[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 207 (Tuesday, December 9, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8554-S8555]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Tribute to  Andy Kim

  Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, as my colleagues are understandably 
greeting my colleague, I just wanted to take a moment and take the 
floor to express my deep admiration for a man that I have known for 
decades.
  I first met  Andy Kim when he was a college student and I was 
interviewing him for a Rhodes Scholarship. I was part of this panel of 
people who had to interview some of the best people from the State of 
New Jersey for this vaunted scholarship. I will tell you right now, 
when  Andy Kim walked in that room, he blew away every one of the 
interviewers.
  I like to brag around New Jersey now that while now hundreds and 
hundreds of thousands of people have voted for  Andy Kim, I was perhaps 
the first person to do so.
  What I saw in a young college student decades ago has only blossomed 
so much more as he has gone from a young man to a U.S. Senator.
  We throw around the word ``patriotism'' a lot, and it is often used 
in a way to brandish pride or, at its worst, as a way to condemn 
others. But the truth of patriotism was in the language we heard today; 
it is in the language of love, the fact that you cannot love your 
country unless you love your fellow country men and women.
  I am excited that New Jersey has a Senator of unassailable 
brilliance, but what makes him special is not simply his extraordinary 
head but the profound depths of his heart.
  New Jersey is a State that often I call the Rodney Dangerfield State 
where we get no respect, but the truth of the matter is, New Jersey has 
a representative that in this body that is known for partisanship, he 
is a person that is seen by colleagues on both sides of the aisle as 
someone that has a soul force, someone who has a heart, someone who is 
determined to be the kind of patriot this Nation needs.
  I would be remiss in not mentioning this: I love the fact that we 
have this body that represents so many American traditions, so many 
streams of lived experiences that make this a great representation of 
our Nation. But the truth is, we are still seeing so many firsts in 
this body.
  One first we should recognize is the one that  Andy Kim exemplifies. 
He is the first Korean American to serve in this body at a time that 
Korean Americans have made contributions--from the academics, to the 
sciences, innovators, businesspeople, farmers. But this is the first 
time the United States of America has seen a Korean American, the son 
of immigrants, stand in this body. I will tell you this--not just 
because of his heritage, not just because of the uniqueness of his 
presence on this floor, but because of the depth of his humanity, his 
demonstration today of the urgency that we stand up and allow people to 
see our vulnerability, see our frailty. In fact, in many ways,  Andy 
Kim has shown that often the greatest courage is found in the depths of 
our frailty, our vulnerability, and our candor and honesty with our own 
struggles.
  I am a man of great physical stature relative to my smaller Senator, 
but I hope everybody in America knows this: I may have greater physical 
stature, but since I met him as a college student, I have looked up to 
my friend and my brother, a giant of a human,  Andy Kim.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
  Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I also rise to commend my new colleague of

[[Page S8555]]

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.
  I yield the floor.