[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 124 (Tuesday, July 23, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5019-S5020]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              TRIBUTE TO REBECCA WARD AND MEREDITH BOOKER

  Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to recognize two members of my 
team who are leaving the Senate after their years of dedicated and 
important work. Becca Ward will be leaving on August 7, and Meredith 
Booker will be leaving on Friday, July 26.
  Both of them joined my team as interns. They have worked their way up 
within Team Merkley and have made tremendous contributions to my office 
and to our Nation. I know they are both going to do extraordinary 
things in the next chapters of their lives, but, first, it is worth 
reflecting on their service in the U.S. Senate.
  Becca Ward has been an invaluable member of our team for 6 years. She 
started as an intern in my Oregon office, and she worked her way up to 
be my lead adviser on climate chaos and energy policy. Becca joined 
Team Merkley as a full-time staff assistant in 2013. Over the years, 
she rose to be a legislative correspondent and then a legislative aide. 
She drafted and sent responses to more than 225,000 Oregonians who were 
concerned about the climate and the environment.
  Becca's terrific work made it clear that she was capable of more, so 
she became my top policy adviser on the threat of climate chaos. 
Climate chaos presents an existential threat to our planet. Her 
professionalism, her substantive expertise, her creativity, and the 
network she created proved to be powerful tools in our working to 
advance a progressive climate agenda.
  When Becca first started working on climate change, she took the lead 
and the effort to protect the Arctic Ocean from oil and gas drilling, 
which led to the introduction of the Stop Arctic Ocean Drilling Act. 
Over the course of her years on this portfolio, she has helped a lot 
with the mission 100 bill, which aims to transition the United States 
into a 100-percent clean energy economy, and with my Keep It in the 
Ground Act, which would stop the expansion of the leasing of our 
Federal publicly owned properties for the production of fossil fuels.
  More recently, she has contributed by collating the Senate's version 
of the Green New Deal, which has set a high bar for progressive climate 
efforts in the future. Just last week, she led my staff through the 
introduction of the Good Jobs for 21st Century Energy Act--a bold, new 
bill that required extensive coordination between the environmental 
community and the labor community. It is designed to create good-
paying, family-wage jobs and to have high labor standards--a race to 
the top in employment during the transition to clean energy.
  Becca's efforts to take on the global challenge of climate chaos 
hasn't been limited to the United States. She has repeatedly traveled 
with me and on my behalf to U.N. Conference of the Parties meetings and 
to other international events to engage in the diplomacy that is 
necessary for a true global response to a global crisis. She has 
shepherded my efforts through the Appropriations Committee to maintain 
funding for climate programs and to introduce and pass bipartisan 
amendments that support the Green Climate Fund.
  In addition to her substantive policy responsibilities, she has been 
an incredible team player and a remarkable individual to have with us. 
I think it is safe to say that Becca will likely go down in Team 
Merkley history as the only member of our team who is also an Olympic 
medalist. She has been a fantastic manager and mentor to the members of 
the climate team and has been a huge contributor to our office's 
efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work. I know 
her absence will be felt especially strongly every year when the annual 
cherry blossom run comes around.
  Becca, you might need to plan a trip to DC for next spring.
  While Becca is going to do incredible things for the planet in her 
next chapter of helping to expand a recently formed environmental 
organization, the Clean Energy Leadership Institute, she will be 
greatly missed here as a colleague, as a friend, and as a mentor to so 
many of us on the team.
  We are counting on you, Becca, to save the planet, so no pressure. We 
appreciate your service to Oregon and to our country, and I look 
forward to hearing about your efforts in your journey ahead.
  Now we turn to another member of Team Merkley, Meredith Booker, who 
is, sadly, leaving us in July--in fact, at the end of this week. 
Meredith embodies the heart and soul and work ethic of Team Merkley, 
and she will be sorely missed by everyone in the immigration, civil 
rights, housing, and LGBTQ rights portfolios.
  Meredith joined our team as an intern in August of 2016 and quickly 
became indispensable, joining the legislative correspondent ranks in 
December of 2016.
  In June of 2018, she was promoted to legislative aide and hasn't 
looked back, taking on more and more responsibility. She came into this 
position with a deep understanding and background in criminal justice 
and has brought a top-notch performance to every project and task she 
has touched. I think most of our office would agree. She is the best 
organized member of our team. Her meticulously crafted policy-tracker 
spreadsheet has helped our team stay on track in many areas and will 
remain a lasting part of her legacy here on Capitol Hill. It doesn't 
matter whether it is the smallest project or the biggest high-stakes 
moment, Meredith always gets it done and gets it done well.
  This work ethic has extended from volunteering countless time to 
pitching in with coding parties. Coding parties are when the team stays 
late in the evening to work to try to have a prompt response to the 
thousands of letters we receive from Oregonians.
  It stems from that to hustling to perfect every line and section of 
the 2019 Equality Act, resulting in a record of 47 Senate sponsors and 
bipartisan passage in the House of Representatives this May. That act 
has yet to be considered on the floor of the Senate, but it is way past 
time that we establish equality of opportunity for every single 
American.
  Meredith skillfully navigated working with two different legislative 
assistants at times--and sometimes with one LA and sometimes with no 
LA--without letting a single decision, memo, or project fall through 
the cracks.
  She managed reintroduction of the American Savings Act to expand 
high-quality retirement savings accounts to every American.
  She managed our annual August Breastfeeding Month resolution to 
recognize the importance of breastfeeding

