[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Page 9401]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          9/11 MEMORIAL MUSEUM

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, on a totally different subject, my wife 
and I had the opportunity to go to New York last Saturday. We were 
invited up by our oldest son to visit with him and his roommate. We 
visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum. For anybody who has a chance to go to 
New York City and visit that memorial, I urge that they do that. It was 
a walk back in time to 9/11 and the horrors of that day and the days 
and the weeks that followed, but out of that terrible disaster, our 
country came together.
  Our country came together in rather remarkable ways. Instead of 
pointing fingers at each other, we decided to join hands and work 
together under the leadership of George W. Bush, and we created a 9/11 
Commission, chaired by Republican Tom King of New Jersey and cochaired 
by Lee Hamilton, Congressman from Indiana, former chair of the House 
Foreign Relations Committee. It was a bipartisan Commission. There were 
9 or 11 people. They went to work. They had a great staff, and they 
worked for months to drill down on what went wrong, what led to 9/11--
that catastrophe and how could it happen--and came up with a whole host 
of recommendations. I think there were about 40 recommendations. They 
were unanimous. They adopted them unanimously and gave them to us. They 
came before us and came before our committee, the Committee on 
Governmental Affairs, and we adopted about 80 percent of them pretty 
much unanimously. It was a time that rather than us being divided as a 
country, it was a time we came together on the heels of a terrible 
disaster.
  When I look at the political back and forth that seems to flow out of 
the tragedy in Orlando and I compare that with what existed when we 
lost maybe 60 times as many lives 15 years ago, I would hope we would 
remember, as a people--I hope those of us who serve in this body and 
those who would like to lead our country will remember the words right 
over the Presiding Officer's head. I don't know a lot of Latin, but the 
Latin words inscribed over the chair where the Presiding Officer sits, 
``E pluribus unum,'' from many, one. From many, one. We are strong when 
we are united, and we need to be united just as we were 15 years ago. 
We need to be united as a nation today. George Voinovich, if he were 
here, would remind us of that. Since he is not, I wanted to.

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