[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 90 (Thursday, July 13, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H6038-H6041]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE DEVASTATION OF CANCER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simpson). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, before giving my special order on 
cancer, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe) 
to speak about a good friend of mine and his and this entire body.


                          Tribute to Ron Lasch

  Mr. KOLBE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for 
yielding. I will be brief, but I especially thank him for yielding, 
because I know this evening he is going to be talking about something 
very important and very personal to him.
  I did want to take just a moment or two to pay tribute to, as the 
gentleman from Texas said, a good friend of ours, a loyal employee of 
this House of Representatives, somebody who served this House 
extraordinarily well for so many years, Ron Lasch.
  It was just a little over 41 years ago that Ron Lasch came to the 
House of Representatives as a young page. I know, because I was also 
here at that time as a page. I was a page over in the U.S. Senate at 
that time when Ron came under Mr. Whitnall's sponsorship to the House 
of Representatives.
  Along with Don Anderson, who, of course, went on to become the Clerk 
of the House of Representatives, we all graduated in 1960 from the page 
school. Most of us went on with our lives and did other things, went 
away to college and began families, went into the service, but Ron 
Lasch, along with Don Anderson, stayed here in the House of 
Representatives. I mention that because he has given an extraordinarily 
large part of his life and his service to the House of Representatives.
  For the last 16 years I have served in the House and have had an 
opportunity to know Ron in a different capacity, in a professional way 
as well in the personal way that I knew Ron Lasch. His service here I 
think has been absolutely extraordinary.
  His leaving the House of Representatives is something in keeping, I 
guess, with Ron's personality, in that he left without telling any of 
his friends that he was going to do this. He insisted that he was 
determined there would be no farewells for him, at least while he was 
around. I guess he cannot stop us once he is gone from here.
  That is why I think many of us have taken an opportunity in the last 
couple of days to rise, realizing that Ron Lasch is not in the back of 
the Chamber like in his usual position there. We miss him, so we have 
taken this opportunity to rise and to reflect on just how much he means 
to this House of Representatives.
  This institution gets criticized, and I think perhaps sometimes quite 
justifiably, but very often the unsung heroes of this place are the 
staff that make it work. Some of them get on television right behind 
the gentleman from Texas, and they are seen every day. Others of them 
are in the back of the Chamber or off the Chamber. But, together, 
collectively, they are what makes this place work. They are what makes 
this place run smoothly. They are the glue which often holds it 
together. They are very often the institutional history of this body.

[[Page H6039]]

  Ron Lasch, with 41 years of service in the House of Representatives, 
knew the precedents of the House. He knew about the ways in which this 
House ran. He also knew the personalities of the House of 
Representatives.
  I think that he epitomized what is so good about this institution. He 
reflected the very best of this institution. Ron could be sarcastic, he 
could sometimes even be caustic, but he was always honest. He told 
Members in a way that was extraordinarily honest about what he thought, 
about what was going on, and his views about things.
  I think that was extraordinarily important, because we got an 
unvarnished view of what was happening around this place from Ron 
Lasch. He is the person we relied on when we came to the floor to help 
us understand what the votes were about, what the procedures were 
about, about what the time frame of what we were going to be doing 
would be, how we could proceed when we had a question about how should 
we handle a parliamentary issue. He was the one who helped us 
understand that. He is the one who helped us get the rules right. He is 
the one who, when the Republicans came into the majority 6 years ago, I 
think made it possible for us to make that transition so much more 
smoothly than we might otherwise have made.
  So I just want to say to my friend Ron Lasch that we are going to 
miss him tremendously. We thank him for the service that he has given 
to this country, and, most particularly, to the House of 
Representatives.
  But I also want to thank him very personally for the friendship and 
what it has meant to work with him and to know him for these last 41 
years. He is not gone from among us. He will continue to be that friend 
of mine. But I will certainly miss him in the professional capacity 
that he has served. I know that many of my colleagues would join in 
this sentiment. We wish him well. We hope to see him back on the floor 
of the House of Representatives from time to time.
  I thank my good friend the gentleman from Texas for yielding this 
time to me this afternoon.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I want to join in the accolades for 
Ron. There is a phrase that a lot of us use called ``institutional 
memory.'' Ron Lasch is the institutional memory, at least on the 
Republican side, of the procedures here in the House.
  I think it is well-known that I am a Congressman who lives in Texas 
and visits Washington, and I try to find the first plane out of town 
after the last vote. I used to check with Trent Lott when he was the 
minority whip and then Newt Gingrich, and now that we are in the 
majority I will check with Tom Delay or Dick Armey. But when I want to 
really know, I will go to Ron Lasch, and he always knows when we can 
leave.
  So, in typical fashion, he has gone on leave to take his vacation. He 
is not officially gone yet, but we are not expecting to see him on the 
floor very often anymore. So I join in accolading Mr. Lasch as a friend 
of mine. I do not know him as well personally as the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Kolbe), but he is certainly a good man.


