Tributes To Departing Senators
Mr. President, as our office is winding down from my Senate term beginning this week, the field offices in Virginia ceased their functioning, and it is going to be my pleasure later on today to host a lunch for all my staff and to thank…
Mr. President, as our office is winding down from my Senate term beginning this week, the field offices in Virginia ceased their functioning, and it is going to be my pleasure later on today to host a lunch for all my staff and to thank them for the work they have done. I just want to take this opportunity to talk about why I have said so many times since I came to the Senate that my greatest legacy will be the work of our staff.
When I first came to the Senate, people were asking: Will you be remembered for the GI bill if you get it done--which we did--or maybe some great transportation project or something of that sort? I said: No, the most important thing a leader can do is to bring good people around him or her and to work them to the full extent of their capacity and then to provide them the opportunity to grow professionally in the spirit in which we have worked together.
It is not going to surprise the Presiding Officer or anyone else when I say the greatest learning experience for me in that regard was when I served as a rifle platoon and company commander in the U.S. Marine Corps. When we were in training to go to Vietnam, we got a lecture from a battle-hardened lieutenant colonel who fought as an enlisted marine in World War II, rifle platoon commander in Korea, and then as a battalion commander in Vietnam.
One of the things he said to us was, You may carry a side arm, you may carry a 45 pistol, you may carry an M-16 rifle, but a Marine officer is only successful if he fights with his marines. It is the same concept here. A person is no better as a leader than the people he or she leads. We worked hard on our staff for 6 years to find the most talented people in America, to work them to their full capacity, to instill in them my personal views of the principles of leadership and the philosophy of governance which are at the core of what I wanted to bring to the Senate, and I believe we did that.
We started with Paul Reagan and Kathy Wilmoth. Paul Reagan, my chief of staff, is a veteran with 25 years of Democratic politics and governance inside Virginia. He worked for Congressman Rick Boucher. He worked for Jim Moran as his chief of staff. He worked for two other Members of Congress, and he had been the communications director with Mark Warner when he was Governor. We were what some people would call the political odd couple early on. Paul was a master of every detail inside Virginia politics. My experience for many years had been on the national level of policy. We worked very hard to screen every single applicant to make sure these were people who met the standards we were trying to put into place.
Kathy Wilmoth, in my view, is something of a legend here. She became our office director. She knows every Capitol Hill policeman. She probably knows every person sitting here working on the Senate floor. She is an absolute gold star administrator. Before she came to work for us, she worked for Senators John and Lincoln Chafee. When I was a 25- year-old marine, I worked on Senator John Chafee's staff when he was Secretary of the Navy. I know I am biased, but I would challenge anyone to rebut that we have had the best run staff on Capitol Hill.
We set up a communications shop. We had Jessica Smith and Kimberly Hunter, two very talented and invaluable communicators, who understood the job was not simply to respond to media requests but to proactively explain what we were doing, what our purposes were, what our goals were, and what the philosophical approach we were taking happened to be to local and national media rather than simply entertaining interview requests and those sorts of things.
On the State level, we were able to have Conaway Haskins and Louise Ware. They set up the State administrative structure. We were constantly able to listen and respond to the needs and to the opinions of people throughout this extraordinarily complex demographic jurisdiction that is the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Sometimes we forget about what happens on these phones in our offices when we are off in our meetings. The people who have run our phones and have done our casework at times have astounded me. We go back to the votes on health care reform. We know all the debates that were going on here. We took a count in our office, and we received--just in our office--226,000 pieces of advice just on health care reform; in fact, a total of 300,000 pieces of communication on that debate of which approximately 50.1 percent of the people who called in to us may have been happy with the eventual vote that I took. But I could walk out of the office when that was going on and I could see the young people on those phones and see how battered they often were, from the advice which, quite frankly, wasn't always pleasantly given.
With respect to casework, I had the great pleasure and unique experience when I was 25 years old, on the Secretary of the Navy's staff, of how to do casework. It opened my eyes to how many people there are in this country who simply don't know how to open the door to get their needs solved by the government that has set its requirements on them. I did this for John Chafee when he was Secretary of the Navy, and I did it for John Warner when he was Secretary of the Navy. I strongly emphasized to the people who handled our casework what an important job it was they were doing.
In the time we have been in the Senate, our staff has resolved more than 40,000 personal cases. More than 40,000 people who had not known, in many cases, even how to approach their government have received personal assistance that has helped them solve other problems in their lives. In fact, Andrea Trotter, JoAnn Pulliam, Debra Lawson, Gwen Sigda, and Debby Burroughs are on our staff, and each one of them resolved more than 3,000 cases during the time I have been in the Senate.
On legislative and political issues I would say that before I came to the Senate, I made promises on the campaign trail and we kept those promises. The greatest achievements, in my view, during this term were made right out of our office, not because we were responding to the suggestions of some committee work or from the executive branch saying they wanted something, but because we continually made suggestions to those committees and to the executive branch about what we thought needed to be done.
My first day in office I introduced a new GI bill. I had talked about it for years. The logic was very simple. These people who had been serving since 9/11 deserved the same chance at a first class future as those who had served during World War II. Within 16 months, with the strong support, by the way, of Leader Reid, we were able to pass this legislation, the most important piece of veterans legislation since World War II.
Most of that effort, again, came directly out of our office from the work of people on our personal staff, led by Mike Sozan, who at that time was our legislative director and has since moved on to be the chief of staff for Senator Mark Udall.
