[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 177 (Wednesday, November 16, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H8532-H8536]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
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REFLECTIONS ON CONGRESSIONAL SERVICE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr.
Kind) for 30 minutes.
Mr. KIND. Madam Speaker, on a lighter note, this will be one of the
last opportunities that I will have to address this Chamber as
Representative of the people of the Third Congressional District of
western and north central Wisconsin.
It has truly been the honor of my life, but Tawni and I decided last
summer that it shouldn't be the honor for our entire lives, so we
decided to make this our last term after 26 years of serving the people
back home.
As a kid growing up on the north side of La Crosse, Madam Speaker, if
someone had told me, the son of a telephone repairman, that I would one
day be serving in a place like the United States Congress, I would have
thought they were crazy.
I thought this was a place where only the politically connected, the
Kennedys, the Rockefellers, or those with great wealth, would come to.
I guess I am a living example that if you want to serve your Nation,
there are still opportunities to do so at all levels.
I had a chance to cut my political teeth as a college undergrad with
one of my political icons and heroes back home, Senator Bill Proxmire.
From him, I learned the importance of fiscal responsibility,
something that I have tried to practice each year in Congress, tried to
instill in my colleagues, the need for us to balance our books.
I was a big advocate back in the 1990s when I joined this Congress
for pay-as-you-go budgeting rules, which is a simple concept. It just
means that if you are going to have a spending increase or a tax cut,
you have to find an offset in the budget to pay for it in order to
maintain that balance.
Then, if you are able to hit the sweet spot with strong economic
growth, increased worker productivity, and with that comes increased
revenue to the Treasury, you can actually not only balance budgets but
run some surpluses, something that the second term of the Clinton
administration demonstrated with 4 consecutive years of budget
surpluses where we were actually paying down the national debt rather
than adding to it.
But in my humble opinion, Madam Speaker, I believe I have represented
the most beautiful congressional district in the Nation. Throughout
western Wisconsin, in an area called the Driftless Area, where the
glaciers missed, we have such beautiful natural resources.
I have more miles that border the Mississippi River than any other
congressional district in the Nation, so I took it upon myself as a
particular duty and responsibility to do what I could to better protect
and preserve the Mississippi River and the watershed basin for future
generations.
It is a huge source of tourism, outdoor recreation, and commercial
navigation, which is vital to the economy and the quality of life in
the upper Midwest.
I am proud that when I first got here back in 1997, I helped form the
first bipartisan Mississippi River Caucus. We were able to do some good
work, Republicans and Democrats working together, to manage river
issues and make sure that we approached it as one
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continuous ecosystem rather than just a northern and southern
Mississippi area.
We have a lot of rivers, a lot of lakes, beautiful bluffs and hills
and coulees that people enjoy back home.
More importantly, it has been such an honor to represent the people
of the district: good, honest, hardworking, salt of the earth.
I have seen time and time again over these last 26 years, when a
community got hit with a natural disaster--for us in western Wisconsin,
it was typically bad flooding that hit people in their communities and
flooded their homes and businesses. I saw people rally, and there
weren't labels. It wasn't Republicans or Democrats or Independents or
whatever. It was just, hey, we need to help our neighbor and get
through this. It was demonstrated time and time again.
I also saw, through the years, how communities rally for our fallen
heroes on the battlefield. People over the last year, knowing that I
was going to be stepping down at the end of this term, have asked me:
What was the most difficult part of your job serving in Congress?
Besides the obvious, the amount of time that you have to be away from
and sacrifice from your family, those missed opportunities, clearly,
the most difficult part of this job is receiving that phone call from
the Pentagon and then having to deliver that message to the family back
home that their loved one has just fallen on the field of battle, and
how absolutely soul-crushing that is to have to deliver that message
and hear the family's reaction to it and then go to that soldier's
funeral in the community.
But it was also inspiring, seeing how the community rallied around
that family and truly honored that fallen hero at the time--27 of them,
unfortunately, in my congressional district alone, from the deployments
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the other hand, people have asked me what has been one of my
prouder accomplishments as a Member of Congress. I tell them it wasn't
anything particular that I did or a piece of legislation that I may
have drafted and passed or some type of project back home that I was
able to help complete. It was more the opportunity I had as a Member of
Congress representing the people back home to go travel and be with our
troops in the field, seeing what our fine young men and women in
uniform do for us each and every day.
