[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 207 (Tuesday, December 8, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7251-S7253]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Farewell to the Senate
Mr. UDALL. Madam President, I thank Senator Schumer for those kind
remarks earlier.
As you know, I announced last year that I wasn't running for
reelection, and if I had known everyone was going to be so nice to me,
I might have announced it earlier.
I am not the only Senator who is giving a farewell speech. Many of us
got to hear Lamar Alexander last week. Lamar is the perfect example of
what a U.S. Senator should be. Before I was wet behind the ears in the
Senate, in my first week here, Lamar invited me and Jill, my wife, to
dinner. There it began. Jill and Honey, Lamar's wife, became fast
friends, and Lamar and I grew closer, building the kind of friendship
that is essential here in the Senate. We worked together to get things
done for our States in bolstering our National Laboratories and
conserving our great outdoors. Something else we shared was Mario, our
barber in the Senate barbershop. To be honest, that is the best place
to learn the wisdom of the Senate--by sitting in Mario's chair.
Friendships like I have with Lamar and Mario are what I will miss
most about the Senate. It is the friendships because, as any good
Senator will tell you, friendships are what get you over the finish
line. I will cherish the friendships I have forged over the last 12
years.
I will miss serving the people of New Mexico in Congress. The
greatest honor of my life has been doing that, and I am confident that
New Mexico will be in good hands with my friend Senator Heinrich, my
great partner over the last 8 years. With his dedicated advocacy for
our communities and his love of the land--all of that--Martin has been
an inspiration, and Senator-Elect Ben Ray Lujan, whom I have the
privilege of calling a friend, I know will fight for New Mexico
families every single day in the Senate.
I will miss the righteous struggle we take up in these Halls to build
a more perfect Union, and I will miss all of you--my staff, colleagues,
and everyone who works around the clock--and the unsung heroes who keep
the Senate running, people like John, Leigh, Mary Anne, and all of the
folks who are here in front of you. There are too many to thank.
First and foremost, I thank my staff. Every Senator here knows we are
only as good as the people on our teams, and as my friend Patrick Leahy
says, we Senators are often just a constitutional impediment to the
staff. Over the years, I have been blessed with staffers who are full
of talent, skill, drive, and heart.
I don't want to leave anyone out, so I ask unanimous consent to have
printed in the Record a list of all of my staff who have been part of
Team Udall
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Ned Adriance, Anna Alexander, Beverly Allen, Anna Apodaca,
Gabe Apodaca, Lauren Arias, Michael Bales, Paloma Arroyo-
Lefebre, Jonathan Black, Greg Bloom, Jessica Borchert, Billy
Busch, Rene Camacho, Xochitl Campos, Jack Carpenter, Nick
Carter, Sameer Chintamani, Dorcas Cisse, Leeanne Clark, Sarah
Cobb, Emma Coghlan, Jennifer Collins, Michael Collins,
Clinton Cowan, Tiffany Cox, Laura Creech, Walter Cross, Kevin
Cummins, Cal Curley, Laura Davidson, Reyes De La Cruz,
Sabrina De Santiago, Leticia Delgado, Francesca Di Palma,
Kristine Dietz, Meredith Dixon, Noelle Dominguez, Elizabeth
Driggers, Pablo Duran, Roger Duran.
Bobbie Ferrell, Rachel Fleischer, Meagan Foster, Tannis
Fox, Claudette Frausto, Julia Friedmann, Jenna Frosch, Adam
Fullerton, Ariel Garayar, Jack Gardner, Renee Gasper, Cara
Gilbert, Fern Goodhart, Melanie Goodman, Marco Grajeda,
Jessica Grubesic, Stephenne Harding, Jesse Hale, Emma
Hamilton, Miranda Hernandez, Sierra Howlett, Cynthia Hull,
Carolyn Ice, Michele Jacquez-Ortiz, Stephen Jochem, Michael
Johnson, Alex Jordan, Michelle Kavanaugh, Edward Kellum, Sean
Kennedy, Caroline Klaff, Stephanie Kuo, Talia Lapid, Jeffrey
Lopez, Michael Lopez, Yesenia Luna, Jeanette Lyman, Rachel
Marchand, Crystal Martinez, Jaime McCarthy.
