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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