We send them off to these faraway battlefields with strange-sounding
names and weird histories and conflicts that are centuries old, and we
ask them to perform incredibly dangerous and difficult missions, and
they do it.
They are so well trained. They are so well motivated. They are the
best our Nation has to offer.
It is just inspiring, being in their presence, especially the five
times I went to Iraq, the six times I was in Afghanistan, the one time
I went to Kosovo at the height of that air war in the late 1990s,
seeing the job they do for us.
There is no other Nation in the world that can do what our military
does. They do it with decency, and they do it by abiding by the Geneva
Convention. That is something that the world expects of us.
We have well-trained and well-motivated men and women on our behalf
securing our freedom and our liberties but also advancing the cause of
peace throughout the world.
I just wish everyone, as a citizen of this country, could see and go
do the things that I did in meeting with our troops in the field.
That clearly is the proudest moment. I have never been prouder to be
an American than during those opportunities to be with them.
I have enjoyed the committee assignments that I have had through the
years. Initially, when I came to Congress, I was assigned to the
Natural Resources Committee. Of course, with all the work we were doing
for the Mississippi River, I have been one of the cochairs of the
National Park Caucus for a number of years now--truly, America's
greatest idea.
It is kind of neat to think that that democratizing principle that we
created in the National Park System, that just because we were citizens
of this great Nation, all of us are co-owners of some of the most
beautiful and most expensive real estate in the entire world, our
national parks.
They are calling for us to visit. They are beautiful places. I fell
in love with them as a kid, and I wanted to pass that on to my family
and my children. So, every August during our recess here in Congress, I
take the family to a different national park where I can meet with the
superintendents and the park personnel and get a park briefing. But I
also took the family out in the back country, where we went
backpacking.
We started that when the boys were just toddlers and could just
barely carry their own sleeping bags. But as they got older and
stronger, Tawni and I tended to load down their backpacks more and
more, and that made backpacking a lot easier on us.
I encourage our citizens to take advantage of the great national
parks we have, the national wildlife refuges that we have.
I also helped form and cochair the National Wildlife Refuge Caucus,
having three of the most beautiful ones in my congressional district as
well. They are objects of splendor, meant for us to enjoy and utilize.
I also served on the Education and Labor Committee. I represent 6 of
the 11 State universities in Wisconsin, 4 of the greatest technical
schools that we have. I made it a priority to focus on access to the
affordability of higher education, making sure that those doors remain
open to all of our kids, regardless of their socioeconomic background.
I was one of the champions of the need-based financial aid programs
because I benefited from that myself. Again, as a kid of a telephone
repairman, I was the first generation to go on to school.
My family didn't have the resources to send me to college, let alone
technical school, but through a combination of student loans, the work-
study program, and I qualified for a Pell grant being a low-income
student, I was able to make it work financially.
In fact, I think I still hold the undergraduate career for the most
toilets cleaned in a 4-year span. It was the most disgusting job on
campus, but it paid the best through work-study, so I was willing to do
that 2 hours a day, every year, for 4 years in college while I was
still trying to play college football and all that other stuff that I
wanted to do.
I wanted to make sure those programs continued and were strengthened
for the next generation because I didn't want to be one of those
Representatives that pulls the ladder up behind me and tells the next
generation, ``Tough luck. You are on your own.''
It is one of the wisest investments we can make as a Nation in our
youth, expanding those educational opportunities, because the truth is,
the jobs of the future are going to put a premium on higher education
learning. I mean, that is just the way the world and the global economy
are today. We have to expand that access.
The work we did on committee, too, for workforce development and
worker safety issues, I am very proud of that.
I served on the Budget Committee for a number of years. I had a short
stint on the Agriculture Committee. I was one of the leading voices on
farm bill reform. I tried to move away from these huge taxpayer
subsidies that were going to a few but very large agribusinesses, very
much at the expense of our family farmers. I have been proud to be able
to represent a large rural area in Wisconsin where farming, family
farming, is a key component of our economy.
