Madam President, it is my pleasure to take a few minutes on the floor to give a farewell message, and I thank you for your courtesies. I begin with a Scripture, Philippians 4:7, New American Standard Bible, that reads: ``And the peace of…
Madam President, it is my pleasure to take a few minutes on the floor to give a farewell message, and I thank you for your courtesies. I begin with a Scripture, Philippians 4:7, New American Standard Bible, that reads: ``And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.''
Truly for the first time in my adult life I have felt that extraordinary peace about something that was unexpected, but is certainly something that I accept. It has really been amazing as a Christian, as an adult, and as a leader to find myself in this place in a time that should be a time of sadness, but all I can feel is actual joy. It is quite amazing.
It has never happened to me before, so I thought it would be wonderful to share--with so many of my friends, supporters, family, staff, and colleagues listening in--for a few minutes to say that it is absolutely true, and I am a testimony to this extraordinary peace since just a few days before the election and since then. I think it is because I feel and know that God has called me to another place.
Before being a Senator, a wife, and a daughter, I am a Christian, and my faith really is central to my life. My parents always taught me to put my faith where it belongs--in God himself. So it is really with that sense of gratitude and joy that I have been given an opportunity to serve my State, my region, and my country for now almost 34 years-- which is quite amazing--having started at a very young age and still being relatively young.
So let me just share some remarks about that time, and particularly the time here in the Senate. I want to begin by thanking my family, and particularly my extraordinary husband Frank, who has been a partner and, as I said on election night, not only an encouraging and supportive partner but one who has literally egged me on. When I wanted to quit, he would say: No, you have to continue to serve. He is not only an accomplished lawyer and professional, but also an elected official in his own right, he came from a family that was dedicated to public service, having both of his parents being very active in party politics--first the Republican Party and then the Democratic Party. But that is a whole other story. They are both strong civil rights leaders--my husband as well--and always encouraging me and being willing to share the burdens of public life as well as sharing in the great joy.
Our son Connor is now 23 years old, and our daughter Mary Shannon is now 17. The reason I mention that is because Connor was 5 when we were elected to the Senate. Mary Shannon was adopted the first year we were here. On election night, she looked at me--and she is just so beautiful at 17--and she said: Mom, it is going to be a little strange. I have only known you as a Senator. So I warned her that now that I am going to be a full-time mom this is going to be a real problem for her. She is not looking forward to it.
To our new daughter-in-law Emily, and especially to our precious little Maddox Parker Snellings, who many people saw on election night-- now, Maddox gets the distinction. He is 10 months old, but he gives me the most joy, and I used to keep a picture of him during all my debates. There were only three, as you all will remember, but I would keep a picture of him because
my staff kept telling me: You have to smile more. I kept saying: But I can't, because I am really aggravated. They said: No, you have to smile. So my solution was to put a picture of Maddox on my podium and, of course, I then smiled through the whole debate. That is a trick for those who will be continuing to debate.
To my mother and father, who are the light of not only our family but the light of our community, the light of the Nation in many ways--they had 9 children, 37 grandchildren, and now 6 great grandchildren. They are in wonderful health, they are watching right now, and I can only say they are two of the most extraordinary individuals I have ever known. Our family is truly blessed by their sacrificial leadership.
Let me also mention my eight siblings--eight brothers and sisters: Mark, Melanie, Michelle, Mitchell, Madeleine, Martin, Melinda, and Maurice, Jr.--all m's. That is another story. There are all of our spouses, my nieces and nephews, who campaigned with me up until the last day. My godchild Sasha literally knocked on doors with me. I was teaching her how to knock on doors before the campaign was over so the tradition could carry on in our own neighborhood where we have lived since I was 5 years old--Broadmoor in New Orleans.
When I first got here 18 years ago, I literally could not find the side door. I didn't know anything. I wasn't even expecting to be here. It was kind of like a dream that I got here, because I had run for Governor, wanted to be the Governor, and served 16 years in my State. I knew that was what I was being called to do--and I see Lamar Alexander--to change our education system, to do some coastal work, and then I landed here. But I literally knew nothing of how to be a Senator.
