Politicians From Boston

"To think that, when Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama at American University, after the defeat in New Hampshire, I believe that was a big moment for the Obama campaign. It really gave it a new spirit. I've also been told that very early in the process, when Obama was thinking about running, it was a conversation with Kennedy that gave him a little fortitude to go ahead into the race."

"The bipartisan spirit of McCain's long collaboration with Edward Kennedy and other Democratic senators is no surprise. McCain calls Kennedy "the lion of the Senate," as indeed Teddy is - perhaps our finest senator ever. Jack Kennedy, too, was bipartisan, appointing two Republicans to his cabinet. McCain, one of the two or three most bipartisan national figures of our day, has worked with Democrats on the environment, court appointments, campaign finance, immigration and more. Obama has the most extreme partisan voting record of any senator. Now, gambling his candidacy on a dynamic young Alaska governor, McCain has confirmed his independence as a leader not bound by the insider politics of Washington."

"Senator McCain is a war veteran, POW survivor and presidential candidate. His courage has never been in question. But cancer cares nothing about heroism, and only five out of 100 people outlive glioblastoma; according to the best studies available, their survival was not due to willpower or fighting spirit. Teddy Kennedy and Beau Biden lacked for neither, and both were felled by the disease. If "battling cancer" has long been a misguided metaphor, it seems spectacularly inapposite in connection with the redoubtable John McCain."

"While we didn’t see eye to eye on many political issues through the years, I always respected his steadfast public service. Ted Kennedy was a seminal figure in the U.S. Senate — a leader who answered the call to duty for some 47 years, and whose death closes a remarkable chapter in that body’s history."

"There are ways of trying to undermine that, which the opposition is very clever at. I find that the arguments are old and they’re tired, but they still have a ring to them: the idea that you’re going to have a bureaucrat in every hospital who will be making medical decisions, the idea that hospitals will close, that doctors will leave, that the expenses will go on up through the roof, that you’ll have socialized medicine. All of these features can be manipulated in ways that can impact and affect people’s fundamental decency."

"You had this dramatic contrast between the system that was just wringing the last ounce of humanity out of a family, and this other system that was dealing with it in a humane and decent way, and a more economic way in terms of the whole process. I mean that was just one—I can remember it just as clearly as I’m here. You know, these things don’t leave you."

"Then—this was very interesting—in Canada, the family with the spina bifida child, and they were taking care of it. While the mother had the spina bifida child, she had a family of four: three of them had graduated from high school and were out. She had one left, and she went and adopted three children who were disabled, and the governmental system paid for taking care of them—the food and the clothing and a stipend for the housing. You’d ask the mother why she took in these children and the mother’s response was, "I want to teach this child what love is all about.""

"And they are just as much out there today. You could have that same hearing today in Chicago and you could have it in any city in America, and have the exact same results on it, and that part has even grown, because you’ve got so many more—I mean, I use the example of the parents that hear a child cry in the night and wonder whether they are $485 sick, because that’s what it costs to go to an emergency room. They listen to the child. Is the child getting better or sicker? They wait until the child finally goes to sleep and wonder whether the child is going to be worse in the morning, because they can’t afford the $500. Or they take that $500 that they put aside to educate their kids, and it’s gone. And that is what’s happening all across the country."

"The way the system works, obviously, is whoever is the senior one gets the choice of the different committees. It appeared to me that Claiborne Pell was going to take the Health Committee and I was going to be on the Education Committee. I liked Senator Pell. I had been in the Senate for five years, and although that sounds like a long time, in time of the Senate it was a short time, and I’d been out a good chunk of that time because of the plane crash in ’64—I’d spent’64 out of it, and ’63 was a difficult year. Then we had the ’68 campaign and that was a difficult year as well. But now, in ’69, we’re looking at both the committees and where I’m going to spend time and how I can be the most useful and productive."

"The other part of Labor said that they don’t want any part of this program for universal coverage, because they want to be able to deliver it as part of their organizing. They want to be able to go out and say, “Join my union because we’re going to give you health insurance.” They’re not as interested in universal coverage, because that’s going to take away a major kind of an appeal that they would have. So you had lip service. You had some who were very strongly for it—the industrial unions; others who said they were for it and really were not; and others who basically sat on their hands because they said, “Why are we going along with this Kennedy proposal when we can use this as an organizing tool? We’re losing members, and we’re losing support in terms of working—this is a key way of getting it. It’s got a lot of grassroots support, and we use it as an organizing tool.” Of course they didn’t use it as an organizing tool. They didn’t do the follow-up on it. Andy Biemiller and [George] Meany and the other follow-on leaders were not interested really, in following Lane Kirkland. Lane Kirkland was more interested in the international Labor movement. I mean, he was somewhat interested in solidarity. He did do some good work in terms of the support of international, but he wasn’t really interested in this. We had a hard time keeping all of that moving."

