Expressing Sorrow of the House at the Death of the Honorable Frank R. Lautenberg, A Senator from the State of New Jersey

Floor Speech

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Mr. PALLONE. I want to thank my colleague.

It's really with a great deal of sadness that we come to the well this evening to announce--or to comment, if you will--on Senator Lautenberg's passing.

I really can't imagine the Congress without him. I worked on his campaign from the very first day in 1982, and he was the longest-serving Member of the U.S. Senate from the State of New Jersey in our entire history.

The fact of the matter is that Senator Lautenberg was always there for the little guy. Many of you know that he was a wealthy individual, but he never forgot his roots, and they were very humble roots. He always believed that the Congress should be there for people in need and that the American Dream required that everyone had an equal opportunity and that Congress could do things. Frank Lautenberg understood that there were a lot of problems out there, but he felt that Congress needed to work together on a bipartisan basis to solve those problems.

There are so many that I can mention, but I won't. Whether it was the Nation's infrastructure, mass transit, all of the environmental concerns, whether he wanted to clean up the ocean or clean the air or clean the water for the next generation, he really believed that things could get done here, and he worked hard to get things done. We know, more than anybody else, he was able to accomplish a lot because of the hard work that he put into it.

So I just want to thank him for all of that and for his legacy, and I want to express sympathy, obviously, to Bonnie and his family. He will be missed for what he accomplished and also for what he told us about what our job is when we're here--to get things done and to worry about the little guy and to make sure that we are always out there, working every day to make this a better country.

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