[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 17 (Monday, January 29, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E200-E201]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       A WISE CHOICE FOR SPEAKER

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Monday, January 29, 2007

  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Madam Speaker, no one who knew them 
both could ever deny the power of the relationship and marriage between 
Phil and Sala Burton. It brought together two people who cared deeply 
about America and believed strongly in progressive values and actions. 
As the enclosed article notes, Sala Burton saw these same values and 
talent in our new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, many years ago. When Sala, 
seriously ill, asked Nancy Pelosi to run for her congressional seat, 
she was acting on the same values and trust that she and Phil brought 
to public life. Sala made a decision that changed the history of the 
House of Representatives and our country forever.
  I would like to share the article with our colleagues:

                [From the Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2007]

                             Sala's Choice


               Nancy Pelosi Carries On a Powerful Legacy

                          (By Harold Meyerson)

       Sala Galant Lipschultz Burton made two critical decisions 
     during her lifetime, the full meaning of which could not have 
     been apparent to her at the time she made them. The first, in 
     the early 1950s, was to marry a young lawyer and Democratic 
     activist named Phil Burton, who was to become the single most 
     important member of the House of Representatives in the '60s 
     and '70s.
       As a leader of the California Young Democrats and a rising 
     force in San Francisco politics, the young Phil Burton had 
     already won a reputation for his political brilliance--and 
     for his explosive temper. Nobody worked harder for liberal 
     causes. Nobody demanded more of his associates and staffers: 
     If they

[[Page E201]]

     didn't match his crazy hours, his ability to count votes or 
     his understanding of the art of the deal, they'd be subjected 
     to eruptions from the Burton volcano.
       Throughout his career, in fact, the biggest obstacle to 
     Burton's success was his rage. That he accomplished as much 
     as he did was due in part to Sala. The late John Jacobs, 
     whose 1995 biography of Burton, ``A Rage for Justice,'' is 
     one of the great political biographies of the past quarter-
     century, reported that Sala was Phil's confidante, co-
     strategist and champion, but that was only the beginning. 
     ``She cleaned up his messes,'' Jacobs wrote, ``soothing and 
     placating those he insulted or abused. She alone could 
     intervene in a conversation to shut him up.''
       Phil Burton was first elected to the House in 1964. In his 
     19 years as a congressman--he died of a ruptured aorta in 
     1983--he was responsible for the legislation that established 
     Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the aged, blind and 
     disabled; created black-lung compensation for coal miners; 
     increased the minimum wage; made strikers eligible for food 
     stamps; greatly expanded the size and number of national 
     parks; and abolished the House Un-American Activities 
     Committee. More broadly, he broke the power of the old 
     Dixiecrat barons in the House by subjecting committee 
     chairmanships to secret ballot elections within the 
     Democratic caucus. He engineered reapportionments of 
     California that were greatly to his party's benefit, and he 
     steered contributions to the Democratic candidates who needed 
     them most.
       When he died, Sala succeeded him in a special election. 
     Just four years later, in January 1987, Sala herself lay 
     dying of cancer. She asked Phil's brother, John Burton, who 
     had represented an adjoining congressional district in San 
     Francisco, to come to the hospital and told him that she 
     wanted ``Nancy'' to succeed her. For a moment, John Burton 
     was unsure which Nancy she was referring to, but as she 
     explained to family and friends at her bedside, the woman in 
     question was the former California Democratic Party chair 
     Nancy Pelosi.
       Pelosi had been associated with the Burtons since shortly 
     after she and her husband had moved to San Francisco in the 
     years when Phil's star was rising. The Pelosis had a large, 
     attractive house, and the first thing she recalls Phil saying 
     to her was, ``We'll use this for fundraisers.'' But Phil's 
     appreciation of Pelosi wasn't confined to her abilities as a 
     hostess. He saw in her a commitment to progressive values 
     and a clear political sense of how to turn those values 
     into laws. When John stepped down from Congress in 1982, 
     Phil asked Pelosi to stand for election to replace him, 
     but she declined, saying her children were too young. Five 
     years later, Sala, on her deathbed, evidently saw in 
     Pelosi the same qualities that Phil had seen.
       This time, her children older, Pelosi said yes, and in 
     April she won a squeaker of a special election.
       In the House, Pelosi has continually sought the counsel of 
     another Burton protege, George Miller, whose district is 
     right across the Bay from hers. Appointed early on to a seat 
     on the Appropriations Committee, she demonstrated, says the 
     committee's new chairman, Wisconsin's David Obey, that she 
     was ``operational''--a Burton word meaning able to steer 
     difficult measures to enactment.
       When the Newt Gingrich Republicans swept to power in 1994, 
     political almanac authors Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa 
     termed it ``the collapse of the House that Phil Burton 
     built'' Nancy Pelosi, as smooth as Phil Burton was rough, is 
     far more open to openness in the legislative process than her 
     sometimes secretive mentor was. Politically, she understands 
     the limits of the possible and that she can expand them only 
     as far as the American people are willing to go. But she also 
     knows that the American people want Congress to do any number 
     of things that were stubbornly, and, in the end, suicidally 
     resisted by the now-collapsed house that Newt Gingrich built.
       The Burtonistas--with different causes and methods for a 
     new era, to be sure--are back. Score two for you, Sala.

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