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[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E916-E917]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                         TRIBUTE TO NANCY DALY

                                 ______

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 2, 1995
  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, last week I was honored to 
address the Second Annual Service to Children Awards Dinner in Los 
Angeles, and to present to Nancy Daly the Lifetime Service Award.
  Ms. Daly, the founder of United Friends of the Children, is one of 
the most remarkable, effective and persistent advocates I have ever 
known, and she richly deserves this great honor. I would like to share 
my remarks with the Members of the House.
                         Tribute to Nancy Daly

       I am very honored to make some remarks this evening, 
     because Nancy Daly is a woman who sends a powerful message--
     to Los Angeles and to America--about what it means to 
     dedicate ourselves to children. And I speak as a member of a 
     profession where proclaiming your concern about children is a 
     requirement of membership.
       My path and Nancy's have crossed many times, including our 
     service together on the National Commission on Children with 
     Senator Jay Rockefeller, where she was the leading proponent 
     for family preservation programs. But we worked on the same 
     issues for years before we ever met.
       Fifteen years ago, after years of investigations and 
     hearings, Congress enacted my bill to reform the national 
     foster care and adoption laws, P.L. 96-272.
       It was at that same time that Nancy went out to visit 
     MacLaren Children's Center, never dreaming that visit would 
     change her life's work or the lives of so many others in this 
     city. While I was massaging my colleagues in Congress to vote 
     for my bill, Nancy was shampooing the heads of foster kids at 
     MacLaren, and deciding that this system needed change, and 
     that she was the one to change it.
       It was in that same year that Nancy founded United Friends 
     of the Children, that stunningly successful volunteer 
     organization working with the abandoned and neglected 
     children of MacLaren, working to improve the children's 
     resources, their educational development, supporting college 
     tuition programs and providing critical transitional help 
     from foster care to independence through creation of low cost 
     housing for those emancipated from the system.
       Throughout the 1980s, Nancy became one of the premier 
     advocates for family preservation programs--efforts designed 
     by agencies and the courts to provide intensive service to 
     at-risk families to help them work through serious problems 
     rather than fragmenting, at great cost to the children and 
     often to the state as well. She has mobilized the formidable 
     resources of the entertainment community on behalf of 
     children's issues, and is a vigorous promoter of
      programs to assure that children have proper legal 
     representation in the court system when critical decisions 
     are being made about their placements, their rights and 
     their futures. And she played the central role in the 
     creation of the Los Angeles Department of Children and 
     Youth to give young people an advocate in government even 
     though they are too young to have a voice in its 
     management.
       Not bad for a volunteer.
       As Nancy was creating and participating in these, and many 
     more activities, I served as the first chairman of the Select 
     Committee on Children, Youth and Families in the Congress, a 
     panel created by Tip O'Neill at my urging because children 
     simply were not receiving the special attention they merited 
     in federal policy. Oh, sure there were educational laws and 
     health laws, foster care laws and child care laws: but no one 
     was looking out for the kids, not for the program or the 
     bureaucracy or the politics: just the kids.
       And that Select Committee did what it was supposed to do. 
     We raised the visibility of children, we held up a mirror to 
     the Congress and said, ``Like 'em or not, these are America's 
     kids.'' We travelled throughout this country for eight years, 
     putting children on the Congress' agenda: children with 
     disabilities, children without homes, children of violence, 
     children with AIDS, children in gangs, children without food, 
     children in poverty. America's future. America's ``most 
     precious resource.'' The subject of every politician's 
     favorite photo op.
       And I think many in Congress were truly shocked by what 
     they saw: the millions of children, about to inherit this 
     nation, who were growing up in Third World conditions, 
     abused, hungry, violent, with little or no investment in 
     society or even in their own futures.
       The mission of the Select Committee, you see, wasn't to 
     score political points, but--perhaps naively--to depoliticize 
     children in the political debate: to make it clear to 
     conservative Republicans, Yellow Dog Democrats and Bleeding 
     Heart liberals alike that you can't lecture America's 
     children into being good citizens, or productive workers or 
     responsible adults if you ignore their most basic needs in 
     their formative years.
       Children really don't care if you're liberal or 
     conservative, a hard heart or a bleeding heart. They don't 
     care if you're a volunteer, a case worker, a lawyer, or a 
     congressman. They know when they're hurting, when they're 
     scared, when they're hungry, when they're confused, and all 
     they want to know is, ``Are you going to be there for me?''
       And, I suppose, that is what is so terribly tragic about 
     what is going on in Washington today. A new political 
     leadership in Congress, which shows no evidence at all of 
     understanding children or public policy towards children, is 
     putting a torch to most of what Nancy and I, and many others 
     in this room and across America, have spent our lives doing. 
     And don't get me wrong: I have no particular concern if 
     someone wants to rewrite the nutrition, child care, family 
     violence, foster care, adoption laws I wrote in the '70s, 
     '80s and '90s--if they want to make them better.
       But let's not kid anyone: the new congressional leadership 
     isn't about improving the system, they are about destroying 
     it, and the children be damned.