"This was a very powerful presentation, in terms of starkness, about health and health insurance and coverage, and basically the moral issue presented here. We were all in the same circumstance. This is a very rare disease that could have happened to anybody. It happened to a United States Senator; it happened to children of working families. There was nothing that they could do about it, and they were being put through this kind of system. This is about as stark as you can get, in terms of the compelling aspects of this issue. A secondary issue that came up that’s related to the public policy is family and medical leave. I’d have to leave the Senate on Friday, and I could go and tell Mike Mansfield that I wasn’t going to be there. Just in terms of the votes, I wasn’t going to be there. It wasn’t a question about me not—I should be with my son and I was going to be with him, but I wasn’t going to lose my job because I was leaving, and I was getting paid for it while I was gone. I was getting paid leave on this."

"Experimental research basis by the NIH. There were probably less than a hundred that had gone through it, but they had had positive numbers on that. Before that, it was very tough; the survival rate was not good, you know, 15 to 20 percent. But after this it was 85 or 90 percent. So that was enormously encouraging. After about three months of my being involved in it, they had completed the whole regime for it. While it’s an experimental drug, it’s paid for by the company or whoever is producing it. But once it’s stopped, the payment stops, and these families had to pick it up. Since it’s an experiment, none of the insurance would cover it, except mine, which is Senate insurance, federal employees’ insurance. The cost is $2,700 a treatment. These parents would be in the waiting room—they had sold their house for $20,000 or $30,000, or mortgaged it completely, eating up all their savings, and they could only fund their treatment for six months, or eight months, or a year—and they were asking the doctor what chance their child had if they could only do half the treatment. Did they have a 50 percent chance of survival? A 60 percent chance of survival?"

"At the time that we were debating family and medical leave, these families would lose their jobs if they didn’t show up, let alone get paid for it, you know? They would either lose their job for not showing up, or at least lose their pay, because they didn’t have the kind of coverage that we had in the United States Senate. That was at the same time that we were debating the family medical leave, and here you had about the most stark—the decision that parents have to make about whether to be with a child or—to have the job that they need, or the job that they love. I didn’t use the example of Teddy, really, during the debate, until the very end, during the final windup. After President [[George H. W. Bush|[George H.W.] Bush]] I vetoed it in 1992, I sort of pulled out the stops on it."

"I was exposed to the most extraordinary groups of doctors and nurses at the Lahey Clinic. Dr. [Herbert] Adams, who was the head doctor up there—there may have been a day when he didn’t come in and see me, but I don’t remember it. This included Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, the whole time I was up there. The commitment and the dedication of the doctors and the nurses, and the support systems and the professionals, was just breathtaking. I think it probably led me to the very strong commitment that I’ve always had, politically, to strong support for nurses, for support personnel, because I always recognized their indispensable role. The doctors, yes, but the support personnel for their patience and their time. During the period when Teddy—Now we’re probably into ’74, so we’ll have to come back to how this intersected with the policy judgments and decisions. It was all within a few years of each other—the dramatic time that I had in the Dana-Farber Institute in Boston with my son Teddy. He had a treatment and we found out that he had this leg cancer that required the loss of his leg, and that’s a special circumstance that we can get into."

"So healthcare was something that had a real powerful impact. Also, in 1962, I remember the incident when my brother lost a baby to hyaline membrane disease. The child lived three days and then died at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. The interesting factor and force of all of this is that, if the child had been born two years later, it would have survived. The progress that was made in medical research would have permitted the child to survive. Here was the person who was the President of the United States, with all of the assets that he could have, and still was unable to see a positive outcome of this. Within all of that, financial security was certainly present. It was present also in 1964 when I had the plane crash we’ve described earlier. I was able to get medical attention, initially up at the Cooley Dickenson Hospital, and then later at the Lahey Clinic that was located in Boston, before it moved down outside of Boston in later years."

"After we made a judgment about which regime we were going to follow—there had been several recommendations, and we spent hours trying to make a decision. What was interesting was that there were alternative ways of proceeding, and when the final decision was made, which I made, those who had different regimes were all very supportive. There was a real coming together of people who were all looking for a common resolution and solution to the challenges they were involved in. They all had different pathways, but nonetheless, once the judgment was made, they all were incredibly supportive. It required that Teddy spend three days every three weeks at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, taking methotrexate, which is a medication that helps kill cancer cells, and this other medication [citrovorum] that helps to alleviate some of the adverse effects of methotrexate. That involved me giving him shots, which I did, both before he came on up to Boston and then right after he had finished the immediate treatment—for the next couple of days intensively, and in the night a couple of times, and then periodically, every four or five days after that."

