On the recordDecember 17, 2024
I thank Congresswoman Barbara Lee for yielding. This is not about me. This is about you, your legislative legacy. You have done a great job here as a legislator, and you will leave a great legacy. {time} 2030 There are two parts of that legacy that I wanted to emphasize. They have been mentioned already tonight, but the first is the advocacy that you had to create the poverty task force. We raised a lot of money to try to get elected, and poverty is rarely mentioned as an issue. You not only created the task force, but you have also used that task force to create targeted, effective ways to actually address the issue of poverty. The other is the issue of global AIDS, the global AIDS crisis. Your work with the Bush administration has been phenomenal. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, AIDS anywhere is a threat of AIDS everywhere, and if we don't address it everywhere, it threatens the rest of the world. Your work convinced the George W. Bush administration to actually allocate the order of magnitude of resources needed. There were discussions of a little here and a little there, but you kept on them until they actually put in the kind of money that was necessary. It is not an exaggeration to say that tens of millions of people are alive today because of your work. So, I thank you, Barbara Lee, for all of your work, especially the work for those who would not have a voice without you.