       How else do you explain proposals to throw infants off 
     income assistance because of the mistakes of their mothers?
       How else do you explain $7 billion in nutrition cuts--
     exposing pregnant women, newborns and school children to 
     serious deficiencies?
       How else do you explain a punitive ``welfare reform'' plan 
     that puts no one to work, but deprives five million people of 
     basic assistance--300,000 right here in Los Angeles?
       How else do you explain dissembling our foster care reforms 
     with the result that children will be housed in unlicensed 
     homes, with few if any services to them or their parents, 
     with no legal representation or hopes for permanent homes?
       I remember well in the early '80s when David Stockman came 
     before the Budget Committee and I asked him how, in light of 
     the uncontroverted evidence that the WIC program saved babies 
     lives and money, too, he could justify slashing that program. 
     And 
     [[Page E917]] he replied that he didn't care whether the 
     program worked, he just didn't like it.
       Fortunately, at that time, we had a Congress that stood up 
     to such dogma--on a bipartisan basis, I might add--and saved 
     effective programs for children. But those days are long 
     gone. The new extremist element in control of the Congress 
     neither understands the programs nor appreciates their 
     achievements. With a rhetorical tip of the hat to the 
     apparently magical capabilities of state and local 
     governments, with a cynical reliance on the limitless 
     abilities of private charities, they have set about 
     destroying our ability to protect children and give them 
     hope.
       You know, they call the Republican welfare reform bill the 
     Personal Responsibility Act. And I am all for people meeting 
     their responsibilities--to their children, to their families, 
     and to their communities. When people don't push their kids 
     to finish school or support their kids, or look hard to find 
     employment, I think emphasizing personal responsibility makes 
     a lot of sense.
       But government has responsibilities, too, particular to our 
     poorest, and most vulnerable, children. I have no admiration 
     for political leaders, and make no concession to political 
     strategies, that abandon those responsibilities to America's 
     children.
       These people aren't just about taking away the safety net. 
     They want to fold up the tent and put the whole show out of 
     business.
       I don't know anyone who's not committed to making the 
     bureaucracy more efficient and the programs more cost-
     effective. We made important changes in welfare policy, in 
     child care,
      in services to dysfunctional families and children in 
     crisis, and those policies work, with a lot of hard effort 
     from volunteers and professionals at all levels. And we 
     need to make more.
       But you don't cure nutritional problems by cutting one 
     fifth of the food stamp program a program that feeds 14 
     million children--as the House-passed welfare bill would do.
       You don't give kids a chance in the future by denying 
     children with Down Syndrome and cerebral palsy financial 
     assistance, as it would do.
       You don't make the foster care system more responsive by 
     eliminating basic children's rights and turning the program 
     over to the states, half of which are under court orders for 
     failing to comply with the law.
       So, at a time when should be learning from our experiences 
     and building stronger programs, people like Nancy Daly are 
     trudging to Capitol Hill and meeting with every Senator and 
     aide she can find, as she did this month, urging that they 
     put aside partisanship, ideology and fanaticism and think, as 
     she has been for twenty years, about the children.
       Nancy has a lot to teach the Congress.
       She can teach them about the value of comprehensive 
     services, about the need for legal advocates, about the 
     contributions (and the limitations) of what volunteerism can 
     do. She can demonstrate to them the need for a responsive 
     government and the necessity of having someone in that 
     bureaucracy whose job to think about children first. She can 
     even show them how a liberal Democrat and a powerful 
     Republican can get along together.
       I would have hope that, at this stage, we wouldn't be 
     engaged in a national debate about whether to kill programs 
     or to keep them, but rather about how to make them more 
     efficient for taxpayers and more effective for children. I 
     believe quite frankly, it is a waste of Nancy Daly and many 
     of those in this room to have to exert such effort and 
     influence just to keep up where we are in terms of a national 
     commitment of excellence to children. But I am enough of an 
     historian and a politician to know that sometimes you have to 
     play defense and work and wait for a better time to come. 
     Unfortunately, the children are waiting, too, and millions of 
     them do not have four or eight years to spare while 
     politicians and voters figure out what they really want to 
     do.
       I see these obstacles as a challenge to those of us who 
     hold a public trust. I have little pity or tolerance for 
     those who bemoan the loss of a majority, or a chairmanship, 
     or the other accoutrements of power. Other have lost far more 
     than we, and they will continue to lose, to have their 
     opportunities shattered and their futures stunted, if we 
     wallow in self-absorbed anguish over an election.
       Nancy Daly serves as an inspiration because she understands 
     that what matters are the results. Beginning without a shred 
     of political power, she has built monuments to the hopes and 
     the futures of children throughout America, and I very much 
     doubt she has given an hour since last November to 
     questioning whether she should do anything but redouble her 
     efforts on behalf of the kids who need her, and us, more now 
     then ever.
       Nancy, my warm congratulations to you on receipt of the 
     richly deserved Lifetime Service Award. And since it is a 
     ``lifetime'' award, I would note that you have several 
     additional years of service that we are all looking forward 
     to.
       I am delighted to be able to participate in this tribute to 
     a wonderful woman tonight, and honored that you have allowed 
     me to share this evening with all of you.
     

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