[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 218 (Friday, December 17, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9283-S9284]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        Remembering Edith Prague

  Madam President, when they made Edith Prague, who died Thursday at 
the age of 96, they broke the mold. I am confident of this because in 
my 48 years on this Earth, I have never, ever met another person like 
her.
  I knew Edith Prague as my colleague in the Connecticut State Senate, 
where she served from 1994 to 2012, retiring as the oldest member of 
that chamber at age 86. She was a friend of mine and a mentor. She 
modeled a form of public service for me that I will be eternally 
grateful for. There was no one in Connecticut public life as 
persistent, as dogged, as forceful, as Edith Prague.
  She woke up every day thinking about the plight of workers, the poor, 
and the elderly. She had an acute sense of the injustice done to those 
who labored in difficult jobs, those making poverty wages, and those 
people who were living on fixed incomes.
  And when she believed that a cause was right, she would not back 
down. In 1991, Governor Lowell Weicker hired her to be his commissioner 
of aging, and then, a year later, he fired her because when he told her 
that she needed to fold her agency into a bigger department to save 
money, she refused.
  When she was elected to the State senate, she was a tireless worker, 
a

[[Page S9284]]

fighter for workplace safety laws, for raising the minimum wage, and 
for elderly nutrition programs. When she believed that a cause was 
just, nothing could stop her. She was relentless. I remember sitting in 
these closed-door Democratic caucus meetings with her, and she would 
introduce a bill at the beginning of the session, usually a bill way 
ahead of its time, expanding workers' rights or increasing supports for 
the elderly. And every week--every week--she would argue the case, and 
she wouldn't stop talking until she had persuaded at least one 
additional State senator in the room to support her bill.
  At the beginning of the session, senate leaders would tell her: ``No, 
Edith, we are not doing that bill this year,'' or ``No, we just can't 
afford it.'' And she just wouldn't listen. She never saw a stop sign.
  I have never seen anybody like this. She never saw a stop sign when 
there was something worthwhile to be done for the vulnerable. She would 
bring that bill up over and over and over again, and, eventually, she 
would just wear everybody down, and she would get it done.
  She was in her seventies when I met her, and she had twice as much 
energy and stamina as I did. She was a force of nature. The last major 
bill she passed, she was 86 years old. It was a landmark piece of 
legislation granting home care workers the ability to organize and 
collectively bargain. She fought for the bill's uncertain passage all 
year, and then she stood on her feet for 6 hours, defending it in a 
marathon Senate debate.

  She did all this with her trademark wide grin, smile, her big laugh. 
She was a consummate pain in the ass, but everybody loved her because, 
although she worked on issues of such gravity and seriousness and 
controversy, she brought such transparent, outward joy to her work. She 
knew she was a pain, and she chuckled when people tried to push her 
aside because she just knew she was going to outlast them.
  I learned so much from her. She took me under her wing. She treated 
me so kindly when I came to the Senate as a naive 29-year-old. She 
believed in me, and her confidence meant the world to me.
  Her energy and her enthusiasm for the causes she worked on gave me 
energy and enthusiasm for the things that mattered to me.
  I think about her a lot when I work on the issue of gun violence. It 
wasn't one of the issues that drove Edith, but, you know, some days, it 
is hard to keep going on an issue like this when so little progress is 
being made nationally. But then I think of Edith, who never ever gave 
up when a thing was the right thing to do, in her mind, and her memory 
will keep me going, and I know it will keep a lot of other people going 
in Connecticut who knew her.
  Longtime political reporter Mark Pazniokas writes for the Connecticut 
Mirror. He wrote a beautiful story about Edith this week, and I will 
close with what he wrote:

       [Edith] Prague did not go gentle, anywhere. She lived Dylan 
     Thomas's poetry, his belief that ``old age should burn and 
     rave at close of day.'' She fought governors, fellow 
     lawmakers, and, most consistently, the notion of retirement, 
     a status finally imposed on her by a confluence of strokes 
     and concerns of family and physician.
       ``My only choice is to retire or drop dead. I have to 
     retire. Believe me, I don't like it,'' Prague said when she 
     left state employment as the 88-year-old commissioner of 
     aging in 2014. ``Lots of people look forward to retirement,'' 
     she said, ``but I'm not one of them.''

  Edith was one of a kind, and the impact she left on people who knew 
her, like me, and the people who never met her, like those she fought 
for, is indelible.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.