Thomas Daschle: “At 3:45 this afternoon, our friend and colleague, Paul Sarbanes, joined what is truly one of the most exclusive clubs in…”

“At 3:45 this afternoon, our friend and colleague, Paul Sarbanes, joined what is truly one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. He cast his 10,000th vote as a United States Senator. Of the 1,875 people ever to serve in the Senate, only 20 others have ever reached this remarkable milestone. Remarkably, eight of the 21 '10,000 vote' Senators are serving in this Senate. In addition to Senator Sarbanes, they include our friends Joe Biden, Senator Byrd, Pete Domenici, Fritz Hollings, Dan Inouye, Ted Kennedy and Ted Stevens. I'm proud to note that, at least in this very distinguished caucus, Democrats still have a majority. Reaching this historic milestone is just the latest remarkable accomplishment in what has been, by anyone's standards, a remarkable American success story. Paul Sarbanes is the proud son of Greek immigrants. His parents, Spyros and Matina Sarbanes, emigrated from the same town in Greece, but met in America. The Sarbanes family owned a restaurant in Salisbury, MD. They gave it a quintessentially American name: The Mayflower Restaurant. Paul worked in the restaurant, and he and his family lived above it. He graduated from a public high school and won a scholarship to Princeton University. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. After Oxford, he came home and, in 1960, earned a law degree from Harvard.”