Jake McCook, Amber McDowell, Everette McKoy, Matt Miller,
Elisa Morales, Donda Morgan, Rachel Montoya, Raven Murray,
Tom Nagle, Ben Nathanson, Matt Nelson, Casey O'Neill, Annie
Orloff, Steven Ortega, Bianca Ortiz Wertheim, Marissa
Padilla, Matthew Padilla, Olivia Padilla, Russell Page,
Carmela Quintana, Anna Rael Delay, Eddie Render, Alyssa
Roberts, Kelly Romero, Rene Romo, Ken Rooney, Zachary
Rosenberg, Carlos Sanchez, Joshua Sanchez, Ben Salazar, Laura
Salgado, Alethea Scally, Alicia Schreiner, Anthony Sedillo,
Kelly Seibert, Leo Sheehan, Sam Simon, Alyson Sincavage,
Joshua Sisneros, Jeffrey Stein.
Jake Stewart, Kristina Swallow, Tomas Talamante, Jennifer
Talhelm, Michael Thorning, Xochitl Torres Small, Patsy
Trujillo, Lisa Van Theemsche, Roberto Vasquez, Anna Vavruska,
Andrew Wallace, Daniel Watson, Zoe Wilson-Meyer, David
Williams, Devon Wohl, Bill Woldman, Timothy Woodbury,
Veronica Yoo, Jan Zastrow.
Mr. UDALL. I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to
each of you for your hard work, your public service, and your
commitment.
I want to thank my family--my parents Stewart and Lee Udall, who
instilled in me the will to do good and to be good.
To my brothers, sisters--my sister Lori, who is here--and cousins who
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have supported me throughout my three decades in elected office, thank
you.
To Amanda, our daughter, who is my forever campaign manager, and to
Judge Jim, our son-in-law and just recently a judge in New Mexico, I
thank them for their constant love and support.
Most importantly, thank you to my brilliant and beautiful partner of
42 years, Jill Cooper Udall. Jill has been my rock. She has been my
chief counsel. She has been my everything, and I couldn't have asked
for a better partner with whom to have this public adventure.
It has truly been an adventure for this son of the West, for after
20-plus years, it is time for me to go back home. As the great western
writer Wallace Stegner wrote, ``It is not an unusual life curve for
Westerners to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space,
clarity, and hopefulness of the West--to go away for study and
enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can
give--and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the
loyalty and demands the commitment.''
Stegner said that we fall into two categories. We are either boomers
or stickers. Boomers ``pillage and run.'' Stickers are ``motivated by
affection, by such a love for place and its life that they want to
preserve it and remain in it.''
I am telling you here today that I am a sticker. I am also an
optimist. I want to be more accurate: I am a troubled optimist. I have
tried to open my eyes to the challenges we face, while never losing
conviction in our ability to meet those challenges.
As the scientist Rachel Carson said, one way to open your eyes is to
ask yourself, ``What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I
would never see it again?''
I believe this Nation has arrived at a moment when we are opening our
eyes to the enormous challenges before us and also to their solutions.
Our planet is in crisis--facing mass extinction and climate change. Our
people are in coronavirus--ravaged by a pandemic that has laid bare the
inequities of our society. Also, our democracy is in crisis as the
people's faith in their government is shaken.
We cannot solve one of these crises without solving the others, and
that is why I am troubled, but all I have to do to be optimistic is to
look around me. I look at the young people across this country who are
calling for change, for climate action, for voting rights, for
immigrant rights, and for economic, environmental, and racial justice.
They have held sit-ins in my office--probably in yours too. They are
demanding that we do better, and their determination gives me hope. I
am optimistic as I look back on the small acts of kindness and the big
acts of progress that define my time in the Congress. I believe that
there are lessons in these accomplishments.
Now, you may know me as someone who wants to reform the filibuster,
but to be clear, I have always supported the talking filibuster. So, if
you will indulge me--and by the rules of the Senate, you have to; you
can leave, but I get to keep talking--
(Laughter.)
--I would like to talk about a few of the highlights of my career and
what I have learned from them.
As you know, protecting America's outdoor treasures is a cause close
to my heart. It is something of a family project. My family homesteaded
in the West almost 180 years ago, and like generations of Udalls before
me, I grew up with a special connection to the land--to the gorgeous,
untamed beauty of the West, to the 60-mile vistas, to the snow-covered,
rugged mountains, alpine lakes, and abundant wildlife. Mitt Romney
knows this, for our great-grandfathers settled the same small western
community. Stegner called the West the ``geography of hope.'' It sure
is for me. It is what has inspired much of my public service, and that
is why I am so proud of what we have accomplished together to conserve
our natural heritage.
On the Appropriations Committee, we have worked together for
resources for our public lands and environmental protection, on a
bipartisan basis, in the face of massive proposed cuts, and we have
held off anti-environmental riders that have had no place in these
bills.
