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Floor Speech

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Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I rise to take the floor for what I call my summing-up speech. It is not my farewell speech because I have the honor and privilege of being the ranking member and former chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I will speak later on this week when we move the continuing resolution.

It is the practice and the tradition of the Senate that when a Senator is departing the Senate, they give what they call their farewell address. Well, mine is not going to be as memorable as when George Washington resigned his commission or other memorable speeches, but I do want to say words about how I feel today about having the great opportunity to serve in the Congress.

I have spent 30 years in the Senate, 10 years in the House of Representatives, and, yes, 5 years in the Baltimore City Council. I have served in elected public office for 45 years. More than half of my life has been in elected public service but, at the same time, all of my life has been focused on service.

I rise today to thank the people of Maryland. I rise to thank them for their vote of confidence. When people vote for you, it is not only that they are sending you to Washington or sending you to city hall.

They are giving you a vote of confidence that you will be their voice, that you will be their vote, that you will be at their side and on their side, and that is what I want to be able to talk about today.

The people of Baltimore gave me my first shot at running for the Baltimore City Council. When I beat the political bosses, when running for political office as a woman was considered a novelty, they said: You don't look the part. But I said: This is what the part looks like, and this is what the part is going to be like. Along the way, so many people helped me. Behind ``me'' is a whole lot of ``we.'' I got started in public life because of volunteers and activists who, on their own time and on their own dime, volunteered themselves to not only help me get elected but to be involved in their communities, to be civically engaged, to make their community and their country a better place. These are the people who were behind me. Well, guess what. No, I was behind them, because they certainly have led the way.

Along the way, there were people who also not only helped me get elected, but they helped me govern--people who, again, volunteered their own time. I had a wonderful service academy board that helped me pick the best and the brightest to serve in our military academies-- people with distinguished careers in either the military or in education. I had a judicial appointment advisory board that made sure I helped nominate the best people to serve in the Federal judiciary.

Also, I had a veterans advisory group that brought to me what was really happening to the veterans, not what was in the press releases from the Veterans' Administration. Of course, I had a fabulous strategy group that functioned as a kitchen cabinet. It was a kitchen cabinet.

We spent a lot of time cooking things up to try to make our country and our communities better places. So I thank them all for what they did.

But, when we come here to try to serve the people who sent us here, we cannot do it alone. So we have a fabulous staff, both that serves us in Washington and serves us in our State. I wish to thank my current staff: my chief of staff, Shannon Kula; my deputy chief of staff, Rachel MacKnight; my State director, Nichelle Schoultz; my legislative director, Brigid Houton; my communications director, Matt Jorgenson; my scheduling director, Catie Finley; my office manager, Josh Yearsley; my appropriations staff director, Chuck Kieffer; and my appropriations deputy staff director, Jean Toal Eisen; and of course, all of my staff in my State office who helped me.

There is also the support staff who made sure that the phones got answered. You didn't get one of those ``call 1, call 2, press 7, press 184,'' et cetera. Also, there are the people who answer the mail, whether it was snail mail, which so much of it was when I came, or email, because we really believed that we needed to be here for the people.

I called their names, but there are also others who filled those jobs throughout my time in public office. They worked very hard to make sure that we could represent the people of Maryland and to be on their side.
After 45 years, though, it is time for me to say goodbye to elected office, but not to service.

I have the high privilege of being the longest serving woman in congressional history. But I say it is not how long you serve but how well you serve. For those who know me and have been to rallies and so on, they know that I say: ``I am here to work on the macro issues and I am here to work on the macaroni and cheese issues''--to work on the big picture, to make sure that the people's day-to-day needs were converted into public policy or, while we are working on public policy, to try to help our communities.

We also have to remember in our own States that we have constituent service issues. One of the things I am really proud of is my constituent service staff, where if you were a veteran and you needed help or you had a Social Security or Medicare problem, you could call Senator Barb and you didn't feel that you had to go to a $100 fundraiser or know somebody who had connections. The only connection you needed was a phone. You didn't even need Wi-Fi. You could just call me. Summer, winter, spring, or fall, they had Senator Barb. I tried to be of service because service was in my DNA. I was raised to think about service.

My mother and father ran a small neighborhood grocery store in one of Baltimore's famous row house neighborhoods. Every day they would get up, and they would open that grocery store and say to their customers: Good morning. Can I help you?

