[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 9399-9401]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      REMEMBERING GEORGE VOINOVICH

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I come here with a solemn message today, 
and I come here remembering a Republican colleague who served in this 
body for 12 years--George Voinovich.
  George was a former Governor of Ohio and a former mayor of Cleveland. 
I think, in his time, he was county auditor. He was Lieutenant 
Governor, I believe, and mayor of Cleveland. He was the chairman of the 
National League of Cities. As a two-term Governor of Ohio, he was also 
chairman of the National Governors Association. I had the privilege of 
serving as his vice chairman and, later on, as his successor, as the 
chairman of the NGA.
  Then George came here. He was elected in 1998, and he took office 
here in the Senate in 1999. He served for two terms and is, I am sure, 
remembered by everybody who served with him as smart, kind, principled, 
hard-working, and straight-talking. He was everything an elected 
official should be and could be.
  He and I went to Ohio State together but not at the same time. He was 
in law school and a year or two older than me. I was an undergraduate, 
and so I never got to know him at that point in time. But we shared a 
lot of bonds. I got to know his family well, his wife Janet. She and my 
wife Martha, as we were Governors together, were spouses together and 
were very good and close friends.
  I liked George. You know sometimes when you meet someone and you just 
like them right away? I don't believe anybody in Ohio history ever won 
all 84 counties, and with something like almost two-thirds of the vote. 
He did that. That was in 2004. I think in 2006, I won every county in 
Delaware. We have three. He has 80 or so counties. I would joke with 
him: Well, we both won every county in our State. It was a little 
harder for him.
  He impacted this place, as I think relatively few people do. We 
served together on the Environment and Public Works Committee. We 
served together on the committee that was initially called Governmental 
Affairs and later Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He was 
one of the leaders in each of those committees.
  George was one of those people who had the courage to keep out of 
step when everyone else was marching to the wrong tune. As a 
Republican, at a time when we had a Republican President--and by 2007 
the war in Iraq was not going well--he very bravely, within his own 
caucus, called on President George W. Bush to begin a phased withdrawal 
of our troops. He basically said the Iraqis ought to be able to do a 
little more for themselves, fend for themselves. We will help them, but 
they should do more for themselves.
  He was one who believed we needed to match revenues with 
expenditures, and he was a guy who really knew how to squeeze a dime. 
He was very fiscally very responsible. He was a big believer

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that States should be fiscally responsible--and cities. He became mayor 
of Cleveland when they were basically bankrupt. He helped guide them 
back to prosperity and helped to rekindle the economy there and helped 
to foster an extremely strong economy. That is how he won every single 
county in Ohio.
  George was a guy who would actually vote against a tax break when he 
thought it wasn't fiscally responsible to do, if it would further erode 
our revenue base and enlarge our budget deficit. He was a very 
courageous--very courageous--elected official and someone you just 
liked.
  You know sometimes you meet people and it is all about them? Well, it 
was never all about George. He was a guy who had every reason to be 
pompous and proud and everything, but he was not that way at all. How 
do I describe him? He had the heart of a servant. He understood that 
his job was to serve, not be served. He was humble, not haughty. He 
came from a humble background and never had a lot of money--he and his 
wife Janet--until the day he died.
  George died in his sleep earlier this week, almost at the age of 80, 
just 2 days before my wife and I were supposed to have dinner with him 
and his wife here in Washington, and with other friends, to celebrate 
his impending 80th birthday.
  I said earlier that George had the courage to keep out of step when 
everyone else was marching to the wrong tune. How do I say this? When 
faced with the dilemma of maybe voting with his caucus or voting with 
the President on something he just thought was wrong, he was amazingly 
brave. He would say: What is the right thing to do? I heard him say 
this more than a few times, as Governor, chairman of the National 
Governors Association, and here. He would say: What is the right thing 
to do? He wouldn't say: What is the easy thing to do? What is the 
expedient thing to do? But what is the right thing to do?
  He was a person of deep faith. We have a Bible study group that meets 
here every Thursday, just upstairs, not far from this floor. There are 
about seven or eight of us, who, I like to say, need the most help. It 
is Democrats and Republicans. It is not just all one religion or the 
other. It is a meeting he came to just about every Thursday. He was a 
person of deep faith.
  George felt that the most important rule of law for us to follow, 
regardless of what religion we were--whether Protestant or Catholic or 
Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist--they all have some version of 
the golden rule. Even Confucius in China had something like the golden 
rule 2,500 years ago, which goes something like this: Don't do to 
others what you don't want to have done to you. But George was really 
the embodiment of the golden rule: Treat other people like you want to 
be treated.
  He had a temper, but, frankly, he lost it when he should have. He 
lost it when he should have.
  Today we had a roundtable, and the roundtable included someone from 
the Government Accountability Office. Every 2 years, as the Presiding 
Officer knows, GAO puts out a high-risk list. I describe it as high-
risk ways of wasting taxpayer money. They lay out all these different 
things that should be done in agencies and that, if done, would not 
only provide better service for citizens of this country but also do so 
in a more cost-effective way.
  George was always really interested in how we get better results with 
less money. He was always interested in that.
  At this roundtable today, when we convened it, I said: Let's hold 
this roundtable today with the Government Accountability Office and 
with representatives from across the Federal Government who are working 
to get off GAO's high-risk list. In order to do that, you have to 
figure out how to address the concerns raised by GAO and their reviews 
of agency operations. We talked about some of the areas where Senator 
George Voinovich worked--in one case with Senator Danny Akaka from 
Hawaii--to address a number of areas of expenditures and practices that 
needed to be addressed.
  Subsequent to the roundtable, I left there and came here to the 
Capitol Building and went to the office of the President pro tempore, 
Senator Orrin Hatch, where he was signing a document relating to the 
adoption of legislation the Presiding Officer and I and others had 
worked on, which is focused on how we do a better job in this country 
when we transition from one administration--this President, the current 
administration, President Obama--to the next administration. How do we 
do that in a way that we just don't drop the ball and get further 
behind, stop making progress in particular areas, and undermine our 
national security? How do we transition in smarter ways?
  That legislation has been named after two people--in honor of two 
people. One is Senator Ted Kaufman, who was Joe Biden's successor here. 
Ted was our Senator here for 2 years following Joe's departure to 
become Vice President and before Chris Coons was elected and joined us 
here in the Senate. During the 2 years Ted Kaufman was our Senator from 
Delaware, one of the pieces of legislation he offered was to make 
possible better transitions, more effective transitions, and smoother 
transitions from one administration to the other.
  Another person who had thought about that a whole lot was a fellow 
named Mike Leavitt, former Governor of Utah and later a Cabinet 
Secretary in George W. Bush's administration, and a friend of mine. I 
succeeded George Voinovich as chairman of the National Governors 
Association, and Mike Leavitt was the vice chairman, and he then became 
the chairman. We were all very close friends and colleagues then and 
right up until George's death.
  But we went over, literally, to the President pro tempore's office 
and signed the documentation. We had Senator Kaufman there, Governor 
Leavitt there, and we remembered George Voinovich, because when the 
first version of that legislation was passed, Ted Kaufman was the 
Democratic lead and George Voinovich was the Republican lead.
  That is just one of dozens of examples where he provided leadership 
for this country, as he did for Ohio in the roles he held there.
  I really loved George Voinovich. I just loved the guy. I think when 
we think of leaders, sometimes people in leadership positions say to 
others: Do as I say. George actually said: Do as I do. He was a big 
believer in leading by example.
  The other thing I loved and respected about him was that he was very 
tenacious. We have all met people who could have done something, gotten 
something done, and been somebody, and they gave up. They gave up. 
George never gave up. He was one of those people who, when he knew he 
was right and he was sure he was right, he never gave up.
  Tomorrow, people from all over Ohio--actually from around the 
country--will gather in Cleveland not far from the home where George 
and Janet and their family were raised and where they lived for many 
years--where Janet still lives. It will be sad, but there will also be 
a sense of joy. There are probably not many good ways to die--but to 
die at the age of almost 80 and to die in your sleep without pain and 
suffering, and to have a legacy of wonderful children--children any of 
us would be proud to call our own--and a bunch of grandchildren--the 
same thing, whom any of us would be proud to call our own. That is a 
great legacy if you just stopped right there. But the legacy goes well 
beyond that in terms of the way Ohio is governed today by Governor John 
Kasich, who is another close friend.
  John Kasich and I came to the House together in 1983, and I am 
delighted he has had the opportunity to serve as Governor there--a 
worthy successor to George Voinovich. Frankly, I might add--and I will 
probably get in trouble with my caucus for saying this--he would have 
been a great nominee for our friends in the Republican Party. But 
apparently that is not in the cards.
  So I won't go on much further, but when people say bad things about

