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Floor Speech
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Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I also rise to commend my new colleague of less than a year on his maiden speech, and I rise as the senior-most Republican on the floor at this time to congratulate him on behalf of my colleagues on the Republican side. Andy Kim is going to cast votes that will be considered way further to the left than those that I will cast. There will be ratings that will rate him 100 percent and probably give me a zero, and on the conservative ratings, it will be close to the same in the other direction.
But having watched him, having listened to him, having attended Senate Prayer Breakfasts with Andy Kim over the past few months, I know that he is someone whose heart is good and who will work with every Senator and every Member of the House to advance this Nation.
I am glad that Senator Andy Kim mentioned ``E pluribus unum,'' and I have learned a history lesson. I had never gone back to Cicero, but I found it interesting that Senator Kim went back and found that the verb there that allowed many to become one was ``love'' in the view of Cicero. And it reminded me of perhaps a passage that he might have heard or read from the New Testament in some of our Prayer Breakfasts, and that is when Jesus of Nazareth was asked by the experts, what was the greatest commandment? And Jesus answered: You should love your God with all your heart and soul and might; this is the first and great commandment.
But the second is alike unto it. The second greatest commandment is just like it, and that is ``love your neighbor.'' And what that means to me, as someone who has been a Christian since my early days in grade school, is that in order to show that you actually love God, you must love your neighbor, and so I appreciate what we have learned from the New Testament and Cicero, which brings us to the great importance of working toward a more perfect Union. We will never have a perfect Union in this world, but out of many we can become one. And it is the kind of rhetoric and the kind of leadership that we have heard from our young colleague today that makes me more and more optimistic about that.
And so I commend my friend and my colleague, and I look forward to working with him in the coming years.
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