"I spent six months in the hospital and five months in a Stryker frame—six months in all—when my back was broken, and I saw the dedication of the people. I knew it was costing a chunk of change for the insurance companies to cover my health insurance on it, but it didn’t present itself—the starkness, the compelling aspects—about the pocketbook. And that has never left me. That aspect of it I’ve been constantly exposed to in the time that I’ve been in the United States Senate, and I go back to it on many different occasions, on the different hearings or things that follow this. One very important set of hearings that I had in the Senate were the hearings in the—We’re getting ahead a little bit but it’s probably worthwhile pointing out because it’s close to this subject matter. In ’78, when we took the committee across the country, we tried to match up, in the hearing, the panel that we’d have. We’d have one panel and we’d have probably ten witnesses, but we’d group them so that there were five subject matters. We would have the way that the United States covered the particular illness, and the way the Canadians covered it, just to present to the American people the difference, you know, how the systems were in terms of real life circumstances. We’d have what were common experiences in the particular areas that families would be affected."

"I was elected to the Senate, and in the early years as my family arrived I was exposed to the power of asthma with a small child, Patrick [Kennedy]. We detected when he was two that he was a chronic asthmatic. He had the test that is given to children, where they have pinpricks along their arm—I think it’s 24 pinpricks—of different kinds of allergies. His arm looked like a nuclear meltdown; it just absolutely reddened, all of it. He was allergic to everything. My brother Jack [John F.] Kennedy was allergic to cat fur and my sister Pat [Patricia Kennedy Lawford] had allergies, and maybe the others had some, but I certainly noticed those as they were growing up. My brother Jack would come back to the Cape and would go into his room, and he’d come out about an hour later, storming mad, wondering who let the cat sleep in the bed while he had been away, or some cat had come on in. He’d be battling the allergies for the next several hours."

"I suppose the first major challenge that I saw was in 1961 when my father had the very serious stroke, which really disabled him in a very important way. He lived on for a number of years afterwards, but I saw the enormous—I was exposed to the dramatic moments of the time right after he had that stroke, about whether he was going to live or die, and also to the whole issue of being significantly disabled, and the corresponding actions of incredible care and loving attention that he was able to receive. The dedication of nurses and healthcare personnel, and the patience and the love and commitment of so many of those who worked with him, took an immense amount of time. Attention to this was a very powerful factor in terms of my whole observation of this part of my life. He eventually went to the Rusk Institute in New York and got specialized attention from this fellow, Henry Betts, who is still alive and now runs an institute in Chicago. Betts was a junior figure to [Howard A.] Rusk, who was the national leader in rehabilitation. This was a first dramatic opening in my life, other than Rosemary."

"When Patrick developed it, we brought in medical experts at least once a year and sometimes twice a year, from around the country. They came in at nighttime. They would examine Patrick and talk with him, and then they would go off by themselves and have a meeting at a hotel, and then they would come over in the morning and brief me on their understanding of his condition, and their recommendations. Since he was chronic, there was a whole series of different types of medications that they would talk about, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. That continued all the way up through his graduation from Andover, even in his last year at Andover. The last meeting was at the Parker House in Boston. He had some time off and my son [Edward M. Kennedy, Jr.] Teddy was going to take some time off, so the three of us were going to go away, and the doctor said, "Don’t go further than 35 or 40 minutes from a hospital." So we went down to Key Biscayne, because we were 35 minutes away from the hospitals down in Miami. So, it was a major factor and a force as he was growing."

"I thought maybe I’d start off initially with my association with the health issue and also the family’s association with the health issue and why it was a central force in my life growing up, and with my early days in the United States Senate—how the opportunity to become involved in it from a policy point of view, in many respects, goes back to my own observations about the importance of health in a personal way, but also in a way that exposed me as a young person to the policy considerations, and the impact that it had on me."

"Many Iraqis have been working with our Armed Forces, our diplomatic mission, and our reconstruction teams in Iraq and have performed valiantly, and their lives are at risk. Many have lost their lives and many more have lost their homes, their property, and their livelihood. For some, it will be too dangerous to ever return home. America has a special obligation to keep faith with the Iraqis who now have a bulls-eye on their back because of their association with our Government. Our bipartisan legislation will establish the kind of process that Ambassador Crocker, David Keene, Julia Taft, Roy Medved, Lanny Davis, and many others have called for to help these Iraqis who have sacrificed so much for the United States. I ask unanimous consent that the Washington Post article and other articles I have mentioned be printed in the Record. I urge my colleagues to support our legislation, S. 1651, to keep the faith with the many brave Iraqis whose lives are in great danger because they have the courage to work with the United States."

"I have commented, probably earlier in our discussions, about the fact that my sister Rosemary [Kennedy] was mentally and intellectually challenged, and how she always was considered special in our family. As a small child, I found that I could play with children that were my age, or in many instances I would find that she was both available, acceptable, and desiring to play ball with me. We’d take a soccer ball and either play soccer, or bounce a lighter ball, like a beach ball, and play tag with it, or other children’s games. She always seemed to be willing to spend more time with me than the others, who were always distracted in playing other games. I noticed that she had some special kinds of needs. I observed that early as a child. I didn’t understand it in the early years, and it took a while, obviously, to grasp the full dimensions of that, but I noticed that that was different. The regular kinds of childhood activities with childhood accidents when I was growing up were probably not different from other kinds of activities of large families."