Now, in running that business, they also wanted to be sure that they were connected to the community. We weren't a big-box shop. We were a shop for the little people. If anybody was in difficulty, my father was happy to extend credit. It was called: We will write your name down in a book. Pay us when you can. Don't worry that you got laid off at Bethlehem Steel. We know that your wife had a difficult childbirth and needs this extra stuff. We are here to help.

My father would say: Barbara, deliver those groceries. Take it down in that little red wagon I got for you. With my little red wagon, I would maybe take orange juice down to a shut-in, but my father would say: Don't take a tip. But the tip he gave me was to always be of service and to treat people fair and square.

The other place where I learned so much about service was from the nuns who taught me. I had the great fortune to go to Catholic schools.

I was taught by the Sisters of Notre Dame and the Sisters of Mercy.

These wonderful women, who led the consecrated life, taught us not only about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they taught us religion and emphasized the Beatitudes. If anybody reads the Scripture, if you go to Matthew 5 and you go to the Beatitudes, you know what has shaped us.

One of them is this: Blessed are those who are meek at heart. I had to really work at that one--really, really work at that one. At the same time, there were those who said: those who hunger and thirst after justice. That is what motivated me. It was focusing on the values of faith, like love your neighbor, care for the sick, and worry about the poor.

I was also inspired by a motto from something called the Christopher Movement, where you would help carry the burden. It said: ``It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.'' That is what was motivating me to service.

You see, we really believed in America in my family, and we really believed in it in my community. When my great grandmother came to this country from Poland in 1886, she had little money in her pocket, but she had big dreams in her heart. Women didn't even have the right to vote. One hundred years to the year that she landed in this country, I landed in the Senate. That is what opportunity means in the United States of America.
I never thought I would come into politics. Growing up in Baltimore, my family wasn't involved in politics. My family was involved more in church work, philanthropy, doing good works in the way they did their business. In Baltimore in those days, there were political bosses--guys with pot bellies who smoked cigars and did deals, et cetera--and that wasn't going to be me. I thought I would go into the field of social work.

But I got involved because they wanted to put a 16-lane highway through the European ethnic neighborhoods of Baltimore and not even give the people relocation benefits, and they were going to smash and bulldoze the first African-American home-ownership neighborhood in Baltimore, in a community called Rosemont.
I said: Look, we can fight this. We just have to give ourselves a militant name.

I helped put together a group called SCAR, or the Southeast Council Against the Road. Our African-American neighbors were on the other side of town, and they had a group called RAM, or Relocation Action Movement. Then the citywide coalition had a group called MAD, or Movement Against Destruction. So you see, I have always had a certain flair about these things.

So we did take on city hall. But the more I knocked on doors--and our community did--we weren't heard. So I decided: the heck with it. If I knocked on a door and I wasn't going to be heard, I was going to knock on the door to get elected, and that is what I did--knocking on doors, putting together a coalition, defying the odds, defying what people said: You can't win. No woman can win in an ethnic, hard-hat neighborhood. No woman can win who isn't part of the political machine.

And no woman could win who had been active in the civil rights movement. I said: Guess what. We defied the odds, and we denied the odds, and that is how I came into public office--a champion on behalf of the people.
I wanted to come to be an advocate for people to have better lives, to have better livelihoods and better neighborhoods, to be able to save jobs and to do what I could to be able to help them. I knew that to do that I had to show up, stand up, and speak up for my constituents, staying close enough to the people so they wouldn't fall between the cracks and meeting their day-to-day needs and the long-range needs of the Nation.

When I came to the Senate, I was the very first woman elected in her own right. Though I was all by myself, I was never alone. When I came, there was only one other woman here--the wonderful and distinguished colleague from Kansas, Senator Nancy Kassebaum, a wonderful colleague.

When I say I was by myself as the only woman in the Democratic caucus, I say I was never alone because of the great men that we could work with in the Senate.

Now, I have had the privilege to work with two of the best men in America. Senator Paul Sarbanes, who was my senior Senator when I came and who certainly was my champion, helped me to get on the right committees and convinced everybody that my name was Barb Mikulski and not Bella Abzug. But I was a little bit of both. As to Senator Sarbanes and now, of course, Senator Ben Cardin, who also has been at my side, we have worked together on issues related to Maryland both large and small.

