Lawyers From The United States

"Reeling from twin wars, leaderless, and rudderless, America is in need of help. Our polarized political leaders have shamefully and shamelessly failed us. They have summoned our worst demons at the very moment when we needed summoned our better angels. As a consequence, America finds itself in desperate need of either a reawakening and quickening to the vision, truths, values, principles, beliefs, hopes, and dreams upon which the country was founded and that have made America the greatest nation in the world — a revival of America and the American spirit. Or, if it is to be, we are in need of a revival around a new vision, new truths, new values, new principles, new beliefs, new hopes and dreams that hopefully could once again bind our divided nation together into the more perfect union that "We the People" originally ordained and established it to be. We cannot hobble along much longer, politically paralyzed and hopelessly divided, directionless and undecided as to which revival it will be — if any at all. Where do we begin? This is the easier question. Who has the patriotic and political courage to go first? This is the harder question."

"As to the first question, we begin where the reconciliation of all broken human relationships, be they broken from war, anger, betrayal, or love, begins — by talking with each other, and listening to one another again, as human beings and fellow citizens who share the same destiny and the same belief in America and hope for her future. For years now, taking the lead from our politicians, we Americans have spoken only coarse, desensitizing, dehumanizing political vile at each other, which enables us to speak to each other without guilt or regret. For too many years now, we have spoken to each other as charlatanic political gladiators in an arena that today has become annihilative of America's future, not promising of that future."

"The Nation wept during the evening of January 6, as the Capitol police began to clear and resecure the Capitol at day's end. Finally, at 8:00 p.m. on January 6, seven hours after the siege on the Capitol had begun, Vice President Pence gaveled the Joint Session back into order with measured, understated resolve: "Today was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol. . . . Let's get back to work." January 6 was a dark day in the history of the United States, too. It was not until the next day, January 7, 2021, at 3:42 a.m. in the morning — almost fifteen hours after the Joint Session had first been gaveled into session by Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that the Vice President finally declared that Joe Biden had been elected the 46th President of the United States. On January 6, 2021, the prescribed day for choosing the American president, there was not to be a peaceful transfer of power — for the first time in the history of our Republic."

"If one of our national political parties — one of the two political guardians of our democracy — cannot agree even as to whether the violent riot and occupation of the United States Capitol, inspired by the President of the United States and carried out by his followers to prevent Congress from counting the votes for the presidency of those same United States, was reprehensible insurrection or needed, legitimate political discourse, we all can agree on nothing. Nor should we."

"By constitutional order, We the People of this great Nation confer upon our elected representatives the power that they are then, by solemn constitutional obligation, directed to wield on our behalf and on America's behalf. But today our politicians live in a different world from the rest of us, and in a different world than that ordained by the Constitution. They live in a fictional world of divided loyalties between party and country, a world of their own unfaithful making."

"Over a year and a half later, in continued defiance of our democracy, both the former president and his political party allies still maintain that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" from him, despite all evidence — all evidence now — that that is simply false. All the while, this false and reckless insistence that the former president won the 2020 presidential election has laid waste to Americans' confidence in their national elections. More alarming still is that the former president pledges that his reelection will not be "stolen" from him next time around, and his Republican Party allies and supporters obeisantly pledge the same."

"False claims that our elections have been stolen from us corrupt our democracy, as they corrupt us. To continue to insist and persist in the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is itself an affront to our democracy and to the Constitution of the United States — an affront without precedent. Those who think that because America is a republic, theft and corruption of our national elections and electoral process are not theft and corruption of our democracy are sorely mistaken. America is both a republic and a representative democracy, and therefore a sustained attack on our national elections is a fortiori an attack on our democracy, any political theory otherwise notwithstanding."

"Very few ever have the honor of counseling the President of the United States of America. That highest of honors carries with it the highest of obligations. Counsel provided to the President of the United States must be the product of not only exquisite, penetrating legal analysis but also profound, insightful legal judgment. These two combined are so far from mere technical legal competence as almost to be its polar opposite. The President and the country deserve nothing less from those who counsel the President, so consequential are the stakes for the Nation when the President acts upon the advice of his or her Counsel. Whatever else, the President of the United States did not receive such counsel during his sustained effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It is as much the former president's fault as anyone's that he did not."

"Irrespective of the merits of the legal arguments that fueled the former president's efforts to overturn that election — irrespective of them, though there were none — those arguments, and therefore those efforts, by the former president were the product of the most reckless, insidious, and calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history. From their inception, the legal arguments that underlaid the efforts to overturn the 2020 election were, in that context, little more than beguiling and frivolous, perhaps appropriate for academic classroom debate, but singularly inappropriate as counsel to the President of the United States of America in his effort to overturn the presidential election — an election he had lost fair and square and as to which there was not then, and there is not to this day, evidence of fraud. It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the President of the United States at that perilous moment in history."