"Later, in the early ’70s, we were faced with the health challenges that Teddy was facing with cancer of the leg. I always thought it was osteosarcoma, but I’ve been told it may have been chondrosarcoma. I remember very clearly his talking about and complaining about a bump on his leg, and how it wasn’t getting any better and it was getting sorer. One morning I was headed to Boston and I was getting briefed about the various health meetings I was having in Boston. One of the staff people, Phil Caper, was also a doctor, and I had mentioned to Phil about the swelling. He examined Teddy and said, “You’ve got to get an X-ray on it right away.” I remember hearing later in the morning when I was up in Boston, about how they looked at the X-ray and saw the cancer, and that this was just enormously serious—life threatening. It was going to take immediate and dramatic action, which presented a wide range of both emotional and real decisions about the removal of his leg—the conversation prior to that time and the conversation after that time. At the same time, my niece was getting married, Kathleen [Kennedy]. So this was a very emotional, roller-coaster period in my life. And then much later, my daughter Kara [Kennedy] found out that she had lung cancer. That was as a result of a picture that had been taken of her lung after—She had pain in her shoulder and was under medical attention for stenosis, and the very good doctor suggested that they take a picture of the shoulder. They found that she had lung cancer, and we had to move within a matter of hours. We went, later that afternoon, up to Johns Hopkins and had discussions up there with their medical team, which were very unsatisfactory. Then we had medical consultations with some experts and made a decision to follow a different route, which was surgery, which has worked out very successfully. She’s now four or five years free from any cancer."

"One of the most dramatic that I still remember so clearly was in Chicago. It was two families that had children who had spina bifida. In the U.S. family the mother was a schoolteacher and the husband was a construction worker, and they made a good chunk of change and had a very good life. There was one other child in the family. Then the mother had to stop teaching school to take care of the child because it got sicker and sicker. And then, because the mother got run down, the husband quit his job. They went through all their savings looking after this child, and the result was that the state was going to take away the child because the parents could no longer take care of this child. You had the mother and the father completely distraught about this. This was out in Chicago."

"You know, it depends on the unions, about where they are. Some of them have got other issues that are as important, if not more important, in terms of the narrow Labor issues. All of the railroad unions were concerned about Amtrak—that’s 31 of the unions who were all concerned about—that’s their particular part of it. The building trades were concerned about independent contracting. And they’re worried about immigration and this kind of thing that they get on the health. The number one issue for Labor today is the Employee Free Choice Act, to permit them to have card check-offs for organizing. That’s really the most powerful, although you still—this is one of the four or five issues that they’ll list, but they’ve got other issues as well. In a number of areas there is a heightened interest on the part of Labor, because in an increasing number of these negotiations they are losing ground because they are having to pay higher co-pays and higher deductibles. Therefore, it’s becoming more of an issue at the bargaining table, where it was sort off the bargaining table for years. Even in the UAW, it was never—all they would do is continue to make progress in coverage, and now they’re in a gradual kind of retreat. They made this macro deal recently, where they developed a foundation to offload some of the expenses—a rather complicated financial deal that helped them get out from some of the legacy costs on it. But I’d say that now, in many more union disputes, healthcare is front and center, but they still care about some of these other issues. We could go on in terms of where we are in the ’70s. We’ve gone through pretty much on Nixon."

"In a March 6, 2000, letter to Senator Levin, Dr. Rice assured the Congress that the United Nations inspectors had been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction missile and UAV-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified. In fact, we had not done so. Dr. Rice was plain wrong. The Intelligence Committee report on the prewar intelligence at page 418 stated: "Public pronouncements by Administration officials that the Central Intelligence Agency had shared information on all high and moderate priority suspect sites with United Nations inspectors were factually incorrect." Had Dr. Rice and others in the administration shared all of the information, it might have changed the course of history. We might have discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction. The rush to war might have been stopped. We would have stayed focused on the real threat, kept faith with our allies, and would be safer today. America is in deep trouble in Iraq today because of our misguided policy, and the quagmire is very real. Nearly 1,400 of our finest men and women in uniform have been killed and more than 10,000 have been wounded. We now know that Saddam had no nuclear weapons, had no weapons of mass destruction of any kind, and that the war has not made America safer from the threat of al-Qaida. Instead, as the National Intelligence Council recently stated, the war has made Iraq a breeding ground for terrorism that previously did not exist. As a result, the war has made us less secure, not more secure. It has increased support for al-Qaida, made America more hated in the world, and made it much harder to win the real war against terrorism, the war against al-Qaida. Before we can repair our broken policy, the administration needs to admit it is broken. Yet in 2 days of confirmation hearings, Dr. Rice categorically defended the President's decision to invade Iraq, saying the strategic decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was the right one. She defended the President's decision to ignore the advice of GEN Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, who thought that a large number of troops would be necessary if we went to war. She said: "I do believe that the plan and forces that we went in with were appropriate to the task.""