I stumbled a great deal in my first years. But I want to thank my chiefs of staff, Norma Jane Sabiston, Ron Faucheux, Jason Matthews, Jane Campbell, and Don Cravins. I had five of the most remarkable chiefs of staff, who, with me, learned how to do this job and to do it well. We never forget where we came from, and they are still--all of them--with me, and all of us are still working to make our State the very best that it can be and to make our country the very best that it can be.
To three staffers who have been with me for almost 20 years--Alicia Williams is the longest serving office manager, I think, in the Senate. She was here when I arrived and stayed with me. She was with Bennett Johnston. T. Bradley Keith has been with me for 22 years as a former staffer in a former life, before I was a Senator, and now as my long- time State director. And Shannon Langlois has been, I think, with the Senate for almost 30 years. She is a caseworker. She was, again, with Bennett Johnston and stayed with me. She has literally given her life to thousands, hundreds of thousands of cases in Louisiana and trained every caseworker that I had for 18 years, and they just did phenomenal work.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record my current staff, all of whom are here--my personal staff, my energy staff, and my homeland security staff.
Madam President, I want to thank Don Cravins, again, as my chief of staff; Liz Craddock, Staff Director of my energy committee; and Stephanie Gupta, head of homeland security. I know I am leaving them in good hands with what they are going to be doing in the future and with the great leadership that remains here.
I only have a few minutes, so I will just run through a couple of the highlights of some of the accomplishments that I am most proud of and really take this opportunity to thank so many who helped, because the one thing I have learned that most certainly is true, is that if you want to accomplish really big things here--really great things, generational things--you most certainly cannot do that alone. So the first thing you need to do is look for a really good partner--and I mean a partner that will be with you through thick and thin. Sometimes you are lucky enough to find those kinds of partners, and I found them on both sides of the aisle.
The first major piece of legislation I introduced was something that was in my heart for so long, and that was the Conservation and Reinvestment Act. The cosponsors of that bill, amazingly, were Frank Murkowski from Alaska, Trent Lott from Mississippi, John Breaux from Louisiana, and Senator Dianne Feinstein from California. Chris Dodd joined me a few days later after we introduced it--and Ron Wyden, Chris Bond, John Warner, and Thad Cochran, just to name a few.
At the end of this effort--although this particular bill didn't pass; we missed it literally by inches, and I will describe what that was in a minute--we had 4,500 organizations throughout the country, from the Sierra Club to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and everyone in between in a broad coalition to fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund--and Lamar Alexander knows more about this than I could ever know, and he will tell you one day the details about the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Udalls and the Udalls' fathers were very instrumental in the creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It was a promise made but never kept--that this country would set aside about $900 million a year to purchase land, to build our parks, and to secure recreational opportunities. This country is so blessed--more than any on Earth--with the amount of natural resources we have, and we have not lived up to that promise.
So I introduced this bill as a young legislator. John Breaux said you don't even know what you are doing; how are you introducing a bill like this? I said: I don't know, but I am just going for it because I believe in it. So we never passed it, but it has been in part of almost every piece of energy legislation--in pieces and parts since that day we introduced that. I am very hopeful that war will go on under Senator Murkowski, the daughter of Frank Murkowski, and Maria Cantwell, who in many ways got to the Senate because she defeated one of the gentlemen who opposed us on this bill and used it as a platform to get here. So I know she will be committed to finishing the work.
The bill did three things. It fully funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a trust fund that will go on for generations. It would fully fund coastal restoration, which is so important not just to Louisiana, because we are literally falling away into the Gulf of Mexico, but it will help Sheldon Whitehouse in his work. It will help Dick Durbin along the Great Lakes, and it will help Cory Booker in New Jersey. If you allocate the funding correctly, it will be grants that these coastal communities can use until we figure out how to clean our atmosphere and how to stop the tremendous pressures that are coming on our coast. Louisiana knows this. We have experienced the worst disasters literally in the history of our country, and they are only getting worse. I will talk about that more in a minute.
