A rift has developed between the American people and their highest elected officials. The public cannot understand the congressional fixation on the impeachment of the President and members of Congress find it difficult to comprehend the public's insistence on dropping the present debate and moving on to other issues in need of attention. Pollsters document an astonishingly high level of confidence in a chief executive who cannot claim the moral confidence personally of those who give his presidency high marks professionally. When the matter of impeachment went before the House of Representatives, we watched members of that body split largely along partisan lines and listened as people on both sides of the great divide shouted at each other. Amid the harshness of the present political climate, even a call to civility is being used as a political weapon.
Dictionaries define civility succinctly.
I am confident that we will hear helpful definitions of civility in the course of this morning. However, the nature of civility is brought clearly into focus by the rhetoric now extant in the nation. Whether or not a person can define civility, most people know civility when they see it and hear it and readily recognize the absence of civility when other modes of debate prevail. Civility is not an inconsequential issue. If we can't handle the present crisis claiming the attention of our nation without rhetoric and behavior that tear us apart as a nation, we have a far larger problem than that at the center of deliberations in the United States Senate.