Ex-president faces another day of peril on Capitol Hill after January 6 panel’s referral to the justice department on four criminal charges
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The long-serving Democratic senator Patrick Leahy has delivered an emotional farewell speech on the Senate floor, including an ill-disguised dig at Donald Trump and a call for a return to the bipartisan collaboration of another era.
Leahy, 82, the Senate president pro tempore, is standing down after 48 years in the chamber, a tenure than began with the Watergate scandal and concludes in a highly partisan era in which he said the scoring “of political points have reduced debate oratory to bumper sticker slogans”:
When I arrived here, bipartisan cooperation was the norm, not the exception.
Make no mistake, the Senate of yesterday was far from perfect. [But] the Senate I entered had one remarkable, redeeming quality. The overwhelming majority of senators of both parties believed they were here to do a job.
I began my time in the Senate in the aftermath of a constitutional crisis. We faced the nation broken by the Watergate scandal, the resignation of President Nixon and an endless war in Vietnam.
And as I leave in a few days, the nation is coping with strains and challenges of other kinds. Of very real threats to the whole concept of a working democracy, the sanctity of our Constitution, our elections and the strength of the rule of law.