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Floor Speech
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Madam President, I want to thank Roy. We have been through a lot together, and I am so proud to call him a friend, as well as Abby. I have such fond memories of our work together. I have really fun memories of when we once went to Canada--remember that?--with all the Canadian interparliamentarian groups; the work we did on adoption when no one thought we could get anything done, and we stood up for a number of really important bills; and the work we did on travel and tourism to make sure our country could compete with other countries around the world when it came to foreign tourists.
One of my favorite ones was when Senator Duckworth was pregnant and wanted to have permission to bring her baby on the floor just for the first year or 6 months when there were late-night votes and the like. I thought that was going to be really easy, and I told her we could get it done. Then, every single month, I looked at her, and she was getting more and more pregnant, and I realized I wasn't accomplishing my job. Roy and I worked on that together.
One of my fond memories of that is Senator Hatch being surrounded by media and being asked about it, and he said: Well, that is OK if we have 1 baby on the floor, but what if we have 10 babies on the floor? I said: We already have 10 babies on the floor.
In any case, we were able to get that done.
As Roy mentioned, on a more serious topic, the sexual harassment rules--we instituted training, but we also updated the rules, which is a very difficult issue. We were working with Senator McConnell and working with Senator Schumer, as well as the House, to get that done.
Our work on protecting election officials--Roy, having been a previous election official, understood that. We had a bipartisan hearing with the secretaries of state from red States and blue States. That was a major moment for me.
But probably the thing I most remember was on January 6 when we had started the morning with this beautiful celebration and the ceremony of this walk with the young women with the mahogany boxes. Everyone here knows exactly what I am talking about. The insurrection went on, and Roy showed so much leadership that entire day in working with his colleagues, because while the police were on the frontlines, as we recognized today, Roy was doing a lot of work in working out how the process was going to work once we got through there. You know, he was the guy who made that work late into the night.
Then, in the end, at about 3:30 in the morning, it was Vice President Pence and Roy and myself and those three pairs of pages with the mahogany boxes, walking through the corridors, where we knew that throughout the Capitol there was broken glass and spray-painted columns, and Roy just kept doing his job.
Afterwards, when we got to the House, we knew that democracy had prevailed.
We came back to the Senate--remember this?--and the Sun was coming up. It is like 4 in the morning at this point, and we decided to go down to the Parliamentarian's offices, which were destroyed. One of the beloved members of our Parliamentarian's staff's family picture was on the floor. The whole thing was a mess. We stood there and committed that we were going to not just clean up the Capitol and improve the security but make this all better. That kind of drove my work in the last year.
But what I most remember about that particular moment at 4 in the morning is that we walked out of that room, which was ransacked, and Roy looked at me, and he looked at me with that typical Roy understatement, and he said: Well, see you tomorrow morning. And I go: OK, Roy.
That is Roy. He did what he said he would do. We did a report immediately on security in the Capitol--we got it done in 6 months-- with Senator Peters and Senator Portman about what had to be done. We made a bunch of changes. We hired a new chief, and we went on from there, because, for Roy, it is always, I will see you in the morning.
And we know, Roy, that we are going to see you in the morning, that you are not going to be a stranger, that you will stay a friend to so many of us. Thank you for your incredible service to the people of your State, to this Senate, and to the United States of America.
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