But it was because we had laid the groundwork for CARA, Pete Domenici literally felt so sorry for me--he knew how hard we had worked and the coalition was so disappointed when we
lost--that he directed, literally with the stroke of a pen, $1 billion to the gulf coast in the energy bill for 2005. That money was divided 50 percent to Louisiana and 50 percent to the other States.
Now, I can promise everyone here that for the $500 million that went to Louisiana, we can account for every penny of it. We know exactly where it went, and we put that down as a downpayment to restoring our coast, which doesn't just belong to us--it belongs to the whole Nation. This is the greatest, the seventh largest delta on the planet. It is what Thomas Jefferson leveraged the whole entire Treasury of the United States to purchase. It is something worth fighting for. We would not be a country without the Mississippi Delta, and we could never have found our way west if we couldn't have supplied the great center of this Nation with the commerce they needed.
Every State along this river--19 of them--use this river and understand what I am talking about. Amy Klobuchar understands this. She is at the top of this river, and I am at the bottom, and we have talked a lot about how important that corridor is. That needs to continue.
Then there was the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which I finally passed with Pete Domenici's help, who was my dear friend and one of the most wonderful leaders I have ever worked with. He came from a family with eight children. We had nine, and we are both Catholic and came from the same sort of background. He served with such passion. So he joined with me in passing the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which finally secured a permanent stream of revenue for coastal restoration and protection.
But as Lamar Alexander knows, it left out the land and water, and it left out wildlife. We just couldn't lift it all, so that needs to be corrected.
Finally, there is the RESTORE Act, which I worked on with my colleagues when the BP oil spill killed 11 people in the gulf and spilled 5 million barrels of oil in the gulf. Thanks go to Barbara Boxer, this extraordinary woman who has been a partner with me. We think very differently about the world. We see things very differently. California is very different from Louisiana. But I will say one thing about Barbara Boxer. If I had to be in a foxhole with someone, I would want to be with her because she never stops fighting. She and I are very much alike in that regard. Once we set our minds to something there is no dividing us.
People asked why did I send her money for her reelection? Why did I raise so much money from Louisiana? I said that I would do it again because when no one would stand up--well, not no one, but if she hadn't stood up when that BP oil spill went down, and said, I am chair of this committee and I believe the gulf coast deserves this funding, we just wouldn't have had it. It is as simple as that. People do not know how powerful a chairman is here. When a chairman makes up their mind and they say this is what we are going to do, the rest of the committee, for the most part, goes along. And so Barbara said that.
With Senator Vitter, of course, who is the ranking member on that committee put his shoulder to the wheel, and we were able to get--well, it is still in court, but we think--a serious downpayment to recover from one of the great ecological disasters of our State, of our country, which is the loss of the gulf coast. This just isn't in Louisiana. This is Texas and Mississippi, and it is going to affect parts of the whole country. But we are on the mend.
I came here to do that work. I came to find money. I found it, and we are going to continue that work. I am thrilled to work with so many of you to get that done.
On education--Lamar has to leave, but I am glad he is here because I found a great soulmate in Lamar Alexander--former Secretary of Education, former Governor, a Presidential candidate, and absolutely extraordinarily committed to finding a better way for our children in America to be educated. As proud as we are of the public school system, at the turn of the century, when people in the world were wondering how to build the middle class in the world and lots of countries were struggling with how to do that, America knew. America knew that if you educated your citizens--women, boys, and girls; not just boys, which is what half the world still does, which is a tragedy--if we open up our schools for universal, free education, along with other things, it would lift your country to greatness unsurpassed in the history of the world.
What breaks my heart is to walk into schools today--and Mark Warner knows this because he was Governor of Virginia--and see children's eyes just completely dulled, sitting there completely bored, teachers who are just sort of going through the motions. It breaks my heart because I know that not only does it limit their lives but it limits the potential of our Nation.