Wisconsin is the Dairy State. Cheese--everyone is kind of familiar
with that, and we wear that label proudly.
It has been really neat throughout the years to go out on the family
farms and visit with those farm families and see the incredible work
they do for us to enable our food security, something that we, as
Americans, kind of take for granted. Yet, we shouldn't because farming
is tough: the ups and downs of commodity prices, the expenses, the
fixed costs that they face.
The last year or so has been particularly difficult with the increase
in fuel and fertilizer that they have without a corresponding increase
in commodity prices.
It is a hard business, especially if you are a dairy farmer because
that is 24/7.
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Cows have to be milked every day. You don't have the luxury of being
able to step away for a few days at a time. There are challenges there
that I tried to understand and tried to address in my role as
Representative of one of the larger dairy-producing districts in the
Nation.
I especially enjoyed my time as a member of the Ways and Means
Committee over the last 16 years. It is the only committee that is
constitutionally mandated. In the early years of our Republic, it was
the only committee that Congress had. Then, finally, it was starting to
get piecemealed and torn apart and that, but we still have incredible
jurisdiction over most of the economic issues: obviously, the tax code;
trade policy; Social Security and Medicare; healthcare policy.
It has been fun working in that committee and working with my
colleagues to try to develop good policy that makes sense for our
country. The work I especially focused on is healthcare reform, trying
to implement a value-based system so that we are actually paying for
the quality of care that is given to us and not the volume of care, not
the tests and procedures and things that are done to us without any
results, but making sure that we are getting value out of the dollars
that are spent.
I still believe that is going to be one of the keys to healthcare
reform in our country, moving to that value, that quality-based outcome
system that we need.
I benefited from having some of the best healthcare providers in the
world operating in my congressional district: the Gundersen Health
System, the Mayo Clinic Health System.
I think I still have more Mayo doctors in my congressional district
throughout western Wisconsin than they even do in Minnesota or other
places in the country, the Marshfields and the Auroras and the
ThedaCares. We are very lucky in the State of Wisconsin to have such
quality providers.
But, clearly, healthcare is still too expensive. We need to continue
to think creatively on how we can bring those costs down and make sure
that it is accessible for all of our citizens.
I was proud of being able to create the Veterans History Project.
This is an attempt to record our veterans' stories before it is too
late and they pass away because I believe it is an important part of
American history that needs to be preserved.
I teamed up with Amo Houghton, a Republican friend, back when he was
a Marine. We introduced the legislation on the House side. We teamed up
with Max Cleland and Chuck Hagel on the Senate side. I think we still
have the record for the shortest period of time from when a bill was
introduced to when it was signed into law by Bill Clinton because,
every once in a while, the urgency--at the time, it was the World War
II generation that was passing away at 2,000 a day. We wanted to get
this program up and going in order to start capturing their stories.
We are archiving it at the world's greatest library, the Library of
Congress. They have done a tremendous job of handling that program and
collecting all of these stories, digitizing them now, making them
available on the internet for everyone to access, but especially our
younger generation.
What gave me the idea to create the Veterans History Project--and I
am proud to report today we have over 120,000 of these veterans'
stories collected nationwide. Now, we are shifting the focus to the
Vietnam generation, who are starting to pass away because they are
getting up there in age, too.
What gave me the spark to create it was Father's Day weekend. I was
out at the picnic table with my dad, Korea generation, and my uncle,
his brother, Donnie, who flew bomber missions in the Pacific during the
Second World War. For the first time, they started talking to me about
their experience. I said, holy cow, and I told them to stop as I ran
into the house and got the family video camera and then came out and
set it up. My two boys were just toddlers at the time, and I wanted
them, when they were old enough to appreciate it, to be able to hear it
from their grandfather and their great-uncle.
I came back to Washington that next week and said, given the
technology that is available today, we need to be doing this
nationwide. So, we quickly drafted the legislation, moved it through
both Chambers, and got it implemented into law.
It has been a lot of fun being able to not only interview our
veterans but seeing this program grow and the history that we are
preserving so future generations never forget the type of service and
sacrifice that came before them.