"There is a critical question about accountability. Dr. Rice was a principal architect and advocate of the decision to go to war in Iraq at a time when our mission in Afghanistan was not complete and Osama bin Laden was a continuing threat because of our failure to track him down. In the Armed Services Committee before the war, generals advised against the rush to war, but Dr. Rice and others in the administration pressed forward anyway despite the clear warnings. Dr. Rice was the first in the administration to invoke the terrifying image of a nuclear holocaust to justify the need to go to war in Iraq. On September 9, 2002, as Congress was first considering the resolution to authorize the war, Dr. Rice said: We do not want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud. In fact, as we now know, there was significant disagreement in the intelligence community that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, but Dr. Rice spoke instead about a consensus in the intelligence community that the infamous aluminum tubes were for the development of nuclear weapons. On the eve of the war many of us argued that inspectors should be given a chance to do their job and that America should share information to facilitate their work."

"She refused to disavow the shameful acts of torture that have undermined America's credibility in Iraq and the world. When Senator Dodd asked her whether in her personal view, as a matter of basic humanity, the interrogation techniques amounted to torture, she said: "I'm not going to speak to any specific interrogation techniques . . . The determination of whether interrogation techniques are consistent with our international obligations and American law are made by the Justice Department. I don't want to comment on any specific interrogation techniques." This is after Senator Dodd asked about water-boarding and other interrogation techniques. She continued: "I don't think that would be appropriate, and I think it would not be very good for American security." Yet, as Secretary of State, Dr. Rice will be the chief human rights official for our Government. She will be responsible for monitoring human rights globally, and defending America's human rights record. She cannot abdicate that responsibility or hide behind the Justice Department if Secretary of State."

"I have no illusions that the work ahead will be easy, or that the debates in Congress will be easily resolved. We had to disagree, discuss, and listen to each other to reach the historic reform in education that the President has just signed into law. Positions that were once regarded as non-negotiable had to give way. We will not end all our differences, nor should we yield on fundamental principles in which we believe. Of course, some will disagree with some of the proposals I have made today. Some no doubt will disagree with most or all of them. But surely, for example, a future tax cut for the wealthiest, which they have not yet received, is not a matter of high principle. We have more urgent needs at home as well as abroad. And we cannot be strong abroad if we are weak at home. So I look forward to this new session of Congress, to the dialogue ahead, and the progress we can make. This is a time of testing unlike any other in our history. Our adversaries thought they could force us to retreat. But we will not and must not retreat -- abroad or at home. The American people have shown that they are ready for great missions that meet the demands of this new age. They are the creators of the new spirit of September 11th. Now, we in public life must match the standard the people have set. I intend to do my best to see that we do what is best -- not just for one political party or the other, but for America and its enduring ideal of "liberty and justice for all.""

"We can achieve 350 billion dollars in savings by avoiding these future reductions in the tax rates paid by the wealthiest taxpayers in the highest income brackets, and by maintaining the tax on estates above 4 million dollars. These wealthiest taxpayers will receive less of a tax reduction than they anticipated -- but they will still be receiving billions of dollars in new tax breaks. These future tax cuts for those at the top are not part of the fight against the recession. They are not scheduled to occur until long after the economy emerges from the downturn. In fact, taking fiscally responsible action now will actually help the economy -- by leading to reductions in long-term interest rates that have remained stubbornly high because of the fear that unaffordable tax cuts will lead to growing federal deficits throughout the decade. Reducing that threat will reduce the cost of long-term borrowing for businesses, and provide a stimulus for new job creation now. Future additional tax breaks for the wealthy do not deserve higher priority than strengthening education -- or covering prescription drugs under Medicare -- or protecting Social Security -- or meeting other urgent national priorities."

"Mr. President, I commend my friend and colleague, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, for the way he conducted the hearings on the nomination for Secretary of State. I think many of us who were not members of the committee but followed the hearings very closely were enormously impressed by the conduct of the hearings, by the flexibility he showed in permitting Senators to follow up on questions so we could reach the real nub of the situation and yet to move the hearings along in a timely way. That is part of the long tradition that is associated with the chairman of the committee, and it is one of the reasons, among others, that he is held in such high regard and respect in the Senate. I intend to oppose Condoleezza Rice's nomination. There is no doubt that Dr. Rice has impressive credentials. Her life story is very moving, and she has extensive experience in foreign policy. In general, I believe the President should be able to choose his Cabinet officials, but this nomination is different because of the war in Iraq. Dr. Rice was a key member of the national security team that developed and justified the rationale for war, and it has been a catastrophic failure, a continuing quagmire. In these circumstances, she should not be promoted to Secretary of State."