We said during my campaign and after I got here that the United States desperately needs to reform its criminal justice system. We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prison population. If we ask the average American, two-thirds of them will tell us they feel less safe in their own community than they did a year ago. It is not a political issue. To me, it has always been a personal issue, a leadership issue. I was warned when I first started raising this issue in Virginia 7 years ago that this could actually kill my political campaign. It didn't. People responded.
So since I was not on the Judiciary Committee, we worked on this legislation to create a national commission to examine all the aspects of the criminal justice system, and we did it right out of our office, with Doug Ierley being the point person for the entire country to get this debate going in a way that it hadn't been debated before. We met in our own office with more than 100 different organizations in our conference room. We had a bill a little more than a year ago that reached the floor of this Senate.
I would ask the Presiding Officer or any of my other colleagues when is the last time they have seen a criminal justice bill endorsed by--I have two pages of organizational endorsements--the National Sheriffs Association, the Marijuana Project, the Fraternal Order of Police, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the ACLU, and the Sentencing Project. We got a buy-in from across the philosophical spectrum for a mere $14 million commission where we could receive the advice from the experts in this country on an issue that we have not received their advice on since the 1960s.
One of the great disappointments of my time here has been the fact that this simple, sensible piece of legislation was filibustered. We got 57 votes on it. For some reason, the people on the other side of the aisle decided this shouldn't happen. We did get four votes from the other side of the aisle. Even the National Review, which is one of the most conservative magazines in the country, said filibustering this piece of legislation was ``insane.''
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this time the endorsers of that legislation for the historical record.
We have had a lot of discussion over the last 6 years about the so-called pivot to Asia. I will say as someone who has spent a great deal of time in and out of east Asia that this pivot was heavily influenced by the actions, again, taken directly out of our office. We looked for people to come and work with us who had expertise and the intellect to work not only on the Hill, not only with Members of Congress, and not only with the State Department, but with our embassies around the world, with foreign leaders, with validators, to take a different approach and to refocus the energy of the United States on this most vital part
of the world. David Bonine, Marta McLellan Ross, Gordon Peterson, and Philip Brady were among them.
Our many visits to this part of the world sometimes included five countries in 2 weeks, traveling solely via commercial air rather than with military codel support, and included repeated meetings with the top leadership of countries such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Burma, all of which represent the future of the United States in terms of trade, security, and cultural growth in the coming decades.
With respect to Burma, it was a great moment for me to be able to sit down with and see Aung San Suu Kyi, recognized by the Congress a month or so ago, coming to this country as an elected member of their Parliament. We began the change in that relationship directly from our office based on work I had begun and become interested in over a period of 6 years before I was elected to the Senate.
I am very proud to say we laid the groundwork for a historic visit in 2009 from inside our office--often, I would say, against the will and against the advice of our own State Department. We used validators. We talked to people we knew in the region. I became the only American leader ever to meet with GEN Than Shwe, the leader of the military junta, to express my belief that we could work forward and have a different relationship. We met with Aung San Suu Kyi. I hope those who had some doubts about the wisdom of opening this relationship now can see the benefits as we are seeing the political situation beginning to truly change in Burma.
We worked heavily with Japan. This is a critical yet often overlooked relationship. It involved an effort to resolve basing issues on Okinawa that don't always get the attention they deserve in the Congress but have at times absolutely paralyzed the political debate inside Japan. Ironically, I first began working on these issues as a military planner in 1974 after I left the Marine Corps and was in law school. Our staff has met--and I have been a part of most of these meetings--with more than 70 delegations from Japan, in our office, organized and conducted by our staff.
In Korea, we led an effort to bring Democratic Senators onboard to support the critical free-trade agreement that is so important not only to our bilateral relations but to the signals of the United States in that part of the world, and we began what I believe is something of a pioneering effort to get Korea and Japan to come together at the table to realize their common security interests.
As to Vietnam, I have visited and worked inside Vietnam for 18 out of the last 21 years in addition to having served there as a marine, I would say.
I fought in Vietnam because I believed in the importance of that country to our relationships in Asia. I have spent a great deal of energy for more than 30 years now in an effort to heal the final wound of that war, which is the relationship between our Vietnamese community here in the United States and the government inside Vietnam.
We have worked in Thailand, Singapore, Laos. I was the first American Senator to visit Laos in 7 years, the first Member of Congress to visit Cambodia in 2 years when we visited Indonesia. We worked hard on the sovereignty and maritime issues in the South China Sea. We initiated and sponsored two important Senate resolutions regarding China's recent aggression in the South China Sea. Again, we initiated this from the staff members in our office.
I could go on. Let me just say that the other areas--important areas--that our staff has worked on in the past 6 years include our pioneering work in economic fairness, the need for stronger programs in the area of adult education, the efforts from inside our office to encourage a full spectrum of energy development, the preservation of Civil War battlefields, and the vital need to rebalance the constitutional relationship between the Congress and the Presidency, which I have pursued in both administrations that have been in office while I have been a Member of the U.S. Senate.
Mr. President, at this point, because I really will not have time to list all of the contributions by my staff members, I ask unanimous consent that the names and the positions of my staff members be printed in the Record.
So to my staff, a heartfelt thanks, and to each of those who have served with us, I say again, thank you for your contributions to our staff and, most importantly, to our country. And I say also again that I will continue to expect great things from you in the future. You are my legacy. Never forget that the people you might have the honor of leading as you move forward in your careers, wherever you end up, will someday become your legacy.
I yield the floor.