With Lamar Alexander and a handful of Democrats, I was proud to work with Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush to pass a series of laws. Evan Bayh comes to mind, Joe Lieberman, John Breaux, and a group of us stood up and said: It is time to stop sending money to the States without accountability. If we need to send money, we need to hold States accountable, and we need to give opportunities for choice to parents and public charter schools.
I am reluctant to go too far on vouchers. You have heard my speech on that. You heard Senator Feinstein's speech on that. But both of us have agreed to support some kinds of strategic vouchers that help poor kids get out of failing schools until we can fix them.
Most importantly, I support high-performing public charter schools, and I will continue to fight that for the rest of my days. I thank all of you who helped on that and particularly Tom Carper on the Democratic side and Lamar Alexander. Cory Booker has been an amazing leader and will hopefully continue on that. I thank Dick Durbin, who is on Appropriations. I had to twist his arm a little bit on some of it, but he ended up coming around and has been an amazing fighter for the right kinds of public schools that serve the children first and the bureaucracy and administration second. I respect teachers. I respect administrators. But our schools should work for the children and their families who so desperately want them to have a great education.
The third issue I wish to speak about, which is a legacy issue, is adoption. I hope I can get through this without tearing up. I don't know why I have always had such passion for this issue.
My mother had nine children without one single problem. As a young child, I remember my aunt adopted two children. I think it might have been that; I can't remember exactly. I started to think about all the children in the world who don't have parents. Maybe I was just always so proud when I filled out those forms in Catholic school. I can remember sitting there filling them out: Are your parents divorced or married? I loved checking ``married.'' How many siblings do you have? I loved putting ``eight.'' I was always so proud of my family.
I thought, what do children without parents do? I just could not imagine. So I got very passionate about it. I ended up, of all things, marrying an orphan. My husband was adopted out of an orphanage. So I thought, yes, this is going in the right direction. I thought I would adopt children. I thought he could not say no since he himself was adopted, and so this would work out. Sure enough, we ended up adopting two children.
But this was my passion before I met my husband and before I even thought about adopting. It was as if God put this in my heart, so I have taken it and carried it.
I thank Dave Camp; Jim Oberstar, who is deceased; Tom Bliley from Virginia, who is a great leader among us; Larry Craig, who is no longer here, who served as my cochair; and Senator Jesse Helms. Amazingly, I didn't know to be afraid of Jesse Helms; I thought he was a really nice guy. Later, everybody had to tell me how hard he was to get along with. But I went up to him, and I thought he would surely want to help because he had adopted a child. I don't think a lot of people realize that. Sure enough he did, and we passed a great treaty together that serves as the model for international adoption today. Joe Biden was the ranking member on the committee. With Jesse Helms's and Joe Biden's support, we passed a great treaty years ago, and we are still in the process of making that possible and working it through.
The accomplishments are really quite long, so I am going to submit them for the Record. I will only say that the adoption tax credit which Bob Casey worked on and took up that cause when he got here--I am thrilled and hope we can keep it. I would like to say to Amy Klobuchar how much I appreciate her agreeing to step in and take over the leadership of the adoption caucus on this side and Roy Blunt, who I think will take it up on the Republican side and continue this great work.
There are over 100,000 children who are waiting for families in the United States. There are over 500,000 children in foster care. These children think it is their fault they are there, and it is not. It is not their fault that their family disintegrated around them. It is not their fault that they got pregnant at 11 and were kicked out of their house. Instead of the family wrapping that child in their arms and helping them to grow, they just kicked them out on the street. It is not their fault.
We need to realize that God does not make trash. He never has, and he never will. Everybody he has made has a purpose and dignity, and we need to honor that and do better work. I have spent a lot of time here on it. I am going to continue to do so. I will never stop working on it. I am very proud of the work we have done.
I will put the rest into the Record.