"Dr. Rice also minimized the enormous challenge we face in training a competent Iraqi security force. She insisted 120,000 Iraqis now have been trained, when the quality of training for the vast majority of them is obviously very much in doubt. There was no reason to go to war in Iraq when we did, the way we did, and for the false reasons we were given. As a principal architect of our failed policy, Dr. Rice is the wrong choice for Secretary of State. We need, instead, a Secretary who is open to a clearer vision and a better strategy to stabilize Iraq, to work with the international community, to bring our troops home with dignity and honor, and to restore our lost respect in the world. The stakes are very high and the challenge is vast. Dr. Rice's failed record on Iraq makes her unqualified for promotion to Secretary of State and I urge the Senate to oppose her nomination. I yield the floor."

"We must continue the battle for responsible gun control, by closing the gun-show loophole, by reversing any misguided attempt to undermine the existing background-check system, and by letting the FBI review federal gun records in the investigation of terrorism and other crimes. As we work together to strengthen our immigration laws against terrorists, let us also move forward on lasting and long-overdue reforms that will benefit immigrant workers and their families, along with American business and the American economy. This is a time to stand up for freedom, to heal hurt and injustice, and most of all to serve others. The spirit of assisting others is at an all-time high in our history. It is time for a renewed national resolve to enhance national and community service, so that far more opportunities and incentives will be available for Americans to give something of themselves to help others here at home and in other lands. Effective action against international poverty must become a new national priority. We must do more -- much more -- to ease the harsh conditions in so much of the world that are breeding grounds for despair, extremism, and violence. To succeed -- not just now, but in the years ahead -- the global war on terrorism must also be a global war on poverty. This is not only a matter of moral obligation; it is an urgent, practical, indispensable element of our future national security."

"We must continue our long-standing bipartisan support of the collective bargaining process, which enables workers and businesses to settle their disputes effectively and fairly. We must continue to advance the cause of civil rights by strengthening enforcement and oversight, not weakening it. We should extend equality by prohibiting employers from using sexual orientation as a basis for hiring, firing, promotion, or compensation. It is time -- it is long past time -- to write the Employment Non-Discrimination Act into the laws of this land. We know of victims in the World Trade Center -- contributing, hard-working citizens, who were gay. So was one of the heroes of Flight 93. They died because they were Americans. And their memory should tell us that all Americans should be able to live their lives as full citizens of a free society. And now more than ever after the indelible sight of the horrors inflicted by hate on September 11th, we must pass hate crimes legislation. Let us send a strong, unequivocal message that hate-motivated violence in any form, from any source, for any reason, will not be tolerated anywhere in this country."

"As night follows day, some will of course say that we cannot afford to move America forward in all these ways. But it is clear that we can afford to do what is right if together we return to fiscal responsibility. Many fiscally responsible voices, including a number of leading members of the business community, have said we cannot now afford -- if we ever could -- the 1.7 trillion dollar cost of the tax cuts enacted last year. The doubts that many of us had before the nation was attacked about the affordability of those tax cuts have become certainties in the wake of September 11th. The spirit of this new time is placing major new demands on our national resources, and those demands must take priority. We cannot meet them while making all of the planned future tax cuts unless we raid Social Security and Medicare and cut health, education, and other vital goals. To me, that is not only unacceptable; it is a violation of fundamental pledges that both parties gave in the 2000 campaign."

"We must act on the minimum wage as well. The downturn in the economy has placed strains on the lives of many families. And, as wages stagnate, workers at the bottom suffer most. The current minimum wage is only five dollars and fifteen cents an hour. Americans earning the minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, earn only 10,700 dollars a year -- nearly 4,000 dollars below the poverty level for a family of three. On this meager income, they fail to earn enough to afford adequate housing in any area of this country. We must raise the minimum wage by a dollar fifty an hour -- and raise it now. No one who works for a living should have to live in poverty. In addition, the spirit of September 11 calls for policies that not only help working men and women earn a decent living, but assure them time to meet their obligations to their families and their communities. We must stop asking parents to solve the work-family conflict on their own. We are in a new time and a new place, and we need new solutions. And we must ask private businesses to be partners in this mission. Our future depends on the development of healthy, well-educated, responsible citizens. Yet our government provides far less support for working and non-working parents than the governments of other nations. This abdication of modern responsibility contributes to the high rate of child poverty in the nation, and the tremendous pressure on today's parents to choose between the jobs they need and the children they love."

"We can build on the Children's Health Insurance Program enacted in 1997 -- by passing the bipartisan legislation introduced last year, to enable parents to qualify for the coverage already available to their children. We can pass the bipartisan legislation now pending to provide affordable health care to families with disabled children. And we can begin, on a bipartisan basis, to fashion legislation that will require employers with more than 100 workers to be good corporate citizens and provide basic health insurance for their workforce. I know how hard it will be to hammer out an agreement here. But we must try. And if at first we cannot achieve a reasonable approach across party lines, then we must continue to press the case. I believe that we can ultimately prevail -- because I believe the American people, across the political spectrum, are ready for national health reform."