[[Page S5020]]

to American families and to the health of the children and the health 
of the mothers.
  Just a short time ago, when the Department of Agriculture laid out a 
plan to destroy Civilian Conservation Corps centers across America, she 
dove into the tricky and wonky world of that and proceeded to work 
intensely to prevent that from happening and worked successfully to do 
that.
  She threw herself into the challenge of the retirement integrity act, 
designed to make IRAs work more cost-effectively for working Americans 
rather than be a loophole for the megawealthy.
  Though we have always known we were lucky to have Meredith on Team 
Merkley, she has truly stepped up and gone above and beyond in the last 
year, after my June 2018 trip to Brownsville led to intensive work on 
the issue of family and child separation and to a lot of efforts by 
many parties to push back against President Trump's cruelty to migrant 
families. When President Trump proposed locking families up in 
internment camps, she led the drafting of the No Internment Camps Act 
to say that we will never repeat that shameful chapter in our history. 
When President Trump threw thousands of children into unregulated child 
prisons at Tornillo and Homestead, she leapt into action and worked 
with the immigration team to draft the Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act 
to end this horrific practice.
  Just a few weeks ago, she was instrumental to the introduction of the 
Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act, legislation to ensure we treat 
children with dignity and respect, and that act already has 40 Senators 
sponsoring it.
  As I have traveled to investigate the Trump administration's policies 
toward migrants over the last year, Meredith's codel, or congressional 
delegation, binders have become legendary. Whether they are assembled 
in support of trips to Texas or Central America--or when she joined the 
trip herself, as she did earlier this year when we went to the child 
jail in Homestead, FL--you have never seen a binder assembled with so 
much meticulous care and attention to detail.
  In addition to her many accomplishments supporting legislation and 
oversight trips, she worked with countless outside groups to organize a 
hugely successful hearing through the Democratic Policy and 
Communications Center, or DPCC, on family separation in June of 2018. 
She reprised that role this week--in fact, today--working to help 
organize another DPCC hearing on the treatment of children at the 
southern U.S. border. It occurred just earlier this afternoon, with the 
focus on stopping the cruel treatment of migrant children.
  She has done all this without letting the effort to respond to 
Oregonians' letters fall through the cracks. She probably holds the 
record for our team responding to constituent mail, having responded to 
more than 256,000 emails in less than 3 years and, in doing so, created 
350 unique letters for those responses. That means, on average, that 
Meredith has created nearly 150 letters per year and sent approximately 
100,000 responses per year. That is a lot of communicating with folks 
back home.

  America is very lucky that Meredith is taking her talents to the 
legal arena. She will be starting at Loyola University of New Orleans 
this fall, working toward her law degree. Knowing how much she has done 
without a law degree--probably more than most fully accredited 
lawyers--I know the world is going to benefit enormously as she pursues 
that degree and puts it to work in the fight for justice and equality. 
The world of justice and equality will benefit just as we experience 
the loss of her talents here in the Senate.
  Meredith, we are tremendously grateful for your contributions and 
will deeply miss you on Team Merkley. We will absolutely miss you both. 
You leave a tremendous hole in our team. Your final assignment is to 
make sure that we have some very talented people to carry on the 
terrific work you have been doing. Thank you.

                          ____________________