On energy very quickly and then finally disaster recovery, I couldn't have been prouder when I became the chair of this committee. It was quite a miracle. I didn't expect it. I never thought I would last long enough to become the chair because there were so many people ahead of me. It kind of worked out when Max Baucus left to go to China and Tim Johnson was retiring that it fell to me. It has been my great joy for 9 months to serve as chair, with Lisa Murkowski as my ranking member. Of course, I worked with her father. I didn't sit next to him because I was a junior member, but I worked with him closely, and it has been wonderful working with her. I am so proud that Maria Cantwell will step up and take that leadership. I know the two of them work beautifully together. They do see the world differently, but they are two women who know how to compromise and who will be respectful of each other and find a way for our country to move forward.
I can tell you all that in my whole life--which isn't that long, but it has been a pretty good run in public office--there has never been a time when America has been closer to energy independence. What that means to our country is beyond description. We don't have to listen to parts of the world that don't hold our values. We can lift up our country. We can move forward. And it has to be with a combination of fossil fuels, weaning our way to a greener, cleaner environment, and manufacturing right here in America.
I hope you all will put down the swords and pick up the plow and really plow together because this is an amazing opportunity for our country. I sure hope we don't miss it. It is going to benefit and make the whole country, not just our part of the country, more prosperous.
People desperately want to move up into the middle class and stay there and not feel so fragile and feel as if they can have the manufacturing jobs and good energy jobs and really eliminate some of the geopolitical nightmares we have been in, fighting wars for oil. It has to come to an end.
Finally, I will say a word about disaster recovery. When I got to the Senate, my husband and I were looking at each other saying: How did we even end up here? We had no idea. When Katrina hit, it became very clear that this is why I needed to be here.
I had been an appropriator since I was 23 years old. I knew a little bit about budgets. I knew a little bit about how the system worked. I knew how the State and local governments depended on the Federal Government so much funding. I understood the power of HUD and the power of housing and the power of building schools and levees and the Corps of Engineers. So I was perfectly positioned to be able to lead the effort for my State, and they desperately needed a leader. I wasn't perfect. I made lots of mistakes. But I wasn't afraid to try because that is all you can do.
The devastation was so great and it was so unbelievable. Eighty percent of the east bank of the city and much of Jefferson Parish--not quite as bad as New Orleans--and all of St. Bernard--67,000 people in St. Bernard lost everything. Everyone in the Lower Ninth Ward lost everything, which is like a small city unto itself. In New Orleans east, which is like a small city unto itself, 60,000 people lost every school, every house. It was unbelievable.
I say to my colleagues: Thank you for being there for us. I know I aggravated you to death. I know I never stopped asking. But you were the only hope because there was just no way these communities could recover. New Orleans has been there for 300 years. You have heard me say this: We didn't move down there recently to go sunbathing or to build condos; we have been down there for 300 years. The city is going to stay there. The region is going to stay there. And had this government just invested a little bit of the money back that we have given it over time--from our energy resources, from our manufacturing, from the wealth we have created along that great mouth of the river--if the country had just given us a little bit of money--$500 million here, $500 million there--and built levees that wouldn't have broken in 52 places, we wouldn't have had $140 billion in damage.
So when I came to Robert Byrd because President Bush was not that forward-leaning--I will just leave it at that. There will be a lot more in my book about it, but I will just leave it at that, not very forward-leaning. The person I went to was Robert Byrd. In his old age, he was so wise. He just looked at me. He didn't say much at that time, but he just took my hand and he said: I will be there with you.
He was the chair of the Appropriations Committee, so that meant something. Boy, he was. He helped me write things in a bill that could probably never be possible today. That was when chairmen understood the power to help people to heal wounds and to bring hope and to be compassionate. That is what government is there to do. If government is not there when you have lost everything, then what in the heck is the use of having it?
So we hope we will be able to repay this country for the investments that have been made, and we will. We will do our best. With all of the people who come to New Orleans and all the conventions that come--and we hope we bring joy and happiness when people come--we hope to pay our way and to pay this back over time for what you have done to help us. We are doing a good job of helping ourselves by planning better, doing more smart-growth, sustainable development, building our levees to the point where they won't break again, and we will continue to do that.