"Had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States, America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis. The former president's accountability under the law for the riot on the United States Capitol on January 6 is incidental to his responsibility and accountability for his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from the American People and thereby steal America's democracy from America herself. This said, willful ignorance of law and fact is neither excuse nor defense in law. Willful ignorance, thus, is neither political nor legal excuse or defense available to the former President of the United States, his allies, and his supporters."

"On January 6, 2021, revolutionaries, not patriots, assaulted America and American democracy. The walls of all three of our institutions of democracy were scaled and breached on that appalling day. And almost two years thence, one of America's two political parties cannot even agree whether that day was good or bad, right or wrong. Worse, it cannot agree over whether January 6 was needed, or not. Needed or not. Pause for a moment and reflect on that. The former president and his party cannot decide whether the revolt at the United States Capitol to disrupt and prevent the constitutional counting of the votes for the presidency was needed, and therefore whether another revolt might be needed at a future date to accomplish that which the previous revolt failed to accomplish."

"Today's politicians believe that they never have to choose between partisan party politics and country, when in fact they are obliged by oath to choose between the two every day, and every day they defiantly refuse to choose. For today's politicians, never the twain shall meet between partisan ambition and country, and never the latter before the former, either. The politicians in today's America only sponsor partisan incitement and only traffic in the same, rather than sponsor bi-partisan reason and lead in thoughtful deliberation. They have purposely led us down the road not in the direction toward the bridging of our differences, but in the direction away from the bridging of those differences. They have proven themselves incapable of leading us. But still, all it would take to turn America around is a consensus among some number of these political leaders who possess the combined necessary moral authority and who would agree to be bound together by patriotic covenant, to stand up, step forward, and acknowledge to the American People that America is in peril. In order to end these wars that are draining the lifeblood from our country, a critical mass of our two parties' political leaders is needed, to whom the remainder would be willing to listen, at least without immediate partisan recrimination."

"I am convinced that we must reduce our overdependence on mineral revenues and broaden our tax base or risk Wyoming slipping into a death spiral destine for oblivion."

"The state of Wyoming and the governor's office do not and will not take sides in a labor dispute, because I don't believe that's the role of government."

"It's a little bit more of a challenge, I think, for women, but, if you're willing to put in the work and be committed and have a family and circle of support around you, you'll be able to do it, and thankfully, I do, so I can serve my district."

"It seems to me that some of us may have a fundamental difference in philosophy and perspective. The issue we face today is the tendency to place substantial revenues out of our reach, out of our investment strategy, and out of our future. The budget crisis is at least in part artificial and one which will be perpetuated if we do not act to change our investment strategy, continue our important savings programs and meet changing social and economic needs."

"In you deliberations on this issue I want you to keep in mind a letter I received from a 70 year-old man in Riverton. He wrote to explain that his social security check is his only source of income. His savings were spent battling the cancer which eventually took his wife's life. Last year he had to sell his car to pay his property tax. In the letter he threatens to burn his home to the ground rather than let the state take it for unpaid taxes."

"A few politicians, the editor of the Star-Tribune and his chief surrogate have exercised their vocal cords and their penmanship with great vigor. Since they are burdened by neither responsibility nor facts, they have hip-shot the issues with an energy usually reserved for the months preceding an election."

"Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our state is one of strength and promise. And that strength is based on our vast resources and the strength of our people."

"Regardless of our parties or philosophies, we have been joined by our desire to serve the people of Wyoming and bonded by the challenges of a most difficult time in our state's history."

"Let us follow the lights of change and seize this opportunity to invest in our future in a new way. I acknowledge there is some risk in the investments I ask you to make, but I am convinced as I stand before you today that the greater danger is in doing nothing or failing to invest."

"With Rahm, you get someone who is both a great strategic thinker and a great tactician. It's great to have someone who knows the Congress inside and out. There can often be major differences between the executive branch and the congressional branch, even when you're from the same party. It will certainly help in terms of getting things done."

"If I was a Democrat running in 2022, I’d be worried about turnout. I’d be looking to sound the alarm on this issue, because it’s a turnout issue for Democrats and progressives, and Josh Shapiro might be worried, with good reason, that they don’t come out"

"Today, in light of the recent controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke, [I have] introduced a bill to ensure that the Pentagon avoids supporting programs that exhibit values contrary to the basic values of the Armed Forces and the United States."

"As a person who believes in individual responsibility, I did not fear being alone; besides, I only argue with myself as head of the Republican Senate Minority!"

"A healthy economy or a healthy population are not mutually exclusive."

"I always wanted to share my story, even when I wasn’t talking about the past and didn’t tell anyone that I was undocumented. I always felt that I had this story burning inside me and it was frustrating to have it pent up in there. It was growing inside me and gnawing at my consciousness, so I think it needed to take this long for this book to come out and if I waited longer, it probably would have come out in a different form."