Thank you to my friend Lisa Murkowski, who has been the best partner
I could ask for in this work. In New Mexico, where public lands are
central to our way of life, we have had enormous success unlocking tens
of thousands of acres of enchanted land for all of us to enjoy--and for
Martin to hunt on every now and then. Each of these efforts was
collaborative and community-driven, and that collaborative work has
culminated in one of the biggest conservation victories in American
history--the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act. Thanks to the
determination of a grassroots coalition and many champions here in
Congress, we got this bill over the finish line.
For the first time, we have realized the promise of the Land and
Water Conservation Fund--the promise my father envisioned almost 55
years ago, when he helped to create our Nation's most successful
conservation program. After more than 20 years of fighting for this in
Congress, I am thrilled we have gotten it done, and we have gotten it
done together.
The law is a model for how conservation and economic recovery can go
hand in hand. It will help us to achieve the urgent goal of protecting
30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030. Enacting the Great American
Outdoors Act, at a time of immense division, is a tremendous feat, and
it tells us a lot about what we are capable of. It tells us that
conservation is popular--a political winner. Environmental protection
can be an area of cooperative action, and it must be if humanity is to
survive and prosper.
As I talk about my love of the land, I cannot neglect to acknowledge
how much I have learned from the original stewards of this land--Native
Americans, indigenous people. I got my start in politics by working
with my father in fighting alongside the Navajo uranium miners who had
been hurt and many who had died. They had been hurt by this Nation, by
our nuclear weapons program. My work as vice chair of the Indian
Affairs Committee has been the honor of a lifetime and another area in
which this committee has achieved bipartisan progress.
I thank my chairmen, Senator Hoeven and Senator Barrasso before him,
for their partnership and friendship. We have worked together as a
committee for better healthcare, education, housing, and urgently
needed resources for Native communities, especially as they battle this
pandemic.
The Federal Government's obligation to uphold its trust and treaty
obligations is sacred. Some of my proudest achievements have been the
result of working with Tribal leaders to advance the Indian Country's
priorities and to support New Mexico's 23 Tribes
Recently, a bipartisan coalition passed legislation to strengthen the
principle of Tribal self-governance, provide Native entrepreneurs
critical resources, and secure investments in Native language
revitalization.
The achievements I remember most fondly are ones like these--those we
did together. Indeed, those are the only kinds of achievements that are
possible in this body.
Take the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century
Act--our landmark reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act. It was
the biggest environmental reform in a generation. I was proud to lead
that effort to protect our families from toxic chemicals. It was hard
work, and it took years. But if you can get a project where Jim Inhofe
and Ed Markey are working for the same goal, you can get a lot done
around here.
It is another example of how friendships get you over the finish
line. My friendship with David Vitter, my partner on TSCA reform, was
sort of like Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch's friendship, a political odd
couple--me, the son of Mormon pioneers; David, a son of New Orleans--
two very different political backgrounds and different views on the big
problems before us.
But I will never forget the dinner we had after Frank Lautenberg
passed away, when we decided to take on TSCA reform. We looked at each
other after that dinner and shook hands and said: We are going to get
this done.
And we did. It passed the Senate unanimously. We agreed that there
was a problem, and we found common ground on a solution. That is still
possible in the Senate.
But I didn't come here to just list accomplishments. You can check my
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Twitter feed if you want to see more of that. I do want to share some
final thoughts about challenges our Nation faces before I leave the
Senate.
I believe that, for all of us here, public service is a calling. It
certainly is for me. In my life I have had the privilege of learning
from many dedicated servants. One of them was Senator John McCain.
Senator McCain was a friend to me and a friend to my family. When
John first came to the House, my Uncle Mo--big Uncle Mo, 6 feet 5
inches--took him under his wing. John did the same for me, and we
worked together on issues like campaign finance reform, Native American
issues, and others.
John often said to me: ``We disagree in politics--but not in life.''
Let's remember that. ``We disagree in politics--but not in life.''
My great-grandfather helped settle St. John's, a small farming and
cattle community on the Arizona-New Mexico border, in the 1880s. He had
an embroidery that hung on his frontier home that read: ``If the good
folks don't get into politics, the scoundrels will take over.''
I believe there are a lot of good folks here in the Senate, but the
system we are caught in makes it too hard to work together. We need to
remember that we disagree in politics but not in life.
I am not the first to say in a farewell address, and I won't be the
last: But the Senate is broken. The Senate is broken, and it is not
working for the American people.
