Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta considered canceling a Tuesday morning speech calling for “civility” and “bipartisan leadership” in Washington after the shooting in Tucson, but decided it was “imperative to give it.”
Kerry called the shooting an “assault on our democracy itself.”
“Many observers have already reduced this tragedy to simple questions of whether overheated rhetoric is to blame, or one partisan group or another. And surely today many pundits and politicians are measuring their words a little more carefully and thinking a little more about what they’re saying,” Kerry said. “But in the weeks and months ahead, the real issue we need to confront isn’t just what role divisive political rhetoric may have played on Saturday – but it’s the violence divisive, overly simplistic dialogue does to our democracy every day.”
Despite his calls for bipartisanship, Kerry did not name a single issue on which he agrees with Republicans, and his staff did not immediately return The Daily Caller’s request for one.
“It’s no secret that I’m a convinced Democrat. And I know it’s better to be in the majority than in the minority. And I don’t want anyone to come to the Senate, check their beliefs at the door, and ‘go Washington,’” Kerry said. “Neither did the Founding Fathers. And certainly no one’s elected to the Senate promising to join an exclusive club — or to forget where they came from. But the truth is some of the most fiercely independent, plain-talking, direct and determined partisans I’ve ever known in the Senate have also been the ones who tackled the toughest issues, finding common ground with people they disagreed with on damn near everything else.”
Kerry called for an end to partisan “gridlock” in Washington. He denounced Republicans’ recent use of filibuster in the Senate, even though he said he’s used it for things he thought were important. He called Republicans’ use of the filibuster an “ordinary expedient.”
“Sometimes, party leaders also ask too much, especially if they exploit the rules of the United States Senate for the sole purpose of denying a president a second term,” Kerry said. “But that is what we have witnessed the last two years; Republicans nearly unanimous in opposition to almost every proposal by the president and almost every proposal by Democratic colleagues.”
Kerry slipped in some jabs at the Tea Party movement, saying that for politicians to balance the budget and create jobs, they “can’t pretend that we can do it by just eliminating earmarks and government waste.”
“Do they want a government too limited to have invented the Internet, now a vital part of our commerce and communications?,” Kerry asked. “A government too small to give America’s auto industry and all its workers a second chance to fight for their survival? Taxes too low to invest in the research that creates jobs and industries and fills the Treasury with the revenue that educates our children, cures disease and defends our country?”
The senator compared America’s ongoing economic crisis and current world standing to the Space Race in the Cold War with Russia, saying “we as a people face another Sputnik moment today.”
“And the great question is whether we will meet this moment as Americans did so boldly five decades ago,” Kerry said. “The decisions we make — or fail to make — in this decade on new energy sources, on education, infrastructure, technology, and research, all of which are going to produce the jobs of the future, and our decisions on deficits and entitlements will without doubt determine whether the United States will continue to lead the world – or be left to follow in the wake of others, on the way to decline, less prosperous in our own land and less secure in the world.”