"We must embrace a new model of the workplace -- one that values the needs of parents and all others who care for children. Parents should have the right to leave work to care for a sick child or participate in a parent-teacher conference. New parents deserve assistance so they can afford leave to care for their newborn or newly adopted children. Part-time work must become an affordable and valued alternative to full-time work. Businesses should employ technologies that offer the flexibility to work from home. No one should be required to work overtime when they know it is not healthy, safe, or feasible. We must secure more affordable, more accessible, high quality child-care. Next, we know that those who lost their lives on September 11th were not the only victims of that sad day. For every life lost, there are children, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, friends, and colleagues who will forever feel the pain of that day. As we have sought to reach out to them, we have found that our nation's safety net falls short of our nation's generous spirit. Survivors' benefits under Social Security are inadequate to care for the many children who lost their parents. Workers' compensation is insufficient to provide the injured with adequate support for a lifetime of pain. Unemployment insurance and health insurance do not go far enough to help laid-off workers. We must close the gaps in our safety net. The changes we make can be among the most meaningful memorials of all to those who lost their lives on September 11th. At the same time, we must protect the pensions and retirement savings of all workers from the threat of future Enrons. We cannot allow corporate executives to cash in and take home millions while their workers' retirement savings disappear."

"So why can't we come together, without recrimination or placing blame, and agree on a simple basic proposition. Whatever the merits or demerits of last year's tax bill, it was enacted in what now seems a very different and distant time. Today, for the sake of our country, we must transcend the old boundaries of debate. We must think anew, and act responsibly. We can and should postpone a portion of the future tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers. Those tax cuts are not scheduled to be made until 2004 and later. We should put them on hold until we are certain that we can afford a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens, make the needed investments in education and health care, protect Social Security and fully provide for the common defense. My proposal would put on hold approximately 350 billion dollars in future tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans during the next ten years. Over one trillion dollars of tax cuts will still take effect as scheduled. Families earning less than 130,000 dollars a year and filing joint returns would not be affected. No taxpayers would pay a higher tax rate than they pay now. In fact, income tax rates for everyone will still be lower in 2002 and in succeeding years than they were in 2001. The child tax credit would be increased as planned, and marriage penalty relief would be provided as scheduled."

"According to the article, Ambassador Crocker has called for establishment of an immigrant visa program for these Iraqi employees. In fact, Senators Smith, Biden, Hagel, Lieberman, Leahy, Levin, and I have introduced legislation which establishes a program to do precisely what Ambassador Crocker calls for. Our legislation establishes an immigrant visa program for Iraqis who have worked for or directly with the United States government for at least 1 year. Our Government now provides such special immigrant visas but only for Iraqi and Afghan translators and interpreters. Our bill expands it to include Iraqis in other professions who have been employed by us or who have worked directly with us. In addition, our legislation creates additional options for Iraqis who are under threat because of their close association with the United States to apply to our refugee resettlement program."

"I have worked with other members of Congress on bipartisan legislation to provide resources to states and localities to bring existing early learning programs together, and to begin a universal initiative in early education. Although the selection of specific service priorities is best left to states and communities, the federal government can provide greater incentives for the states to create more coherent systems, setting and implementing strategies to assure that young children -- all young children -- will be healthier, more secure, and ready to learn. We must narrow the gap between what we know and what we do, to give every young child in America the best possible start in life. We must see to it that millions of children are not left far behind even before they enter the first grade. In the next year, we must address this vastly important frontier of education reform -- the first five years of life."

"Third, it is imperative to develop genuine partnerships among federal, state, and local governments to create a more unified and effective system of early education services for all children, particularly those at greatest risk. Forty-one states are already investing in early education. The early childhood landscape includes a variety of programs, from subsidized child care facilities and private nursery schools to Head Start centers and early intervention services for children with special needs. Too few of the efforts are well-coordinated with each other, but all are guided by the same underlying science. On this shared knowledge base, we must now build stronger ties and eliminate arbitrary barriers. The time has come to coordinate and strengthen the capacity of Head Start and Early Head Start, child welfare, child care, and agencies that administer welfare reform."

"Our goals for America also demand a higher priority for health care. One out of six Americans has no health insurance. The problem is becoming worse, not better. Increasingly, people with disabilities and other illnesses are being shut out of coverage. As the cost of care increases and jobs become less secure, more and more Americans are losing the coverage they have, and they fear that the sudden illness of a child or a loved one will bankrupt their family. As a result, too many too often go without the health care they need. In fact, those without health coverage are four times more likely not to get medical care than insured Americans. Lack of health insurance is the seventh leading cause of death in the nation today. Medical bills too often force the uninsured to default on their debts or lose everything they have. Inevitably, as medicine advances and as more and more medical miracles become available in this extraordinary new age of the life sciences, health care is increasingly beyond the reach of large numbers of Americans. America cannot have the best workforce in the world if we do not also have the healthiest workforce in the world. Our failure to guarantee health care is one of our greatest failures as a nation. More than ever, in our modern society, health security should be and must be a basic right for all. The battle for quality, affordable health care has never been easy. If it were, we would have enacted it a generation ago. But as the new spirit after September 11 calls forth the best in all of us, it challenges us to move forward to good health care for all Americans. We saw what could be achieved in education reform with genuine bipartisanship. There are disagreements on health policy, as there were and are on education. But at least we should be able to work together for goals widely shared by all Americans, and endorsed by both Presidential nominees in 2000."