                       The Devastation of Cancer

  Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to talk about a terrible word, a 
terrible six letter word, it is one of the most frightening words in 
the English language, and that word is cancer, C-A-N-C-E-R.
  If you have ever been in a doctor's office and had that word spoken 
in a personal way, or been with a loved one when that word has been 
spoken about their physical condition, it sends chills literally into 
your heart.
  Cancer kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, and 
millions worldwide. In this Congress we spend billions of dollars 
researching cures for cancer. In this Congress in and the last Congress 
we passed close to a dozen bills to try to address what can be done to 
seek redress for the disease. It is a disease that knows no 
socioeconomic boundary; it knows no geographical boundary. It is 
literally a six letter word that chills us to the very core of our 
souls.
  Most of us, fortunately, tend to look at cancer more academically or 
in a statistical sense, and we do not have to address it in a human 
sense. But there are times when we do. Now is one of those times.
  I want to humanize cancer on a very personal basis this evening. The 
gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe), who was just here, informed me that 
his brother John Kolbe died of liver cancer last year. We have in this 
body the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Pryce) who lost a daughter to 
cancer within the last year.
  We are not used to congressmen and congresswomen and senators and 
public officials really being looked at as real people. Most of the 
time the general public looks at us as some sort of a political icon or 
something, but we are real people and we have real families, and, for 
some of us, we have medical problems that border on the tragic.
  I have a brother, John Barton. John is 43 years old. He is a District 
Judge in Fort Worth, Texas. He is married. He has two beautiful sons, 
Jake and Jace. Jace is about to have a birthday, July 22, a beautiful 
wife, Jennifer, an outstanding career in the community.
  About a year-and-a-half ago John Barton was diagnosed as having a 
cancer behind his nose, the ethmoid sinus cavity. The particular kind 
of cancer he was diagnosed with is a very rare form of cancer called a 
squamous cell carcinoma.
  At that time he was given little chance to live more than 6 months to 
a year. Obviously, he was very concerned, his family was very 
concerned. We were able to get him in touch with some of the leading 
medical experts in the United States, and, thanks to the good work of 
the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis), who is a subcommittee 
chairman of one of the Committee on Appropriations subcommittees, he 
had been able to get money invested in a special kind of proton beam 
accelerator at Loma Linda out in California. They had had some success 
in treating cancers that were inoperable.

                              {time}  1745

  John's cancer behind his nose, between the optic nerve and the 
olfactory nerve, the decision was made that it would be very difficult 
to surgically remove it, so they agreed to try to treat him with this 
proton beam radiation. Again, I cannot say enough about the gentleman 
from California (Mr. Lewis) and the work he has done to provide the 
funding for that facility. It bears his name, the Jerry Lewis Treatment 
Facility. My brother went out there; and in May of last year, John was 
given a clean bill of health, that the squamous cell cancer in his 
ethmoid sinus was gone. We literally thought that it was a medical 
miracle and religious miracle that he was cancer-free.
  He went back to Texas and regrew his hair, regained weight, was 
living a normal life, and in January of this year, January of 2000, he 
got to feeling a little bit under the weather and he went in to see the 
doctor and they took a blood sample and his liver function was off the 
chart.
  So they did a medical biopsy of the liver and found out that he had 
dozens, if not hundreds, of liver cancer tumors in his liver. They 
performed a round of tests, and first it was indeterminate whether this 
was a new cancer or a metastasized version of the cancer that had been 
in his sinus. Finally, the doctors decided that it was a metastasized 
squamous cell moderated carcinoma from the ethmoid sinus, and they gave 
him 3 to 6 months to live in February of this year. We had gone through 
this the year before; and so again, John was in shock and his mother 
and his wife and myself as one of his brothers, his brother Jay, his 
sister Jan, his friends.
  So John decided to try to seek both spiritual assistance and medical 
assistance. He has gone through a number of treatment options. He has 
been treated with at least four different kinds of chemotherapy and was 
in an experimental protocol that we thought might help him; but last 
week, his liver bilirubin level, which is a measure of the efficiency 
of the liver, and for you and I, a normal bilirubin count would be one, 
my brother's is over 20. Life cannot be sustained at that level.
  So I take the floor this evening to ask my colleagues if they are 
aware of a treatment somewhere in their district, somewhere that there 
is a researcher doing research on metastasized cancers that migrate to 
the liver, call me and I will get in touch with my brother's doctors.
  In Texas, there is a famous Texan named William Barrett Travis who 
was

