the manifold activities of the State systematized and directed with the efficiency of a great business corporation."

"Nevertheless, there was merit in the manner of the man and the portent of his prognostications. His major contribution as a senator was his repeated warning about the dangers of excessive federal spending, a warning that had more substance twenty years after his retirement than it did during the prosperous post-World War II years. There are limits to what government can accomplish, dangers in long-term unbalanced budgets, and liabilities in dependence on the welfare state- for rich and poor alike. Byrd's flaw was that he did not translate these forebodings into imaginative solutions to the problems of modern society but instead fell back on old clichés and a narrow individualistic ethic that was no longer serviceable, a sterile legacy to show for thirty years of service. Harry Byrd's retirement was short-lived. A few months later, as his condition deteriorated, he was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor. He spent his remaining days at Rosemont, mostly bedridden, but not without having one last small impact on Virginia politics. On the eve of his son's reelection bid, he lapsed into a coma, and out of respect for him, the campaign was halted. Days later, Harry Jr. won a narrow victory over Armistead Boothe in the Democratic primary, but Willis Robertson and Howard Smith went down to defeat. The Old Guard had passed. On October 20, 1966, Harry Flood Byrd died in the same room where his wife had died two years earlier. He was buried next to her on a hill overlooking Winchester and the Valley and mountains he loved so much."

"In an 2020 op-ed entitled, “We Need Hot Jews Like Jon Ossoff in the Senate,” Jewish feminist publication Alma noted that while Ossoff is married to Alisha Kramer, MD, a resident at Emory School of Medicine, “if you are elected to the Senate, you can be all of Jewish America’s husband.”... Like most internet-boyfriend-style crushes, the Ossoff admiration transcends mere good hair, encompassing his young-professor aura. Ossoff cites the late civil rights icon Representative John Lewis, for whom he interned, as a mentor."

"While pandemic relief was at the top of Ossoff’s list, he rattled off an array of other issues Democrats would be able to tackle as well with control of the Senate: raising the minimum wage, building new health clinics, re-opening hospitals that have closed, Civil Rights legislation to reform the justice system and policing, improving public schools, and expanding Pell Grants to make college more affordable."

"Ossoff said he’s feeling especially encouraged by Democrats’ turnout operation, which included making more than 1.5. million phone calls per day and knocking on tens, and in some cases, more than 100,000 doors every day in the last week. Ossoff has also hired thousands of young mobilizers to knock on doors and turn out voters. And he called the large crowds he’s gotten in small towns all across the state proof that if Democrats compete in rural Georgia, their ideas can win the day."

"In 2017 I remember whispering to myself... “He’s Jewish, accomplished, and single!?” Well, to all the Jewish mothers across the nation desperately searching for an eligible bachelor for their daughters, he tied the knot with his (Jewish) girlfriend of 12 years later that year. There were claims by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that he was “shamed” into marrying his girlfriend for an electoral boost. Members of the tribe… we know this is not true. Sometimes it just takes time for a nice Jewish man and a nice Jewish woman to take the plunge..."

"I will work in the U.S. Senate to support a robust public health response so that we can defeat this virus, putting Georgia’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the lead, trusting medical expertise, doctors, and scientists to bring the tools to bear, the technology to bear, the ingenuity to bear, and the resources to bear necessary to stop the spread of this virus to defeat it and to get our daily lives back — and to rush direct economic relief to people who need help right now."

"Doorknock for Warnock vote your Ossoff"

"Democrat Jon Ossoff claimed victory over Republican incumbent David Perdue in his Senate race. He would become the second Jewish candidate to win a statewide race in modern Georgia -- and the youngest since Joe Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972."

"People are sick of fake politicians who have no core and say one thing in private and another in public, or are just obviously doing anything right before an election. My sense is that voters of all ideological persuasions prefer candidates who are just real about what they believe and what they want to do, even if it’s not necessarily the precise policy platform that you agree with. You want someone who’s wearing their values on their sleeve and not B.S.’ing*. (Ossoff used more colorful language, but this is a family newspaper.)"

"My friend John Lewis is surely smiling down on his beloved Georgia this morning, as people across the state carried forward the baton that he and so many others passed down to them. I want to congratulate Reverend Raphael Warnock on his election as Georgia’s next U.S. Senator — and while we're still waiting on final results in the other runoff, is clear that last night’s showing... is a testament to the power of the tireless and often unheralded work of grassroots organizing..."

"The last year has really brought home that it is truly a matter of life and death. The tangible, human stakes, the real-life consequences when we are led by fools, and when we are led by people who are more concerned with their own enrichment than they are with the financial well-being of the families that pay their salary. We can get direct financial relief to people fast, and I know that this incoming administration wants to do it. But if we don’t win these Senate races, they’re gonna block help for the people because they’re not going to want to relieve suffering. If the Republicans hold the Senate, they’re gonna block it... Every vote will count, every vote will matter, and we saw in November how every vote mattered. And the second is, there will be a big difference in your daily life depending on the outcome here."

"Georgia voters sent the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church to the U.S. Senate. The Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior shepherd of the same congregation once led by Martin Luther King Jr., will become the first elected Black Democratic senator – not just from Georgia, but from the entire South. Without stepping outside his campaign headquarters, Warnock this morning was making the rounds on morning news shows."

"Verlene Warnock spent her summers picking cotton and tobacco as a teen in Waycross, Georgia, in the 1950s before becoming a pastor. "Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator," [Raphael] Warnock said... Her story was not uncommon. In the Jim Crow South, many poor Black people built savings by working in the fields because it was almost impossible for them to own land... At 82, Verlene Warnock still preaches at Bible and Prayer Ministries, her church in Savannah. And her son, the 11th of 12 children, is going to Congress."

