Mr. President, I wish today to bid farewell and express my special thanks to Kevin Landy for his 13 years of extraordinary service on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Kevin,…
Mr. President, I wish today to bid farewell and express my special thanks to Kevin Landy for his 13 years of extraordinary service on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Kevin, presently the committee's chief counsel and my longest serving committee staff member, is leaving the Senate this month. But I am happy to say he will continue his career in public service as the Director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Detention and Policy Planning, an office responsible for formulating and implementing reforms at immigration detention facilities.
As a Senator, I am privileged to work with dedicated Senate staffers like Kevin Landy, who want to take their talents, skills, and passions and put them to work for the American people.
Thomas Jefferson once asked the question: ``What duty does a citizen owe to the government that secures the society in which he lives?''
Answering his own question, Jefferson said: ``A nation that rests on the will of the people must also depend on individuals to support its institutions if it is to flourish. Persons qualified for public service should feel an obligation to make that contribution.''
Kevin has answered his Nation's call and leaves the Senate with an exemplary record of achievement on behalf of the American people, on a wide range of issues. In particular, I'd like to highlight Kevin's role as my lead staff member on four bills that I count among my most important legislative accomplishments.
In the 107th Congress, Kevin successfully and simultaneously stewarded to passage two very different pieces of legislation. One of those bills established a new framework for the government's uses of the Internet and passed after a great deal of careful consensus building; the other bill established the 9/11 Commission to independently investigate the circumstances of the terrorist attacks and was enacted after a vigorous and often contentious campaign to surmount the administration's resistance.
First, Kevin drafted the E-Government Act, which I introduced in May of 2001, and which called for greater citizen access to government information, services, and regulatory proceedings over the Internet; better management of information technology; and greater protections for privacy and security.
When Kevin began work on this initiative he was trained as a lawyer and had no government IT background. Yet he worked meticulously with every relevant group and constituency first to become fully informed and then to ensure their concerns were addressed. More importantly, Kevin spent months negotiating with OMB officials to overcome the administration's initial opposition. The work paid off when the legislation passed both the House and the Senate by unanimous consent on the same day, November 15, 2002, and was subsequently signed into law the next month.
Some of Kevin's most significant work for our country was on legislation creating and reforming the institutions charged with the defense of our homeland from the terrorist threat.
Soon after the tragic September 11 attacks, Senator McCain and I called for an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks and to provide recommendations designed to guard against future acts of terrorism. Kevin helped draft the legislation to establish the 9/11 Commission, which I introduced with Senator McCain on December 20, 2001.
At first we had no other cosponsors, and faced the opposition of the administration. But over the next year Kevin worked closely with the families of the victims of 9/11, who lobbied arduously for our legislation both in the Halls of Congress and in the media, and the administration finally reversed its position the night before the Senate voted to approve the Commission by a vote of 90 to 8. Contentious negotiations with White House officials followed, but on November 27, 2002, the legislation establishing a 9/11 Commission was enacted.
Kevin's effectiveness and his strong relations with 9/11 family members stood him in good stead when I asked him to lead an even greater challenge 2 years later: helping win enactment of legislation to implement the Commission's ambitious and wide-ranging recommendations.
Following the release of the 9/11 Commission's report on July 22, 2004, Kevin led the combined efforts of the staffs of four Senators to quickly draft legislation, S. 2774, that implemented all of the Commission's recommendations, covering not only comprehensive reform of the intelligence community and the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center but also information sharing, terrorist travel, border security, and secure identification, among other topics. Because of the determined efforts of Kevin and his colleagues, I was able to join with Senators McCain, Bayh, and Specter in introducing the legislation on September 7, just 6 weeks after the Commission's recommendations had been released.
Kevin continued to play a leadership role as I worked with the committee chairman and my close friend, Senator Susan Collins, to draft legislation that focused on the Commission's intelligence reform recommendations, S. 2845. On the Senate floor, provisions of the two bills were merged as we faced a blizzard of amendments and tough votes, before we won an overwhelming
Senate victory. An arduous conference followed, as several House committee chairmen adamantly opposed the bill--through it all Kevin fought to uphold the principles laid down in our legislation. We prevailed, resulting in the historic enactment on December 17, 2004, of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, IRTPA.
We faced even more complex procedural hurdles in 2007, when Senator Collins and I led the efforts of multiple Senate committees to assemble and enact provisions that built on what we had accomplished with IRTPA, mandating counterterrorism improvements in areas such as terrorist travel, communications interoperability, and aviation and maritime security. By then the committee's chief counsel, Kevin had demonstrated his skills at legislative maneuvering in a variety of circumstances. I called on him once again to help coordinate our team as we pushed through a difficult markup, a lively Senate debate, and a fiercely contested conference, at which approximately 15 Senate and House committees claimed jurisdiction and joined the fray. Our work resulted in ambitious legislation, known as the ``Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007,'' enacted on August 3, 2007.
I have described his biggest accomplishments in the areas of national security and good government, but through his entire career Kevin has also shown a passion for the pursuit of justice, including justice for the powerless. Upon graduating from Amherst College, Kevin went to work defending the rights of prisoners to humane conditions in the Texas penal system. Then after graduating from Yale Law School, one of Kevin's jobs took him to Cambodia, where he worked with that nation's judges and prosecutors in an effort to help improve the rule of law as that nation struggled to emerge from its brutal totalitarian past.
On the committee, Kevin has worked tirelessly to improve the treatment of asylum-seekers who often languish in county jails and other immigrant detention facilities as they pursue their claims. He drafted the first bill to address immigration detention reform, the Secure and Safe Detention and Asylum Act, and in 2007 we won Senate passage of the bill as an amendment to ultimately unsuccessful immigration reform legislation. Although legislative progress in this area has proven elusive, Kevin's work helped to bring greater attention to the need for reforms. He has now embraced the opportunity to support the detention reform initiatives being undertaken at the Department of Homeland Security.
I have benefited greatly from Kevin's commitment to my goals and to the pursuit of excellence while achieving them. I want to thank him again for his hard work, his long hours, and selfless persistence in pursuit of worthy legislation.