[[Page H6040]]

commandant of the Alamo, and he was surrounded by 6,000 to 8,000 troops 
under Mexican General Santa Anna. Things looked hopeless and Colonel 
Travis sent out a letter that is famous all over the great State of 
Texas that says, ``To all freedom-loving people of the world, please 
send aid with all dispatch.''
  So I am here this evening on behalf of my brother, John, to ask all 
freedom-loving people of the world if you know of something that might 
yet help him, I would certainly appreciate hearing from you to see if 
we may yet be able to help him.
  I see my good friend, the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. 
Myrick), who is a cancer survivor, on the floor. Before I talk a little 
bit more about my brother, I would be happy to yield to her if she 
wishes to speak.
  I yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina to give us some words 
of wisdom.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, first I want to say I am extremely 
disturbed to hear about the gentleman's brother. These are things that 
none of us hope we will have to face. I assume the gentleman has 
checked with the National Cancer Institute as to their recommendations.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I have, Mr. Speaker.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Maybe somebody does know of something that can help him, 
because there is a lot happening in this field.
  It is really scary, because one in four of us in this country today 
is getting cancer. If it were anything else, it would be an epidemic. 
Think about it: one in four Americans today gets cancer. It is very 
scary, and it is at a point where I believe we in Congress need to give 
it a high priority. We are doing well with treatment options and 
finding treatment options, but we really have not done as much as I 
think we should when it comes to prevention and causes. Why are one in 
four of us coming down with this dreaded disease?
  I just recently finished treatment successfully, I am thankful to 
say, for breast cancer. And my cancer was known. I was feeling 
perfectly fine, had my normal mammograms every year. Started having a 
pain in my right breast and I went to the doctor here, he sent me out 
to Bethesda. They did another mammogram, showed nothing. I went to 
literally five different doctors who could feel nothing. Everybody 
said, nothing there, it is all okay. But I knew something was wrong, so 
I finally got a doctor in my hometown of Charlotte to do an ultrasound. 
Big as life, there the tumor showed up.
  Immediately, they did a biopsy; and it was cancerous, and I 
immediately had surgery as soon as the biopsy healed. As I say, I went 
through chemotherapy. As the gentleman knows from his brother, you do 
not wish it on anyone. I also did radiation and now I am finished with 
all of that. So I am very blessed. But the scary part to me is the 
number of women, because I went public with my story to see if it could 
help other women, the number of women who have said to me that they do 
not either get mammograms or they are afraid to find out what they 
might find out if they go do it. We wonder in America today why, with 
all of the so-called knowledge we have. There are a lot of people who 
are out there who are fearful, I mean really fearful, to even talk 
about cancer.
  So I hope that by some of the things we are able to do here in 
Congress and by some of us who have been through this, being willing to 
share our stories, that we will take some of the fear out of this whole 
subject of what can happen to us and give people hope.
  The other thing that is so important, I say to the gentleman, and I 
know that the gentleman will also relay it to his brother, is a 
positive attitude, because having a positive attitude and being 
determined to beat this is one of the best things that one can do 
personally. I know friends of mine who have been through this who have 
maintained a positive attitude that I am going to beat it are fine, and 
the ones that have just given in to it are having trouble after trouble 
after trouble and it does not go away, so there has to be something to 
do as well, and the spiritual aspect as well too.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, my brother's attitude is such that 
he peps us up. It is amazing to me that here he is, because it is the 