"I feel that the act of writing the book in itself without even submitting it for publication was transformative. It allowed me to heal because I was revisiting the past with my childhood self but also seeing it through an adult lens. And that’s essentially what you do in therapy – you re-parent yourself. What would you do if you were there with your childhood self? What would you tell that child? And in living through that process, I feel that I have healed a lot of those wounds that had stayed opened for decades. Those scars are always going to be there for sure and I will still have moments of irrational fear."

"I live in daily gratitude for everything I have now that would have been unfathomable for Chinese immigrants not so long ago. Our lives are built on the shoulders of giants. Honoring their legacy means living up to our privilege and continuing to push the movement forward. My vision for the beautiful country is this: to every new generation, more rights, more equality, more justice."

"The act of processing the memories I had suppressed for decades had freed me to see not just younger me, but the younger versions of my mother and father in their full dimensions. That in turn allowed me to honour everything we had been and had experienced—both the good and the bad."

"In books, both fiction and nonfiction, what matters is not what happens in the book but how is it is told. By virtue of living, we experience facets of the human experience. How we experience those facets and what we take away from them are both fascinating because they are uniquely ours (because there is no other person exactly like each of us on the planet, and no one who will respond exactly the same way) and because it is universally human. Thus, it does not so much matter what you write about, but how you choose to write and what messages you share. To aspiring writers: I hope you will remember that there is magic and beauty in your experiences and perspectives simply because they are yours."

"So, what I endeavored to do with my book was to speak heart-to-heart, and the childhood lens allowed me the perfect avenue to do so. My vision for my book was that it might allow readers to feel as if they were getting aboard a train, which would carry them through the terrain of my childhood—through that journey, they would be able to see new sights, yes, but also revisit some of their own experiences and familiar landscape. Through this, I hope, people might start to see that underneath the labels and political divides, none of us are all that different from each other, and that at bottom, we all want much of the same things: safety, community, and meaning."

"The growth of Asian American pride is heartening. The young generations of immigrants, Asian Americans, undocumented Americans, and Americans of color never cease to give me faith for the future. That said, new changes in the right direction do not necessarily erase previous wrongs and old hurts. Once someone has felt the acute pain of being dehumanized, that experience stays with them. It does not disappear overnight, nor do the barriers that are built into the foundation of our society. To achieve real, lasting progress, we must remember that."

"She’s a total creature of the Washington swamp but much worse than that and a tool of a corrupt establishment, the likes of which we’ve never seen. The fake news media loves her."

"This is your precious chance to dump the horrific RINO Senator Lisa Murkowski, who’s worse than a Democrat. She’s worse than a Democrat."

"For me, Qian represents the self and the precocious, mischievous child who went from knowing only love and acceptance to living in daily shame and hunger. And Julie represents the pre-teen, teen, and woman who was determined to survive no matter the cost, even if it meant hiding or obliterating her origin story and her authentic self. Both of these names are integral parts of me, and I can no more choose between them than I can between my left and right legs."

"I will not be endorsing, under any circumstances, the failed candidate from the great State of Alaska, Lisa Murkowski. She represents her state badly and her country even worse. I do not know where other people will be next year, but I know where I will be — in Alaska campaigning against a disloyal and very bad Senator."

"It's important for Lisa to be reelected. She's one of the few sort of moderates in the middle of the Senate."

"Knowles, 61, and Murkowski, 47, are two of the biggest political names in Alaska. Knowles served as mayor of Anchorage for six years in the 1980s and was governor from 1995 to 2003. Murkowski served in the Legislature for four years before being appointed by her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski, to the Senate seat he vacated when he was elected governor in 2002."

"Alaska voters should all see the clear and undeniable fact that Lisa Murkowski is working hard to protect women’s health care. Preserving the right to choose will take bipartisan action and leadership. Senator Murkowski has a proven track record of effectiveness and the seniority to work with her colleagues to reverse today’s dangerous precedent."

"For a child who found herself transported overnight to other side of the world, where she knew no one other than her parents, books were my salvation."

"In this case, though, Collins chose not to listen to a survivor—or, more exactly, she found reasons not to listen. Murkowski felt differently. After her vote on Friday morning, she told reporters that she was on her way back to her office to work on a floor statement about her decision. Last month, a reporter asked Murkowski if she had ever had a #MeToo moment. Murkowski answered yes, but did not elaborate."