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I did a lot of work on the veteran front, obviously, trying to ease
their transition from Iraq, Afghanistan, to back home. We had 2 million
of them coming home with special needs, physical and mental, that still
needs to be addressed.
At the VA hospital in my district, I spent a lot of time making sure
we had better coordination of care and better outcome of care for our
veterans. More needs to be done on that front. It is a promise our
Nation has to live up to, given the type of service and sacrifice that
these men and women do for us.
I was also co-chairing the Rural Healthcare Caucus. Obviously, as a
Representative of a lot of rural providers in my district, I teamed up
with Cathy McMorris Rodgers for a number of years to make sure that our
rural providers had a voice when it came to healthcare policy, given
the unique challenges that they face with recruitment, retention, and
just those rural settings generally, and the type of obstacles that we
have to overcome.
In many cases, these rural hospitals are the anchor of these rural
communities. If they lose it, it has huge economic impact, and it also
makes it very difficult then for the people in that region to access
the type of quality healthcare that they need.
When I first got here, I helped form the New Democratic Coalition. It
was back in `97 with Cal Dooley, Tim Roemer, Jim Moran, and others, who
felt that we needed to try to restore the sensible center in Congress
with a pragmatic group of House Members who could get together on a
weekly basis, figure out how we can complement each other's work, but
also figure out ways of building bridges rather than tearing them down
around here, form those crucial bipartisan relationships to get things
done, working closely with the Clinton administration initially and
then subsequent administrations.
I got the honor of chairing the New Democrat Coalition for 4 years.
Today, I think we are close to 100 Members in the Democrat Coalition,
great Members, hardworking, earnest, again, those trying to build
bridges and get things done around here. I think that group has a lot
of hope and promise in the coming Congress now of finding the relevancy
and finding those crucial relationships across the aisle that we need
in order to advance the issues and the policies that benefit our
Nation.
I know I am leaving that New Democrat Coalition in very good with
hands with the young, bright, talented leadership that has come up now
and taken over the reins.
Also, I had some good mentors as I was growing up. I mentioned
Senator Bill Proxmire, who I had a chance to intern for, wrote many of
his speeches about the need for the Senate to ratify the antigenocide
treaty.
He was one of the first sounding the alarm about fiscal
irresponsibility and how we have a responsibility as Representatives to
be good stewards of the dollar.
Also, Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin, one of my heroes, one of
the great conservationists of all time, not just in Congress but for
the country and for the world. Here is a guy who grew up in a 400-
person town called Clear Lake and later became Governor of Wisconsin,
Senator from Wisconsin, and the father of Earth Day, a day that we
commemorate every year about the need to protect our vital natural
resources across the globe, celebrated in 144 nations today. It is a
great story of how one person can make a difference, especially a
small-town kid from northern Wisconsin and the impact that he left
behind with his legacy.
So, obviously, you can't do all of this. This job is too big for one
individual. Everyone here, all of my colleagues know the truth in the
statement that you are only as good as the people you surround yourself
with. I have been so blessed and so lucky throughout the years to have
the best
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staff that any Member could hope for, whether it was here in Washington
or back home in my district offices. These are incredible individuals,
typically young, hardworking, smart, just trying to do the best they
can servicing people back home, whether it was the legislation that we
worked on together here or the casework that my district office staff
members would do.
Nothing brought me greater joy than traveling around the
congressional district, having people come up and say: Ron, I have got
to thank you and your office because of what you did for me or a family
member, whether it was a veteran's issue or a lost Social Security
check or some farm program that a family farmer was trying to access. I
mean, the list goes on and on and on. I give all the credit and all the
laurels to my staff for the job that they did throughout the years.
I had wonderful chiefs of staff, from Cindy, Erik, Travis, Mike,
Hannah, and Alex, who ran a tight ship and just created a great
atmosphere for all of us to work in. They were true partners through
all of this.
I had two wonderful district directors back home: Lauren Kannenberg,
who I recruited as a principal out of a Catholic high school to be my
district office manager way back when, and later Karrie Jacqueline, who
were able to manage those offices and the outreach that we ask our
staff to do and to report back to us so that we stay in constant touch
and communication, if we are not out on the road ourselves meeting with
people back in the community.
