When Senator Harkin was retiring, and I was in the House and running for
the Senate, he called me over and he said, "Tammy, I'm handing the reins over to you."
(laughing)
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It has just sort of fallen to me to
champion ADA issues, being a wheelchair user.
And then, Senator Harkin was retiring and I was in the House
and running for the Senate, he called me over
and he said, "Tammy, I'm handing the reins over to you."
(laughter) "I'm handing the torch to you. You need to be the torch bearer
and you need to really represent the entire disability community
because you, frankly, would't be here had the disability community
not been there before you even became disabled."
And he was absolutely right.
I find myself being the go-to person on a lot of the ADA issues
as they come up in Congress.
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I said, yes, I was honored.
I mean, to be able to be handed the mantle from
Tome Harkin is quite the honor.
And you know, I don't know that I can fill his shoes,
but I try everyday to make sure I do my best to represent the community,
but also to just fight for basic common--
and this is what I did in the Army, I fought for freedoms,
I fought for people's rights. And this is just a basic human right,
to be able to access the life that you want to access,
and live the life that you want to live
and to be not be confronted by barriers at every turn.
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I have been working on burn pit issues for a very long time, and it started
from just my own experience being exposed to the burn pits in Iraq.
We used to fly into Baghdad.
(cough)
We were stationed in Balad and we would fly into Baghdad
into the the Green Zone.
And if you were on the ground looking up, it always, just the sky,
always just looked a little overcast. It didn't look anything, you know,
ominous, but flying through about a 50 foot, 100 foot layer of basically
brown skies, in the sky.
We used to burn the air crew's lungs and you would go through there like,
Oh man, my eyes are watering, my lungs are burning, and I always said
there was gonna be some respiratory illnesses.
And then I started working on Agent Orange issues within the VA,
and it was under President Obama and Secretary Shinseki
that we finally
granted benefits to veterans based on presumptive benefits.
So, if you develop (inudible) heart disease, if you develop leukemia B,
and you were in Vietnam, we're going to presume that it's
because of your Vietnam service.
We no longer force veterans to, you know, prove that their illness
was caused by Agent Orange, which is presumed.
And then, so that really started me working on burn pits
after we were successful with the Agent Orange campaign.
And so it's pretty much been continuous ever since, and I'm really glad
we got the contract passed.
There's more work to do, but it's a great, great, great, great,
first start.
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