liver cancer, he is very jaundiced and has difficulty moving now, and 
yet when we talk to him on the telephone or see him in person, he is 
the most upbeat person in the room. It just amazes me the faith that he 
has and the attitude that he can be trying to cheer others up. I will 
call him, and I will be mad about something we have done in the 
Congress or we have not done in the Congress; and he will kid with me 
about, am I going to come back the next day and rectify that. I mean, 
it is just amazing.
  So the gentlewoman is exactly right, that attitude is important.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Well, and faith. The Lord has been very good to me and 
the Lord has been good to a lot of people, and a lot of people are 
healed when the doctors tell them they cannot be healed. Has anybody 
considered a liver transplant?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I have offered half of my liver. I 
am a little bit older than my brother, but I do not smoke and drink, so 
I am healthy, other than a lot of air miles back and forth to Texas. 
The problem with that is that his liver is so far gone and it has 
metastasized. They did not want to do a transplant or let me donate 
even half my liver because the theory is that they would have to lower 
his immune system to take a new liver and in doing that, the cancer may 
be other places and it would explode.
  Now, there is some tremendous research being done. Stem cells and 
bone marrow have shown that they can migrate to the liver and transform 
into new liver cells; and, of course, the liver will regenerate itself.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, they are doing that with the heart also.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Yes. I am absolutely confident within 5 to 10 
years it will be possible to take my brother's own bone marrow cells 
and probably grow him a new liver and put his own new liver into his 
liver; but that may be 5 or 6 years down the road, or 10 years, and 
right now he is counting weeks if we are not able to help get him an 
option.
  But we looked at transplants. We looked at Johns Hopkins, we looked 
at M.D. Anderson in Houston, we looked at Baylor Medical in Dallas, we 
looked at University of Pittsburgh. I mean, he has checked that option 
as late as last week, and it just does not appear that that is in the 
cards. But that would certainly be an option if it were not a 
metastasized cancer, if it were what is called a hepatoma, which is an 
original cancer in the liver. I think that would have been a very 
viable option 3 or 4 months ago.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I know that people in this country will 
join myself and I know a lot of others in sending up prayers for your 
brother. Like I said, miracles do happen.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is true. That is true. My brother has told 
me one miracle. He had to undergo chemotherapy last year for his sinus 
carcinoma and he said he wanted it as strong as he could take it. So 
they literally took him to the verge of death with his first round of 
chemotherapy, and he told me and his wife and our other family members 
that an angel came and sat on the edge of his bed in the hospital and 
was talking to him and telling him that things would be fine and that 
he did not have to worry about his wife or his children. It just gave 
John a sense of peace that the Lord was with him and had sent an angel 
down. Of course, at that time, he came back.
  So I know that there is an angel that has been assigned to him. Of 
course, we are hoping that the angel does not have to come again real 
soon, that we want the angel to keep an eye on my little brother, John, 
but not take him from us yet.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, that is a real blessing.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Yes.
  I would like to just humanize John a little bit, tell a few stories 
about his background. I have already mentioned that he is 43 years old, 
married, has two lovely children, two sons. But John is not perfect.
  I remember the first week he got his driver's license and he was 16 
in Waco, Texas, and my parents had one good car and one kind of second 
car, and so John got to drive the second car. It was a Ford Fairlane. 
The first week he got his driver's license he was driving down 25th 
street in Waco, and at that time