"I think we need a rational, clear-headed, eyes-wide-open approach to energy and mineral development. We don't want to go backward on energy, and we can't be caught flatfooted on minerals. We have the resources. We have the highest labor standards in the world and the highest environmental standards in the world. Our energy workers and our miners will hold themselves to those standards. Instead of importing more from places like Russia and China, we need to free ourselves from them to the extent that we can establish ourselves as this global alternative. I have kind of taken that--actually, it is not something new. In the beginning of the 116th Congress, I prepared a white paper. We called it "The American and Global"--well, what we called it was a pretty cool title. It is a great little publication that should have gotten more notice, but like a good wine, it comes with time: "With Powers So Disposed, America and the Global Strategic Energy Competition." I outline in this a strategic energy initiative designed to sharpen and direct our tools of energy related to economic statecraft and to enhance the geopolitical position of the country."

"From that or as a jump-off from that, I am introducing my Strategic Energy and Minerals Initiative Act, which we call the SEMI Act. This legislation will enable U.S. companies to better compete in global markets, and it promotes the responsible domestic production of our oil, gas, and minerals. I think these are initiatives that are good for us to be looking critically at, again, as we move forward with this administration's priorities on not only how we can build infrastructure--build it better, build it cleaner, build it with a renewable future--but we have to recognize that when we build things, we need base elements. Know that Alaska is ready, willing, and able to play a role on all of these fronts. We have tremendous stores of resources, but equal to those tremendous stores of resources is the responsibility that I believe Alaskans feel to be good stewards as we access those resources to allow for a level of sustainability, whether it is with our fisheries or whether it is with the subsistence, the livelihoods of those who rely on the food and animals on the land. We believe that we can contribute to our national security and our global competitiveness, while at the same time working to protect the environment, but what we need is a chance to be able to do that."

"None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awestruck by the industry's four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," she told the Senate energy committee."

"I am a big fan of Canada. They are our neighbor, but if we are going to be adding Canada as a 51st State to help us with our minerals and access to minerals, let's not forget the 49th State, because Alaska has good, strong resources. Where we seem to have problems is in gaining access, whether it is in the permitting process or just the ability to move forward with some of our mineral potential. Again, I am not suggesting that we shouldn't be looking to our friends to build these alliances, particularly with our neighbors directly to the north and to the south. This is good. I am not suggesting: Let's not be talking to Canada. That is an important part of how we really work to build these secure supply chains. All I am suggesting is that we here in America need to also look to the strength of our resource assets."

"The least that we can do here at home is to support our own responsible production from States like Alaska, so that we have our supply--our own supply-and can provide a diversified commercial alternative. Moving from oil and gas briefly here, Alaska is also ready to help in another increasingly crucial area and that is with mineral development. Our history of tectonic events has created a geological environment that fosters deposits of a wide variety of minerals that are critical to both our current and our future economies. Back in 2018, the Department of the Interior designated 35 "critical" minerals based on their importance to our economy and security, as well as their susceptibility to supply and disruption. These minerals are essential for everything. They help us with our advanced missile systems, solar panels, batteries for electric vehicles, your cell phones--everything. Our military is certainly aware of this. They recognize the vulnerable position that we are in. Our manufacturers recognize the vulnerability. These are products that we use on a daily basis."

"Right now, the United States is import-reliant on 31 of the 35 minerals designated as "critical." We have relatively no domestic production. We rely completely on imports to meet our demand for 14 of these. And, of course, most of where we are importing these materials are from China. That is not OK. That shouldn't be acceptable to us. I think we all should agree on the need to rebuild our domestic mineral supply chains. There has been good, positive conversation about what we can do. I feel this is one of those areas that is a growing vulnerability. It used to be that we would talk about our vulnerability on the Middle East for our oil, and then policies changed and we reduced our reliance on that. That is why I am anxious. I am concerned about what I am seeing translate going forward. But I think we need to be, again, with eyes wide open when it comes to our mineral dependence and our reliance on these important materials for what we need to be a strong nation. I think this is a pressing and long-term security threat that we face in this country. We have seen it play out in light of the COVID pandemic. We have seen the vulnerability of international supply chains. I thought it was great. It was so important that the administration really focused in on this. The new administration is focusing on this in a good way, and I appreciate that."

"Together, these two relatively centrist Republicans controlled the fate of Kavanaugh’s nomination—which had looked assured until a few weeks ago, when several women came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. (Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.) How did these two lawmakers, who have at times been treated as a pair on high-stakes votes, reach contrary ends?"

"When President Biden released the first part of his infrastructure proposal, focusing on international domestic supply chains, he has one section there about electric vehicles. In the White House fact sheet, it says the plan "will enable automakers to spur domestic supply chains from raw materials to parts, retool factories to compete globally, and support American workers to make batteries and EVs." This is the type of policy that we should all want to get behind, broadened out to every industry, not just to a select few. But the question here, though, is whether the administration is willing to accept what is going to be necessary in order to achieve this goal to have these secure supply chains, especially when it comes to expanding our domestic supply of raw materials. It is going to require approval of mining projects, and that has been a challenge for us. That has been a challenge for us."