Kucinich: Get Ready to Read Bush His Miranda Rights

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Sun Oct-14-07 01:32 PM
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Kucinich: Get Ready to Read Bush His Miranda Rights

Kucinich: Get Ready to Read Bush His Miranda Rights
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2007-10-14 18:16. Criminal Prosecution

Kucinich speech at Latino Congresso, via MyDD

I'm so grateful to be with you this morning. It's such an honor. When I am with this community, I realize the real connection I have, from the heart, (el corazón). It's a connection that transcends the issues, but it connects us to the issues at the same time.

When I started my career in politics forty years ago in Cleveland, the Puerto Rican population was growing, and there were a lot of problems between that community and the police. And so when I finally got elected to city council with the help of the Puerto Rican community, the first thing I did was to take a Spanish language course, so that I could better understand and communicate with members of the Latino community. One of the things we first discovered in the city council was the fact that the police were arresting Latinos without reading them their rights, in direct violation of the Miranda decision. So if someone didn't speak English, they didn't have any rights. The police didn't understand that even if people couldn't speak English, it didn't mean that those people shouldn't have rights. So I was responsible for causing the Cleveland Police to have to learn the Miranda rights in Spanish and carry a card with them.

Now the people in the Administration of George Bush better remember their Miranda rights, because when I'm elected President I'm going to see that they are arrested. I'm not kidding here! I want to let you to know something; how I feel about what's happened to our country. We have been led into a war based upon lies -- an unjust a war. We've seen our civil liberties taken away because of lies. The President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense are all part of this. They're going to be held accountable under the law. If someone runs a traffic light, they'll get a ticket here. There are a million dead Iraqis and almost 4,000 dead American soldiers as a result of this war. Where is the accountability? What's happened is that our constitution is being torn up. And in this toxic environment, the Administration, in its never-ending quest for more scapegoats, focuses on immigrants. You know it and I know it. And we see, unfortunately, the failure of the Democratic Party to stand up to this Administration.

I'm going to give you an example of something that occurred a couple of weeks ago. We had the bill on children's health care that we passed out of the House and it covered all children, including the children of legal immigrants: about 600,000 children. But because of some Republicans in the Senate, who said, "Look, we're not dealing with any immigrants," it doesn't even matter if they're legal at this point, the Democrats wouldn't fight to keep it in the Bill. They took it out. So they brought the bill back to the House, without 600,000 children of immigrants who are legal. Now, think about what that means. It means that we are in so much fear in this country that our children are now being affected by it. You see, I happen to believe that all children, whether they are the children of those that are documented or not, should be covered for their health care. When our politics has gotten to the point where we start to divide our children into various camps, where we start to separate our children from one another, we set the stage for the splitting of the Nation. I want to see our Nation united together. It is time that we had a President who understood that human unity is what makes for peace. And that when we impose the wrath of the law that is unjust, what we're doing is we're stopping peace from happening. So, I'm running for President to make sure that all the people in America know that they have someone who they can count on, and know that they will have a President who will stand up for them. And I will tell you today that the Latino community, in particular, has a right to expect that all the candidates will stand in front of you and say, "Yes. We must have a path to legalization. Yes. There must be a way for people to work in this country, if they want to live in Mexico. Yes. We must take down that wall!"

Isn't it interesting how famous Ronald Reagan became for saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, take down that wall." Oh, how far we've come from those days. When President Reagan said, "Take down that wall," and President Bush now says, "Build up a wall," where are we going as a nation?

I believe the way the immigrant community is treated, whether documented or not, reflects the direction and future of America. We must believe that our brothers and sisters, Latinos and all of the other ethnic groups, are essential to who we are as Americans. We are forgetting what it is that made this country great. We are forgetting that the Statue of Liberty was there for all nationalities. Maybe it would be helpful if we put Emma Lazarus's poem into Spanish, where she said, "Give me your tired, give me your poor."

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