[[Page H6041]]

there was a movie theater called the 25th Street Theater; and the young 
lady who was in the ticket box, the box office, was a friend of his 
from high school, and John drove by, and trying to do some fancy 
maneuver with the car and wave at her, he hit three cars and totaled 
two of them and drove a car up into the front entrance of the local 
newspaper.
  I happened to be a senior in college at the time and was home with 
some of my old high school football buddies; and when he called home, 
he did not ask for my father, he asked for me. He said, Joe, you are 
going to have to come down and help me out a little bit. So my buddies 
and I, we got in the car and they all knew him as ``Little Joe,'' 
because when we were in high school, John was not more than 4\1/2\ feet 
tall, so he had grown up by the time I got to college.

                              {time}  1800

  We went down to see him and he was standing outside, looking at the 
car and not too knowing what to do.
  After we got through laughing about it, we said, Well, John, you are 
going to have to call Dad. There is no way to get around it. So he did, 
and of course my father came down and he was not too happy about it. He 
did not laugh a bit.
  One of my memories of my little brother in high school was standing 
there looking so forlorn, with the girl he was trying to impress in the 
box office at the movie theater laughing, and all of my friends 
laughing, and my father just absolutely chewing his tail out for having 
this happen: the first time he had his driver's license, or in fact the 
first time he had his driver's license and drove by himself, totalling 
two cars and sending another car into the front office of the local 
newspaper, which obviously the next day ran a very uncomplimentary 
story about Larry Barton's youngest son.
  I can also remember in 1984 when I decided to run for Congress, now 
today we read routinely about million dollar campaigns and all these 
high-priced consultants and TV ads, but in the Sixth District of Texas 
in 1984 in the Republican primary there was not any of that. It was an 
absolutely family-oriented grass roots campaign.
  By then John was an attorney who was living down in Corpus Christi, 
Texas. I convinced him to come to Ennis and help run my campaign. So he 
went from a beachfront apartment in Corpus Christi, Texas, down on the 
Gulf Coast, where there were sea breezes and just a really nice 
lifestyle, to sleeping on a cot in the kitchen of my home. My mother-
in-law and father-in-law slept on a pallet out in the garage. My 
campaign driver slept on the couch. My sister slept in one room, a 
bedroom, with my oldest daughter, Alison. Jan and I slept in what was 
called the master bedroom, which meant it had an extra foot of space, 
with Christine, our youngest daughter, in the crib.
  John would routinely be woken up in the morning by my 2-year-old 
Kristin looking into his eyes tickling him. We offered him a great 
salary I think of $600 a month, but what that really meant was when he 
had a car note come due or a college loan payment come due my sister 
Jan, who was a campaign Treasurer, would say, you bring me the bill and 
I will pay the bill. And he did an outstanding job in that campaign.
  I got into a runoff, and in the runoff I lost the runoff by I want to 
say 9 votes out of about 10,000 votes cast. To seek a recount you had 
to file a legal document in every county court, and there were 14 
counties. So my brother, who was the only attorney on the payroll of 
the campaign, had to file those documents. He prepared the legal 
briefs. Within 3 days he went to all 14 county courthouses in the Sixth 
District of Texas and filed the legal paperwork to request a hand count 
recount of every ballot that had been counted, had been cast in the 
primary runoff.
  In that runoff he coordinated some pro bono attorneys who represented 
me at each recount, and we went from losing the election by 9 votes to 
winning the election by 10 votes. To this day, I think if it had not 
been for my little brother, that might not have happened.
  I can also remember when he came to see me about 4 years ago. By now 
he was married and had two children and was practicing law in Fort 
Worth, Texas. He said, Joe, I have decided that I wanted to run for 
office. I said, ``John, have you not seen enough of me and what I have 
done to convince you that there are better ways to make a living than 
trying to get elected?''
  And he said, ``Yes, I have, but I do not want to run for Congress, I 
want to run for district judge.'' The county he was living in is the 
fourth largest county in Texas, so that meant that he had to run 
countywide in a county that has 1 million people.
  I said, ``John, how much money do you have to run for office?'' He 
said, ``I don't have any money.'' I said, ``Okay, what kind of an 
organization do you have?'' He said, ``I don't have any organization.'' 
I said, ``Okay. Have you done something notable in the county in a 
public way that your name is on the lips of all the voters?'' He said, 
``I have not done that.''
  I said, ``Well, why do you think you can win a district judgeship in 
Tarrant County, Texas? He said, ``Well, if you can run for Congress and 
win, I know I can run for district judge and win.''
  I did not have an answer to that, so I said, Okay. So when he 
announced for district judge, he announced in a seat for a position for 
a courtship that he did not think he would have any opposition in. I 
felt pretty confident that he would win an uncontested election, but 
that did not work out. One of the biggest law firms in Fort Worth 
decide that they had an attorney that they wanted to run for that same 
position, so an excellent attorney in Fort Worth who had an excellent 
reputation, was well known in the legal community, had impeccable 
credentials, decided to run against John.
  Of course, when that was announced we were not real happy about that. 
But to make a long story short, just like in my campaign in 1984 for 
Congress where my mother and my father and my brother and my sister and 
my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, all the Barton family and the Bice 
family and the Winslow family were out campaigning. Those same family 
Members trekked up to Tarrant County, Texas, and we got on the 
telephones and we stood in front of the polling places and we handed 
out cards and we did all the grass roots things, and again, John was 
outspent, but when the dust had cleared, he won county-wide. He got the 
largest number of votes for any county-wide office on the ballot, and 
he almost got more votes than I did. That kind of upset me a little 
bit.
  But he has gone on to do an outstanding job. In fact, he has done 
such an outstanding job that this year he is up for reelection and he 
has no opponent. When I go to Tarrant County, which is about half of my 
congressional district, more and more now I am introduced as Judge 
Barton's brother, which is a real tribute to him.
  I really rise this evening to again appeal to all my colleagues and 
to anybody who may be watching in the country, if anyone knows of 
something that could help a metastasized cancer of the liver, please 
get in touch with my office so we can refer that to my brother's 
doctors.
  John is one of the many cancer statistics. Liver cancer kills 14,000 
people in the United States each year. It is a very, very difficult 
disease to arrest once it has progressed. In my brother's case, it is 
serious, but there is still some small hope.
  Just like the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Myrick), there 
are many miracles that have occurred in cancer. The Barton family is 
hoping for one more.
  Mr. Speaker, I again want to commend the Speaker for allowing me to 
do this special order, I want to thank my colleagues for listening, and 
simply hope that we may yet find one miracle for John Barton in Fort 
Worth, Texas.

                          ____________________