The committee staff is just tremendous, the work that they put in,
how helpful they are to us as individual Members, but also to our staff
people. The people we have serving here on the floor, they are the ones
that are behind the scenes, but they try to bring some function to the
dysfunction that occurs too often in this place. We couldn't do it
without them. It is the kind of seamless energy that they bring to
making the trains run on time and just doing the basics for us to be
able to do our job.
We have an official reporter right now taking down my words. They
never get to say a word when they are here, but I know how important
their job is as the guardian of the public record. Somehow they do it
so well, even when we are yelling over each other in heated debates and
trying to get all of that down. It is not an easy job. I know this
personally because my wife is an official court reporter for a judge
back home. I know the type of skill that it takes to perform these
duties. I just want to thank them for their service to our Nation.
The Capitol Hill police. Obviously, January 6 is going to go down as
a dark mark in American history. It was our Capitol Hill police that
were the true vanguard of making sure that it didn't get uglier or
deadlier than it did that day.
I mention these kinds of ancillary personnel who make Capitol Hill
run, because through the years--and for me, 26 years--you get to know
these people as individuals and as human beings and develop those
friendships. It is something that I will truly miss.
Bob and Rose in our cloakroom, who keep us so well informed of what
is happening all the time and what the schedule is and what we should
anticipate, those types of relationships you are never going to forget.
I also benefited throughout the years in one of those competitive
swing districts. I love the fact that my district was 50/50. We have
too few of those districts today with gerrymandering where it is
overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democrat. That wasn't the
case in my district. My district has always been about one-third, one-
third, and one-third in registration. That forced me to play it down
the middle and to understand that I was going to be taking incoming
from the far right and the far left. I always reminded my staff to not
worry about that, because that is not where are our district is. In
fact, if I wasn't taking incoming from the far, far right and the far,
far left, I probably wasn't doing a good job of adequately representing
the people in the district that I had.
It was such a joy, because they did place their trust and confidence
in me to make good decisions on their behalf, even though a lot of them
will tell you they had disagreements with me throughout the years. But
I think they saw the hard work we put in and the honesty and civility
that I tried to bring to this job. It was a great congressional
district to represent.
But I couldn't have gotten here without the help of my campaign
staff, the campaign managers throughout the years, the staff, the
fieldworkers, the volunteers, the supporters, the friends, people like
Wally Capper, Paul Barkla, Bob Welsh, Nancy Johnson, Vicki Burke,
Margaret Wood. These are the people who have enough belief and trust in
you that they are willing to give you one of the most precious things
that we own as human beings and that is our own time. They were, time
and again, campaign after campaign, always there helping out and
pitching in. That is true for thousands of people back home who
supported me throughout the years.
They not only made it possible for me to win in a very competitive
district, but they also made it fun. Because as candidates going
through tough campaigns, it means a lot knowing that you have a lot of
friends and a lot of supporters who have your back and care about you
and care about the outcome of our democracy. They have been terrific.
Most of all, I thank my family. It starts there and it ends there,
especially my soulmate and my partner in all this, my wife, Tawni. I
don't know how she did it. When we first ran, our first son, Johnny,
was born just a few days before our primary. In the midst of that
chaos, the first congressional campaign, with everything swirling
around, suddenly we have a little boy in our arms. Boy, you talk about
a life moment that just brings it down to the basics. At that point,
when he was delivered, nothing else mattered. We win, we lose, it
didn't matter; we have this beautiful little boy in our arms now. He
was such a stabilizing force.
Then 2 years later came Matt. How she did it all of those years with
me running back and forth every weekend, back to the district, coming
out here for my duties in Washington. I am home representing a 19-
county, large rural area, constantly on the road, getting out into the
communities that I represent. So most of this fell on her to raise two
beautiful sons, who are doing incredible things right now. She and I
couldn't be more proud of Johnny and Matt.
They were born into this racket. It is kind of weird for them knowing
dad is stepping down, because this life of me serving in Congress is
all they have known. In fact, for a while, when they were little guys
and Tawni would drop me off at the airport, they literally thought my
job was getting on a plane and flying overhead all week and then
landing, because they would come and pick me up then. Every time they
saw a plane go by, ``Oh, there's daddy.'' Then they started tuning in
to C-SPAN and seeing me engaged in debates on the floor. Wait a minute:
What is going on here? They started figuring it out. I couldn't have
done it without Tawni's support and partnership and the kids.
