Barbara Mikulski: “Before my three colleagues who have accomplished this significant feat leave the floor, I, too, wish to salute them.…”

“Before my three colleagues who have accomplished this significant feat leave the floor, I, too, wish to salute them. Dear colleagues, what an emotional day. First, our good friend Senator Wellstone embarked on that with you, Senator Murray, many years ago. Paul is no longer with us. His legacy lives on. There is a saying I learned in Catholic girls school: exegi aani perrenius. I will build a monument in lasting bronze. And when one thinks about a monument to Paul Wellstone, the kind of wise guy he was, he wouldn't be a marble guy or want some bronze statue. He would want this as a memorial that others might live. As a Senator from Maryland, my State is a manufacturing State. In my shipyards, there was so much asbestos. To this day, the shipyard workers of Baltimore and Fairfield, Bethlehem Steel, people who built the liberty ships, the ones who helped win the battle of the North Atlantic, the ones who every day would go to work with their lunch pail, now go to the senior citizen meetings carrying an oxygen tank, and not only have they suffered but their spouses suffer. Most of the guys in those days would come home and they would wash their clothes and take care of them. The women were exposed to this as well. It is not only secondhand smoke, but it was secondhand asbestos. For me today to know that when we talked about better things through chemistry, the answer was yes, but what we did without realizing it was subject our American citizens to such unbelievable pain.”