George Miller: “I thank the committee so much for bringing this legislation to the floor. We truly honor a man of great character, of…”

“I thank the committee so much for bringing this legislation to the floor. We truly honor a man of great character, of great integrity and of great dignity with the naming of this building for our former colleague, Congressman Ron Dellums, a man who led not only our Bay Area delegation but led national movements on behalf of human rights and who brought the titans of apartheid to their knees and dragged a reluctant American government along the way. He has fought for civil rights for all Americans and, more than any other Member of Congress, he helped to clearly illustrate how an overfed military budget was literally starving our children, our schools and our communities. When it came time to cut that budget, when it came time for the base closures and the various rounds of base closures, Ron worked hard as the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services to make, in fact, sure that those closures were fair, that people had a chance to be retrained and to be reemployed and so their families would not suffer from the closure of those bases and to make sure that the communities in fact were able to absorb those bases into our local economies and to redeploy those assets in the civil economy.”