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.
It's just sort of fallen to me to champion
ADA issues being a wheelchair user.
And then, 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.
I'm handing the torch to you, and you need to be the torch bearer
and you need to really represent the entire disability community
because you, frankly, wouldn'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 issues
as they come up in Congress.
I said, yes, I was honored.
I mean, to be able to be handed the mantle from
Tom Harkin is quite the honor.
You know, I don't know that I can fill his shoes,
but I try every day to make sure I do my best to represent the community,
but then also to just fight for basic common- And this is what I did
in the army I fought for freedom- I fought for people's rights.
And this is just a basic human right
to access the life that you want to access and live the life that you want to live
and to not be confronted by barriers at every turn.
I have been working on burn pit issues for a very long time and it and it started
from just
my own experience being exposed to the burn pits in Iraq.
We used to fly into Baghdad.
We were stationed in
Balad and we would fly into Baghdad into the Green Zone.
And if you were on the ground
looking up, would always just the sky, which is the 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 go through the 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.
If you develop Islamic 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.
Obviously, we no longer force veterans to
prove that
their illness was caused by Agent Orange, which is presumed.
And 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.
Yes. So I wrote a piece of legislation
called the ASAP Act to make all of our transit stations accessible.
All Stations Accessibility Program A.S.A.P.
I wrote it in this piece of legislation and introduced it in the Senate.
Coming out of my experience with the CTA, the Chicago Transit Authority.
I was invited by the CTA when I was a congresswoman on the
25th anniversary of ADA, so we’re on the 32nd anniversary.
So seven years ago they invited me to a ribbon
cutting at a CTA station and they were really proud,
really, really, really proud that they were announcing that they were going
to begin this program to make 100% of the Chicago
Transit Authority's stations, whether it was bus or rail,
fully accessible.
And I said, this is great.
When is this going to be done?
He goes well it's a 25 year plan.
And I looked at him, Dorval Carter, who is the president of the Chicago CTA,
and I said, So you mean a half century after the passage of the ADA?
Is when we can count on this?
And then he went when you put it that way it sounds terrible.
Like, yeah, it is terrible.
Number one, let me just say that it's great that you're doing this.
And I said, Why are we here 25 years later and we still have
stations that are not accessible.
I still to this day don’t use the L in Chicago
because not all stations are accessible and you never know
if one is going to be or not.
And he said, well, it's because we have a limited amount of money.
And ADA accessibility has always been a priority for us.
It's always been in the top three, but we only have enough money for the top two.
And when I have to choose between safety, as in buying a new train car
or safety equipment for the train car versus building a ramp.
I'm going to choose buying new safety equipment for the train car.
I said, so what we're fixing.
He goes, well, we need money that is sectioned off
that cannot be used for anything else other than accessibility.
And that would allow us to do this faster.
So then I wrote the bill on this at the federal level,
and when we were starting to work, when President Biden was sworn in
and Mayor Pete sorry- Pete Buttigieg was appointed, I said, you know,
and I've known him from previously and I said, listen, we got to do this.
We have to do this.
And let me tell you what I'm trying to do.
I invited him out
and he toured one of the CTA stations where this work was going on.
I explained what we were trying to do.
I said, We can make this happen in ten years if we fund this
and so in the bipartisan infrastructure deal, we ended up losing
half the money, but, we got the first five years funded and
you need to support it.
So he supported it.
It was great because he elevated it as a priority.
I was able to make it stay even though I lost half the money, I was able to make
it stay in the bipartisan infrastructure bill instead of it getting dropped.
So this will be nationwide.
So what we did was we put aside federal dollars that
first off, the legacy system
but all transit systems can apply for those dollars to help them
make all of their stations accessible, not just for like wheelchairs,
but it's got to be vision hearing cognitive disabilities as well.
You know, when you have to buy a ticket and it's all touch screen
and, you know, that doesn't help somebody who has a visual impairment.
Cognitively, if you don't make your app on the cell phone app, something that
that is friendly for those with cognitive impairments, then it's not accessible.