But there were others who taught me, like Senator Byrd, Senator Kennedy, and others. What it was all about was being able to work for jobs and for justice.

Though I was the first Democratic woman, I wanted to be the first of many. I wanted to help women get elected to the Senate and do what I could to be able to help them to do that. It has been just wonderful to see that now there are 20 women who are currently serving in the Senate. One of the great joys has been to work to help empower them so that they can be a powerhouse. That is why we have those power workshops that struck fear into the hearts of the guys--not to worry about us but to keep an eye on us.

I have been proud of what I have learned, taking the values that I had growing up and trying to put them in the Federal lawbooks, because, for me, no issue was too small to take up, and no cause was too big for me to not take on.

I firmly believe that the best ideas come from the people. That is where some of my greatest accomplishments came from. One of the things I loved the most was being in Maryland, moving around the State, going to all of the counties in the State. I loved my Mondays in Maryland, where I could meet and go into unannounced places like diners. A lot of people like to do townhalls, and they are terrific, but I like to show up at a diner, go from table to table to table and not only eyeball the french fries but listen to what the people have to say.

The other thing that I really liked was roundtables--absolutely those roundtables--where you could engage in conversation with people and listen to them, not show off how smart or cool you were. I really loved doing that. Out of it came some of my first big accomplishments.

When I came to the U.S. Senate, my father was quite ill with Alzheimer's. My father was a wonderful man. He worked hard for my sisters and me so that we would have an education. He saw his role as a protector and provider, and by providing us an education, we could always take care of ourselves.

When he became so ill and went into a nursing home, I listened to other families who would come to visit people in long-term care. We saw that the very cruel rules of our own government were forcing people to spend down their entire life savings and put in their family home or their family farm as an asset base. Well, listening to them, Barbara Mikulski said this: Family responsibility--yes, you need to take responsibility for your family, but the cruel rules of government should never push a family into family bankruptcy. So I crafted something called the spousal anti-impoverishment rules that enable elderly couples to keep their assets and keep their home. AARP tells me that since that legislation passed over 20 years ago, we have helped 1 million seniors not lose their homes or their family farms because one becomes too ill because of that dreaded A-word or Parkinson's or others. That is what I mean about the best ideas coming from the people.

Then I also listened to women who worked hard every single day yet weren't getting equal pay for equal work. Of course we heard it from Lilly Ledbetter, but we heard it from lots of Lillies, and we heard it from lots of Roses and lots of Marys and lots of Otanias and lots of Marias. That is why we worked hard to pass the equal pay for equal work act.

Working together with Senator Nancy Kassebaum, Olympia Snowe, our friends over in the House, Connie Morella, Pat Schroeder, we also found that women were being excluded from the protocols of NIH. The famous study to take an aspirin and keep a heart attack away was done on 10,000 male medical students, not one woman. So Olympia, Connie, Pat, Barb showed up at NIH and pounded the table and said: Let's start practicing good science instead of bad stereotypes and make sure we are included where we should be in a legitimate, scientific way. Out of that came the appointment of Bernadine Healy as the head of NIH; out of that came the Office of Research on Women's Health at NIH; and out of that came the famous hormone replacement study that Dr. Healy championed. Then Tom Harkin and Arlen Specter helped us get money in the Federal checkbook.

One study changed medical practice and lowered breast cancer rates in this country by 15 percent. Wow. That is what working together does--to try to save lives a million at a time. That was on women's health.

Then we saw growing concerns about the issue of the high cost of college. The first mortgage many of our kids are facing is their student loans. Working together with the other side of the aisle, we created AmeriCorps, making sure we enabled people to be able to be of service to our country and earn a voucher to pay down their student loans.

Then there was a roundtable where I met with parents of special needs children, and a mother asked me to change the law from ``retardation'' to ``intellectual disability'' because she was being bullied. Well, I came back here and drafted legislation. Again, on the other side of the aisle was Mike Enzi, who worked with me to pass that.

Rosa now is a member of the Special Olympics. She wins medals. She was Person of the Week on TV. That is what Mondays in Maryland means.

It is worth everything to do things like that.

