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Honoring Senator Barbara Mikulski

Floor Speech

Date: Nov. 17, 2015
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights

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Mr. President, President Obama recently announced the list of individuals he plans to honor with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. One of them is our colleague from Maryland. I know she was honored by it. I know that someone she mentioned on the floor yesterday--her great-grandmother--would feel a similar sense of honor too. This is a woman who played an important role in our colleague's life, one the Senator speaks of often. She emigrated from Poland when she was 16 years old with little more than a few pennies in her pocket. She couldn't even vote when she arrived. ``She never thought,'' our colleague said, ``that her own great-granddaughter would one day be a United States Senator. But then, it is only in America where my story would have been possible.''

That is something all of us can appreciate, and we recognize our colleague from Maryland, the longest serving woman in Congress, for the President's choice to honor her in this way.

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