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elected officials or unkind things about elected officials, I think it 
is too bad they didn't know the Presiding Officer and they didn't know 
George Voinovich, because they wouldn't feel that way if they knew him 
or had any idea of his commitment and his dedication and his sacrifice 
and his leadership.
  I will close with this. A fellow who used to serve here was a fellow 
named Alan Simpson. He was a Senator from Wyoming. We remembered him 
today because he was the coauthor of the Bowles-Simpson plan, the 
fiscally responsible deficit reduction plan of probably about 6 or 7 
years ago. It was established by President Obama. It was a good roadmap 
then, and I still think it is a good roadmap today. Alan Simpson was 
the Republican part of that, in tandem with Erskine Bowles.
  Alan Simpson used to say a lot of very funny things. He was probably 
as humorous as anybody who ever served here, but he also said some 
serious things here too, and one of them reminds me of George 
Voinovich. Senator Alan Simpson used to talk about integrity, and he 
would say: Integrity--if you have it, nothing else matters. Integrity--
if you don't have it, nothing else matters. Think about that. 
Integrity, if you have it, nothing else matters. Integrity, if you 
don't have it, nothing else matters. George Voinovich did not have a 
partisan bone in his body, but he had a world of integrity--just a 
world of integrity inside that body of his.
  The other thing I would say, I like to think that as important as 
integrity is--and it is--the other thing that is as critically 
important for the success of any organization, whether it is a State or 
county or business or school, this body, the most important ingredient 
for the success of that entity, any of them, is leadership, principled 
leadership, committed leadership, enlightened leadership, and George 
Voinovich embodied those.
  So to the people of Delaware who supported--not Delaware. Delaware is 
a little town just north of Columbus, OH. When I was a student at Ohio 
State, I used to think Delaware was a town just north of Columbus. I 
later found out it was a whole State. When I got out of the Navy, I 
moved there. They were good enough to let me serve in a couple 
different capacities, including here.
  The people of Ohio were smart to elect him and smart to share him 
with us. We were just blessed that they did that, really blessed that 
they did that.
  I felt the presence of George Voinovich today at our roundtable 
working on the issues he loved. I felt his presence at the signing 
ceremony in the President pro tempore's office, when we signed into law 
the transition legislation he originally cosponsored a number of years 
ago with Senator Ted Kaufman, and I feel his presence here today, and 
it is a good presence. While we mourn his loss and his death, we just 
appreciate so much his life.

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