[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18213-18214]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   HONORING SENATOR BARBARA MIKULSKI

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, President Obama recently announced the 
list of individuals he plans to honor with a Presidential Medal of 
Freedom. One of them is our colleague from Maryland. I know she was 
honored by it. I know that someone she mentioned on the floor 
yesterday--her great-grandmother--would feel a similar sense of honor 
too. This is a woman who played an important role in our colleague's 
life, one the Senator speaks of often. She emigrated from Poland when 
she was 16 years old with little more than a few pennies in her pocket. 
She couldn't even vote when she arrived. ``She never thought,'' our 
colleague said, ``that her own great-granddaughter would one day be a 
United States Senator. But then, it is only in America where my story 
would have been possible.''
  That is something all of us can appreciate, and we recognize our 
colleague from Maryland, the longest

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serving woman in Congress, for the President's choice to honor her in 
this way.

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