So many times I had to be away from them, but there were also fun
family events we could do, too, in the course of my duties. Parades, we
lost count at about 1,500. I started losing the boys when they became
teenagers, after about 1,200 parades that they did. County fairs, they
would go along with me, the great dairy breakfasts that we have back
home in Wisconsin during the summertime where we visit dairy families,
have great breakfasts, community events, everyone coming together. So
there were a lot of fun, enjoyable things we could do as a family that
overlapped with my official duties. They never complained, even though
it probably would have been more fun for them to be doing something
else or hanging out with their friends.
Now, I am proud to say that Johnny, after playing college football,
is with an engineering firm in La Crosse, doing great work there, we
couldn't be prouder.
Our son Matt, after graduating Harvard, immediately signed up for
officer candidate school at Quantico, and now he is an infantry
commander for the Marines at Camp Lejeune. Yes, they fixed the water
problem down at Camp Lejeune, after seeing all of those ads on TV
lately. That is what they have been able to do.
[[Page H8536]]
Tawni and I are very, very lucky to have those two sons and the type
of young men and citizens that they have become.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention our ``third son'' whom we
didn't adopt, Oscar, who is an exchange student, who came and lived
with us throughout his high school years, going to school with our
boys. He went to Madison UW. He is working at Epic now and applying to
med school. He is from Luoyang, China. He is just a great kid. He is
home for the holidays with us and does family vacations with us and
goes backpacking with us. That has been a lot of fun, too.
It has been quite the ride. Obviously, many, many people made this
happen. I feel very blessed and very fortunate having the opportunity
to be able to represent such a neat, beautiful area with some great
people and families back home in Wisconsin.
We are looking forward to the next chapter. We don't know what that
is yet. No final decisions have been made. But Tawni and I are going to
be looking for new ways of being able to contribute to the community
and being able to support our democracy.
As I leave here today, just a note of caution. The type of
polarization that we are experiencing right now in this country, the
hyperpartisanship, is not healthy. The key to the survival of any
democracy is the ability to compromise. It is the give and take. It is
being able to reach out across the aisle to a good friend, like Dave
Schweikert, who is on the Committee on Ways and Means with us and find
some issues that we can work on together and try to advance. That is
the only way this place is going to survive. It is the only way our
country and democracy are going to be able to survive.
{time} 1600
Unfortunately, in recent years, people getting involved in politics
are looking at the other side not as reasonable people that you can
disagree with and have heated debates about the best course of action
for the future of our country, but the enemy that needs to be
destroyed.
These campaigns are getting uglier, and they are getting nastier, and
the division is growing, which is leading to events like we had here on
Capitol Hill on January 6. This can't continue.
One of my prouder achievements that I tell people back home is, I
have been consistently ranked as one of the most bipartisan Members of
Congress through the surveys that are taken, the bills I introduce, the
legislation we advance, who I am working with across the aisle. I wear
that as a badge of honor, not as something to be ashamed of or run away
from.
Too many of my colleagues now fear that if they are seen working with
a Democrat or working with a Republican, someone on the other side,
that would be the kiss of death for them in their primary back home.
That is not the way this place is set up to function.
We have got to figure out a way to fight through this bad era of
American politics and remind ourselves that, ultimately, at the end of
the day, we are all Americans with a commonality that can't separate
us. We cannot be enemies.
We need to find a way forward of healing the division and the
partisanship that has poisoned our politics and the alternate realities
that are being created today through many different mediums because if
you don't have that basic commonality of what the facts and what the
truth are, there is no way you are going to be able to reach agreement
on some of the tough issues facing our country. I mean, the separation,
the gulf will be too great.
I didn't mean to lecture my colleagues here or future Representatives
to this place, but it is an issue that we have to stay focused on.
Madam Speaker, I appreciate the recognition, the honor of being able
to address this Chamber for one of my last times and to thank,
ultimately, the people in the Third Congressional District for the
trust and the responsibility that they placed in me these past 26
years.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________