So this covers the full range of disabilities.
Well, it's certainly more partisan.
And after January 6th, it's been difficult, especially compared
to my time in the House where I had a lot of bipartisan work.
I will tell you, though, that I've been able to be very bipartisan
since I've been here in the Senate.
My first piece of legislation I passed it's
like the 64 day mark, which is the fastest any senator had done it
since the seventies.
And I did it with Todd Young of Indiana, my next door neighbor.
And it was very
bureaucratic, cutting red tape.
And that had to do with municipal building projects.
But we got that done. President Trump signed it into law.
I passed legislation to support veterans becoming entrepreneurs,
and that was bipartisan.
And President Trump signed that into law.
I mean, it also will also reduce costs for taxpayers.
Since January 6th, though, it has become even more
partisan here.
So you really have to work to find people to work with.
And sometimes you find folks to work with
that you never expected to because you don't, you know, I'll give you an example.
I just pass the public safety officer support back and my partner
in that was Senator Cornyn actually Republican leadership from Texas.
I don't have a lot in common with him,
but it came out of January 6th where we have Officer Smith
was one of the officers and we have him on record on body camera footage being
beaten and receiving
concussive events at least three different times, two of which he passed out.
And it's on camera
and he went back to work two weeks later, got time off.
Went back to work. Was told you're fine.
Go back to work.
Two weeks later, and within days
ended up dying by suicide.
And that's when I found out through his widow
that for our first responders, like the police forces,
the Police Benefits Association is not allowed to consider
post-traumatic stress as being a result of their job.
And so because he died by suicide,
even though the coroner said this was because he had a concussive event
and that post-traumatic stress, he had damage to the part of his brain
that controls emotions
and that his death by suicide was as a result of what happened on January 6th.
His wife still lost all her benefits
and she found out she lost all of the widow's benefits.
Standing in line at CVS to get prescription medication.
And I said, that is absolutely wrong.
And I talked to John Cornyn and he joined me in it.
And so we passed it in a bipartisan way.
Pro law enforcement, pro first responders.
But really drawing on my work from VA, so when I went to John,
I said, listen, here's what I know about post-traumatic stress in my work at VA.
Will you work with me to help our police, our first responders, our public safety
officers, that this is crazy, that they can't claim PTSD
as being result of their job duties.
And he supported me.
And we were able-
we had a couple folks who tried to shut it down on the Republican side.
But because Cornyn is Republican
leadership, we were able to work our way through it and get to a yes.
And I had to stare down one of my Republican colleagues
and threaten to make him defend his position
against public safety officers on the floor of the Senate.
And he backed off.
I won’t tell you who it is because he didn’t
want to be on record doing that on the floor.
So we got it passed.
So we can get things done.
Cynthia Lummis helped me work on water infrastructure.
I wrote the drinking water and wastewater portion of the bipartisan
infrastructure deal and that included in a significant dollars
to get lead out of drinking water supply via grant programs.
And she is on the same committee.
And I went to talk to her and I said, What do you think about this?
And she said, Well, you forgot all the people who are on well water.
This system- this grant program you’ve
written allows municipalities to
get reimbursement and gives them dollars to fix these programs.
But what about people on well water?
Don't they deserve to not have lead?
And so I said, absolutely, let's write that in.
So we specifically wrote in the well water piece
and we got
89 votes on the floor of the Senate because of it.
And then I come later on to find out that I actually still have people in Chicago
who are still on well water.
So it wasn't just people on the water across Illinois, which I knew about,
but I even have people in urban areas who are still on, well, water.
And that was bipartisan.
She made the bill better. She listened to me.
And even though we rarely vote the same way on a lot of things,
we got 89 votes on the bill, and I'm really proud of it.
There’s hope.
There’s hope, yeah.
Maybe if fewer cameras were watching us and people don't have to play up
for the cameras. We’d get more done.
You know what?
Less people are needing to do this, you know?