Jim Baird: “to close, let me just once again express my deep gratitude and tremendous respect to Dr. Ehlers for his leadership, not…”

“to close, let me just once again express my deep gratitude and tremendous respect to Dr. Ehlers for his leadership, not only now as ranking member, but over the years he has served on this committee. Quite literally there has been no more tireless and effective advocate for this legislation and for science in general than Dr. Ehlers. We all respect and admire that and appreciate that greatly. I also want to express my appreciation to Chairman Gordon, whom I acknowledged earlier and thanked for his leadership, Ranking Member Hall. I want to express a special gratitude to my own staff member, Hilary Cain, for her leadership on this and great counsel; as well as the committee staff, Jim Wilson and Dahlia Sokolov for their tireless efforts. They have spent hours and hours on this. We are grateful. With that, as Dr. Ehlers and others have so eloquently said, this is a good bill, it is a bipartisan bill. It has the endorsement of a long list of sponsors, who I did not enumerate here in the interests of time, but virtually every major scientific organization as well as leaders in industry and in academia have endorsed this bill strongly. It is a bill that this committee and this body should pass. I urge its passage. I urge a ``yes'' vote.”