We are becoming better and better political warriors. We are good at
landing a punch, at exposing the hypocrisy, and at riling each other
up, but we aren't fostering our better angels. Our peacemaking skills
are atrophied. Every hurt takes time to heal, and each time we hurt
each other, it sets us back.
But, unfortunately, the structures we have built reward us for
hurting one another. We need to reform those structures or we will
never make that progress we need to make.
I have proposed Senate rules changes when I was in the minority and
when I was in the majority to make sure this institution does not
remain a graveyard for progress.
The Founders did not envision a Senate requiring 60 votes to act. The
filibuster came to be through historical accident, and it is now woven
into the institutional framework. The promise of the filibuster is that
the majority will find common ground with the minority, but the reality
of the filibuster is paralysis--a deep paralysis.
On top of this, we have a campaign finance system that is out of
control. John McCain told you that over and over again, and he called
money the cancer growing on our democracy. And John McCain knew a lot
about cancer.
Secret money floods campaigns to buy influence instead of letting the
voters speak. Voting rights are under attack. We can do our best to be
good people in a system like that, but it is no surprise that America's
faith in government is declining.
These structures are antidemocratic. They reward extremism. They
punish compromise.
Our government is supposed to respond to the will of the majority
while protecting the rights of the minority. Instead, we have ``the
tyranny of the minority.'' That tyranny is super wealthy, politically
powerful, and dangerously out of touch with the American people.
The majority of Americans support pandemic relief, healthcare for
every American, action on global warming, racial justice and police
reform, and so many other priorities that don't see much progress in
the Senate.
People are losing their faith in the system--rightfully so. We have
to do something to fix this.
If we are to take bold action necessary to tackle the urgent problems
before us, we must reform our democracy. We must make it easier to
vote. We must end the dominance of Big Money, and we must root out
corruption.
And we do not have any time to waste. We have no choice but to be
bold because the crises before us demand bravery. Hundreds of thousands
of Americans are dead from a pandemic--a pandemic that this
administration has callously ignored, a consequence of its continued
rejection of science. In New Mexico, we have surpassed 108,000 cases,
over 1,700 are dead, and tens of thousands have lost their jobs.
Meanwhile, our Nation is facing dual climate and nature crises of
epic proportions. Earlier this year, much of the American West was
engulfed in wildfire. As an arid State, New Mexico is in the crosshairs
of climate change. We lose a football field's worth of nature every 30
seconds.
A million species are at risk of extinction because of human
activity. Our planet's life support system is under threat. As the
climate crisis worsens, ecosystems are destroyed, and as ecosystems are
destroyed, we emit more harmful greenhouse gases. We cannot solve one
crisis without solving the other.
Protecting nature is about protecting humanity. It is just that
simple. And marginalized communities, communities of color, low-income
communities, and indigenous people are bearing the worst consequences
of the environmental destruction and pollution caused by the rich and
the powerful.
We have the power to solve these crises--the power and the
obligation. All it takes is clear eyes and political will and
remembering that we may disagree in politics but not in the future that
we want for our children.
When I was a young man, I spent the summer of 1969 in the mountains
of Colorado, teaching students wilderness skills. Each night, we would
look up and open our eyes to the Moon. It seemed impossibly far away.
I am reminded of Rachel Carson's words: ``One way to open your eyes
is to ask, what if I had never seen this before?''
When we emerged from the wilderness, we learned what Apollo 11 had
achieved. We had landed on the Moon--the Moon that seemed so impossibly
far away.
We should never forget that we can do--we, all of us, can do--the
impossible when we open our eyes to the challenge and work together to
meet it.
So as I return home to the West, I am clear-eyed about--even troubled
by--how far away our destination is. But I am optimistic that we will
get there, like we always have.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. HEINRICH. Madam President, it is my honor today to commend the
senior Senator from New Mexico, my longtime partner in this Chamber, my
good friend Tom Udall, for his years of service to our great State of
New Mexico and to our Nation.
Before I speak about Tom, I would like to quickly take a moment, too,
to recognize the service of Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small over
these last 2 years.
Congresswoman Torres Small actually served for a time in Senator
Udall's office in Las Cruces, and for these last 2 years in the House
of Representatives, she has dedicated herself to delivering resources
for the people of southern New Mexico. And I am so very grateful to
have served alongside Xochitl in our congressional delegation, and I am
greatly looking forward to seeing how she will contribute her heart and
her talents to New Mexico next. She certainly learned a great deal from
our senior Senator.