your rights are just as equal as representative basye or anyone else s. , what were you feeling in those two minutes and 23 seconds that we just saw. where you are summing up your entire life experience for that moment? you know, it is something i have talked thought about saying for a long time. it is something i told several people privately. it is something i talked to friends of mine. friends and acquaintances who grew up in similar situations and circumstances. i served with people who have been through this. and i asked these kids and their families to come to the capital, over and over. i begged them to come and share their stories. and i tell them that i know it is hard. and until that moment i did not realize until how hard it really is. because that was my time to tell my story.
leading up to this, we saw that representative basye as filed this amendment on a relatively unrelated bill pertaining to elections interstate. i asked the floor leader if you would not mind walking over to representative basye and ask him to stand down on this. this was an issue that was not related to elections. this was a time we did not want to have this fight. we are working cohesively in a bipartisan way as a body that afternoon. the florida run over and talked to representative basye, trying to ask him to step down. it was like you ve got the putting that the speaker wanted him to go ahead however. i have had private conversations with representative basye before the speech. before i made it clear that if we were going to do this out in the open, if we would do this in public, if this was something that we were going to debate on the floor, that it was going to get deeply personal, and that it was going to be a serious moment. you know, this is something that i thought we shou