Mr. Richard Neal:

Let me start with the proposition that American democracy is noisy. There is a lot of clutter to democracy. One of the things we cherish is the Bill of Rights and the cornerstone of that is free speech. That means we guarantee a second opinion in the first amendment. The conflict we have all witnessed in America, which has also been embraced by parts of Europe and other parts of the world, is also a reflection of the amplification of conflict through social media. We live in a time of people choosing the media forums that agree with them rather than the opposite and objectivity is becoming a bit more of a challenge. Journalism has increasingly chosen a side as well and it has made our lives a good deal more difficult. Those of us who embrace the institutions understand that the challenges we have now do not come close to America's Civil War. They do not come close to us staring down fascism and Nazism and aggressive military escapades from other parts of the world. I still believe in the lamp Jefferson lit and the Declaration of Independence. While he was not consistent in his own endeavours that related to it, it challenged men and women across the world to embrace the principle of the sturdiness of the individual.

I am sitting maybe 50 ft from where Abraham Lincoln sat in 1865 after the American Civil War, in which he stared down the forces of slavery and rejected the idea that the south could ever leave the union. After 2% of the American people had been killed during that war, he said, "With malice toward none, with charity for all", and welcomed people back to the union. The divisiveness we are all witnessing will be overcome by my faith and our faith in the institutions of American life. The populism that is swelling across the world is, in the end, not well met by the argument that such people have easy answers. Those of us who live in democratic nations know that if the solutions were easy, we would have done them. Our support for our institutions should not be abridged. We should defend them as assertively as we can. I am delighted that Senator Fitzpatrick had such a great experience here and that her relatives can sing the national anthem. That is great.