So those are some of the legacy pieces I have worked on. It is kind of amazing that these were the things that were in my heart when I was a little girl. I didn't learn this when I was a Senator. I can remember taking a bus when I was in the eighth grade down to the coast and looking at LaFourche Parish for the first time, and for a girl from the poor part of uptown, I kept looking at the nuns who took me, and I said: What world is this? I had no idea about Bayou LaFourche.
When I got to be a Senator, I remembered LaFourche, the bayou, and I remembered how fragile it looked to me even as a child, and I thought, if I can do anything to save this place, I will. I have spent a lot of my time saving it, and it is stronger now. It is still not completely safe, but it is much stronger now.
I tutored in public school. My passion started when the nuns of Ursuline sent me to tutor in a public school, and the little girl whom I tutored, who was my age, couldn't read. I can remember going home to my mother and saying: This is the strangest thing. I just met a little girl. She is my age, and she can't read. Mama, is that possible, that children don't know how to read?
I can remember her sitting me down and explaining to me why some children couldn't read, and I said: That doesn't seem right to me. I made up my mind then that I would work.
The reason I say this is because there are a lot of young people listening to this, and I just want you to know, just listen to your heart because God puts these things in your heart at very
young ages. If you don't block it out, if you are not cynical and if you hope and live openly, those dreams can come true. Then you can make a profound difference in rebuilding a school system, which I am continuing to work on, or make sure every orphan in the world knows that they are loved and that we are going to work hard to find them a family; to build this great gulf coast, where I spent my life growing up as a child and knowing that it is worth saving. It may not be as sexy as the west coast or as prosperous as the east coast, but the gulf coast is really worth fighting for. It is a very special place in our country. I learned to love it as a child, and I will fight for it as an adult.
Finally, let me just say a few thank-yous in closing. A thank-you to my mentor Lindy Boggs, who coached me every step of the way; to my mentor John Breaux, who got me into this gig in the first place.
I thank Bennett Johnston, who taught me about being a proud member of the Energy Committee; Senator Tom Daschle, who saved my skin more times than I can tell you; Kent Conrad, who taught me about the budget; Chris John and Jim McCrery and Richard Baker in my delegation, who were Democrats and Republicans--we worked together to do amazing things. I also thank Cedric Richmond, who still works closely with me, and Charles Boustany, whom I admire a lot. I thank other Members who are no longer here: Olympia Snowe--we were the first two women to chair a major committee--well, actually a minor committee, the small business committee; and Lisa and I were the first to chair and be a ranking member of a major committee. I couldn't have worked with two more remarkable women. I thank Senator Joe Lieberman, who was a leader of the DLC and a great mentor of mine on foreign policy issues; Senator Ted Stevens, who was as grumpy as could be but really did take me under his wing and teach me a lot; Senator Danny Inouye; Senator Robert Byrd. And I am going to put others into the Record: Senators Mikulski, Carper, Heitkamp, Manchin, Cantwell, Begich, Pryor, and Hagan.
I want to say a special word to the Black Caucus. I represent 30 percent African Americans in my State. You know, all groups of people are hard to represent, and my State is so diverse, and I have tried so hard to be respectful of all the different groups in my State.
I thank the Black Caucus--both the local elected officials and the National Black Caucus--for being such a great partner with me and helping me to understand about compassion, forgiveness, faithfulness, and for trust. Their spiritual strength is so amazing. I thank them very much for coming down to help me.
I thank labor, who brought me here. They encouraged me to run when I was 23 years old, and I tried to never leave them. Only 8 percent of my State is now organized. I have never left them. I think you should leave with the people who brought you to the dance, and they most certainly did.
I thank Harry Reid, who has been an amazing friend to me and who, most importantly, has been a great friend to my family. He has honored us in so many small ways, and I just love him for his tenacity and his leadership.
I thank you all. I hope I didn't leave anyone out. It has been a joy, but I know God is calling me to a different place. I am not the least bit sad and I am not the least bit afraid because it has been a remarkable opportunity to serve with all of you, and I thank you very much.
(Applause, Senators rising.)