In Maryland, we worked along with Senators Sarbanes and Hardin to clean up the bay. We worked to make sure our port was viable. We worked not only on our Port of Baltimore for ships of commerce, but also we worked on the space community at Goddard. I am so proud of the fact that I worked very hard to save the Hubble Space Telescope. That Hubble Space Telescope turned out to be the richest contact lens in world history. But again, with astronaut Senators Jake Garn and John Glenn working together, we did it, and it ensured America's premier leadership in astronomy and in space for years and for several decades.

Over the years, though, I could go through accomplishment after accomplishment, but one of the things I have learned as my lesson in life is that the best ship you could sail on in life is something called friendship. It is friendship that makes life worth living. It enables life to have the value of giving. That is what friendship is.

When I think about the friends along the way whom I have met both in my hometown and my State, there are also those who are here, people who on both sides of the aisle are absolutely so important to me--and the fact that we have worked on both sides of the aisle.

I spoke about Senator Cardin and Senator Sarbanes. But also on the Senate Appropriations Committee, it was Senator Shelby and Senator Kit Bond; we could actually work together. We put our heads together to try to come up with real solutions for real problems, and we could do that.
The other is not to judge one another because we have a party label.

I am so darned sick of that. In the year of the women, so many came-- like Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray and Dianne Feinstein, also Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who came from Texas. I got a call from Senator Hutchison one day, and my staff said: Ew, she wants to work with you on something. Ew, ew. She is a conservative from Texas and she wants to do something for women.

I said: How about if we listen? Could we start with listening? Could we start with just listening?
Senator Hutchison had a fabulous idea on IRA contributions. In those days, if you were in the marketplace, you could put in $2,000, but if you worked full-time at home, you could put in only $500. What Senator Hutchison wanted to do was to make it have parity--that old word, ``parity.'' I said yes. Our staffs told us not to work with each other, but we were going to forge ahead.

We went out to dinner to talk over strategy, but we talked together about our lives, how she got her start, obstacles she faced. We had such a good time that we said: Let's invite other women. Well, that became the famous dinners--the famous dinners that the women of the Senate have. We knew we would never be a caucus because we were not uniform in our views or the way we voted, but what we wanted to be was, No. 1, a zone of civility where we would treat each other with respect, our debates would be observed with intellectual rigor, and when the day was over, the day would be over. Those dinners have now stood the test of time, and I am so proud of them.

I have been so proud to work with my colleague, the senior Senator from Maine, Ms. Collins, who has been such a friend and such an ally.

Though we are not a caucus, we are a force when we can come together.
We have made change, and we have made a difference. That doesn't go down in the roll books, but I think it certainly should go down in the history books.

So as I get ready to leave the Senate, what will I miss? Well, I will never have another job as consequential as this. This is pretty consequential. The fate of this country, and maybe even the world, lies in the hands of the Congress of the U.S. Senate.

I will miss the people in the Senate the wonderful professional staff, but I am also going to miss the doorkeepers, the elevator operators, the cafeteria workers, the police officers who say: In helping the one, we help the many. We learn so much from them; I have learned so much from them.

I learned a lot from the elevator operators. One was a lady of very modest means who every day would say to me and to all of us, ``Have a blessed day.'' What a great gift she gave us: ``Have a blessed day.'' Another elevator operator, who himself has recovered from very challenging health issues, always cheerful, asks, ``How is your day?'' The last thing you could do is to not return a smile. Those are the kinds of people whom I will always remember, all those helping hands.

So I say to my colleagues now that I will never, ever forget you.

Helen Keller, though she was blind, was a great visionary, and she said that all that you deeply love you never lose. And all whom I have ever met have become a part of me; each and every one of you have become a part of me. Everybody I met along the way, whether it was at roundtables or the elevator operators, have become a part of me. You shaped me, and you have helped me become a better person.

So when I wrap up and people say ``Well, what do you think you are going to do, Barb,'' I will say my plan is not a job description but a life description. Every day I am going to learn something new. Every day I am going to give something back. Every day I am going to do something where I keep an old friend or make a new one. I want to thank God that I live in the United States of America, which enabled me to do this.

In conclusion, George Bernard Shaw--I don't know how he would have felt about me, but he wrote this, and I think it is pretty good. He said this:

I am [of the opinion] that my life belongs to the [whole] community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

For the harder I work, the more I live. I will rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ``brief candle'' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

God bless the United States Senate, and God bless the United States of America.

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