"Success in this effort will be achieved if we meet three core objectives. First, we must demand value from our investments. In early education, value is reflected in the quality of a range of important services. The most significant factors are the knowledge and skills of the service providers, and their capacity to form strong relationships with children and their families. These personal characteristics are influenced by training and compensation. Yet thirty states have no training requirements for preschool teachers before they begin to teach. Parking lot attendants are generally paid more to watch our cars than early education professionals are paid to teach our youngest children. On average, early education providers earn 15,430 dollars a year. It can and must become a national priority to change this -- to improve the skills, the pay, and the retention of the professionals who teach our children at the dawn of life."

"The next great frontier of our commitment to reform should be early childhood education. The politics are complicated, but the goal is simple. Every child should start school ready to learn. Science tells us that the roots of academic difficulty are established well before the first day of school. In the absence of intervention, children from low-income families score consistently lower on developmental tests by age 2, and the differences increase over time. Children who fall far behind before they enter school have a far more difficult time catching up -- but well-designed programs can enhance their learning in the preschool years. And yet, after nearly 35 years of investment in Head Start, only three out of every five eligible children are enrolled. Early Head Start is the only federal program serving infants and toddlers who are living in poverty -- yet it reaches less than five percent -- five percent -- of eligible children. I welcome Mrs. Bush's strong interest and dedication to this issue. She will testify next week before our Education Committee in the Senate. I believe that she and the President can and will join us in working together to develop an effective strategy to promote learning in the earliest years of life. Like elementary and secondary education, building an effective early education system for the nation will take time, commitment, and resources. Therefore, I propose that we set a bold yet realistic goal. Over the next five years, we should develop the capacity to assure that every child has access to quality early education, starting at birth."

"Second, we must acknowledge that school readiness is not only about promoting early literacy and other academic skills. Science tells us that how children feel is as important as how they think, particularly if we are concerned about their capacity to succeed when they get to school. Knowing the alphabet and counting to 10 are not enough, if you can't sit still or pay attention in the classroom. All young children, regardless of their God-given abilities and economic circumstances, must be engaged in caring relationships and provided with a variety of opportunities to learn in a safe and stimulating environment. We already know what is needed to promote the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to learn in school. The time has come for this nation to use that knowledge to help all children achieve that competence -- for their own sake, for the sake of their teachers and classmates, and for the sake of America's future."

"We can and should take two major steps this year -- pass the Patients Bill of Rights and pass prescription drug coverage for all senior citizens. Too often today, HMOs and insurance companies dictate treatment based on economic cost, not medical need. A good Patients Bill of Rights is nearing final approval, and we should complete it as soon as possible. Too many patients across the country have waited too long. It's time for Congress to give them the simple justice of basic protections against HMO abuses. On Medicare, as prescription drug prices soar, the shameful gap in that basic and beloved federal program becomes increasingly unconscionable. Senior citizens are suffering needlessly because they cannot afford the drugs they need. Medicare is a solemn promise to every citizen. It says: "Work hard. Contribute to the system. Play by the rules. And we will guarantee affordable health care when you are old." But the world has changed since 1965, and the old ways of Medicare will not do."

"A new spirit has taken hold in America -- a new sense of community -- a new willingness and new commitment to help others -- a new understanding that we are all in this together -- a new recognition of the helpful role of government -- a new readiness on the part of the vast majority of citizens to ask what they can do for each other and for our country. In this new time, it is right to stand with the President on the war front -- and it is just as right to stand up for fundamental principles on the home front. We can and should support President Bush's conduct of the war, and still ask the administration to join us in addressing the urgent needs of our people in areas like jobs, education, health care, and equal rights. Some suggest that the nation is returning to business as usual -- to politics as usual. I reject that view. The spirit of September 11th is a mandate for new missions, not a summons to selfishness. If we accept less, we fail the innocent men and women and rescue workers who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. We fail the courageous men and women in uniform who have served so brilliantly in recent months. We fail the spirit of September 11th. We fail America itself."

"Our first priority is to stand with the President and our armed forces on the frontlines overseas, and to do all we can to protect the homefront against possible new acts of terrorism. But there is another challenge which also demands the best of all of us, and which I hope we can approach with a new bipartisanship. We must reinforce the nation on the homefront by meeting the great domestic challenges here with the same determination that we all have brought to the great challenge from abroad. Despite all the dangers and difficulties, we enter this period with extraordinary possibilities for progress."