"Raphael Warnock’s victory Tuesday night is historic, heralding a litany of firsts. In a Senate that remains almost solely the province of white men, he'll be the first Black Democrat from Georgia, the first Black Democrat from the South, the first Black pastor and only the second Black senator ever elected from a state below the Mason-Dixon line since Reconstruction... Warnock’s win... negates the longstanding, quietly kept idea that Black candidates don’t stand a chance running for the Senate in the South... Just seven African Americans have ever been elected to the Senate. Warnock will be the eighth. And though it was the New South that propelled Warnock into office, he preaches — and campaigns — from the old school, prophetic tradition, which criticizes America’s greatest societal ills. On the campaign trail, it was hard to separate the preacher from the politician. His stump speeches mirrored his sermons, interspersing calls for Medicaid expansion and criminal justice reform with allusions to scripture. Like Barack Obama, Warnock downplayed race on the campaign trail, running on a platform that appealed to a wide swath of the electorate. In addition to Black voters, Asian Americans and Latinos supported him and Jon Ossoff in droves during both the November and January elections. And he made a concerted effort to target rural and first-time voters, having already engaged the groups extensively as chair of the New Georgia Project, a position he held from 2017 until 2020."

"We need to have perspectives in candidates that reflect the perspectives of a younger generation... Young people have demands and unmet needs. One thing I want to do is say that we can make change and enact legislation that will help. Investment in clean energy, environmental action, real criminal justice reform, and college debt reform are issues that matter to millennials but get little attention in a Senate dominated by boomers and members of the Greatest Generation."

"Democrat Jon Ossoff has a slim lead in his runoff against Republican Senator David Perdue. If Ossoff wins his race, the Senate will be split 50-50, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote, giving Democrats more power to pass President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative agenda."

"I want to say thank you. And I want to say thank you to my mother, who is here tonight. You’ll see her in a little while. But she grew up in the 1950s, in Waycross, Georgia, picking somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco. But tonight she helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator."

"In this moment in American history, Washington has a choice to make. In fact, all of us have a choice to make. Will we continue to divide, distract and dishonor one another, or will we love our neighbors as we love ourselves? Will we play political games while real people suffer, or will we win righteous fights together, standing shoulder to shoulder, for the good of Georgia, for the good of our country? Will we seek to destroy one another as enemies or heed the call towards the common good, building together what Dr. King called the “beloved community”? And so, to everyone out there struggling today, whether you voted for me or not, know this: I hear you. I see you. And every day I’m in the United States Senate, I will fight for you. I will fight for your family."

"I need my neighbor's children to be okay so that my children will be okay. I need all of my neighbor's children to be okay; poor, inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia; I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine, I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay! Because we are all God's children! And so let's stand together, let's work together, let's organize together, let's pray together, let's stand together, let's heal the land! God bless you! Keep the faith!"

"Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator."

"I talked about how I intend to represent them, and my opponent was focused on how she would represent her own interest. And I think the folks heard that loud and clear. We’re dealing with folks that are facing eviction. People have been waiting for months for relief, and they saw politicians play the same old games last week. We should have already passed this $2,000 stimulus check, and I can’t wait to get to work."

"We were told that we couldn’t win this election, but tonight we proved that with hope, hard work and the people by our side, anything is possible. May my story be an inspiration to some young person who is trying to grasp and grab hold of the American dream. And so, Georgia, I am honored by the faith that you have shown in me. And I promise you this tonight: I am going to the Senate to work for all of Georgia, no matter who you cast your vote for in this election."

"Doorknock for Warnock vote your Ossoff"

"The Senate... suffers from a rapidly aging body of legislators. With an average age of 63 and five octogenarian... it’s no secret that the Senate is in need of younger blood. And on Tuesday evening, Jon Ossoff, at a spiffy 33 (he’s got six more years to make Fortune’s 40 under 40), provided just that. The former congressional staffer and investigative journalist will break through the wall of senior citizens to become the youngest member of the legislative body... Throughout his campaign, Ossoff touted his youth as one of his “greatest strengths.” Young people, he said, could easily make up the largest voting bloc and swing elections consistently if they were inspired to come out to the polls. Currently, the Senate has no millennial representation, despite being America’s largest generation."

"Senator-elect Warnock has actually been a part of the same movement that has helped to catapult him to the U.S. Senate as the prior board chair for the New Georgia Project, through work that he’s done through the Ebenezer Baptist Church around public health or through ending mass incarceration back in June of 2019. He was a part of a group of multifaith leaders who held an ending mass incarceration conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church. And so, we saw imams, we saw Jewish faith leaders, we saw rabbis, we saw preachers and pastors from across the South and across the country, come together to address these very critical issues. So, that’s the type of convener he’s already been. And that’s what has resonated with folks on the ground who are doing the work, because they’ve worked alongside him."

"We may be the first generation that instead of sacrificing for our kids, we’re sacrificing their future with an inheritance of debt."

"I’m dedicated to taking steps to ensure that men and women of color can feel safe and secure in America as we work towards justice and equality for all. Though our country has made significant strides in ensuring justice for all, recent events have reminded us all of the progress we must continue to work towards."

"We've seen what Big Government looks like. No one would have thought that the IRS would turn against the American people, and yet here we are. We must always be vigilant and guarded against the overreach of power."