Remembering Carl Levin

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise today to add my voice to my colleagues in remembering and paying our respects to our dear friend and former colleague Senator Carl Levin, whom we sadly lost last night.

My colleagues have been sharing their stories and their experiences of this incredible human being, this amazing Senator, and I want to share one of my own, a story of how he made an impact on my life and my approach to being a Senator.

It was back in 2009, when we had an enormous collapse of our economic system. I came here as a freshman Senator, and we were working to say what happened and how can we prevent this from happening again. A lot of what happened was enormously leveraged bets made in the Wall Street casino. A staff member of mine kept saying, you have got to read this essay by Chairman Volcker about how we take and shut down this Wall Street casino and how it puts our entire economy at risk and will do so again in the future again if we don't act

After two or three times that my team member had approached me on this, I put out an email to all of the Senators and said: Here is the challenge that is presented, and here is what we need to do to protect the future economy. Would anyone join me in undertaking to establish this Volcker rule to shut down the Wall Street casino?

The next day, I came to the floor of the Senate, and Carl Levin comes up to me. And he says: About your email from yesterday, about your email, I want to join you in that project.

He knew a lot about this issue, and he had staff members who knew a lot about this issue. Then he went on to say: And you may think because you are new and I have been here for a while that I am going to sweep in and take this over. He said: But I want to tell you, I am not going to do that. I don't want to do that. I want to work in full partnership with you, together.

And that is what it became, this full partnership: our team members working closely together, Carl and I working closely together, no one leading, if you will, or, to put it differently, leading together. And it had many, many chapters in this effort.

It was not an easy path to say the big banks needed to change how they operate. But what struck me in how he conducted himself was he expressed not egoism but altruism. He didn't focus on what he should do to advance himself politically; he wanted to know what we can do to serve the best interests of this Nation, not grandstanding but problem- solving to make the United States of America work better for everyone. And so we proceeded.

During the debate on Dodd-Frank, we had an opportunity to put forward an amendment to establish the Volcker rule. Colleagues across the aisle were none too happy about that, and it shut down the Senate for a full day. So Carl and I kept working during that day to say: No, this should be debated. This should be voted on. But eventually, our second-degree amendment died when the first-degree amendment was taken down. But our team members had worked through the night to make it a germane amendment so it would have survived had that not taken place.

So then we went, in partnership, over to speak with Mr. Frank, Congressman Frank on the House side. And Congressman Frank joined in the battle. And we kept pushing, and eventually, in conference, the Volcker rule was brought to life.

And then we started partnering and trying to prevent the rulemaking from tearing it down. And Carl would call me up and say: Here is what is happening. What are we going to do? And we would write a letter and we would call the regulators and we would rally our fellow Senators. He just kept at it. Like a dog with a bone, he was not going to let go. He was tenacious, saying: This matters. Every piece of it matters. We are going to get this done.

So when we think about the fact that that Wall Street casino no longer threatens the American economy because it no longer operates as it did, well, we have Senator Carl Levin to thank for that.

There is so much more he did here. Colleagues have been speaking to other chapters of his work, but this was the chapter I was involved in. I think it said so much about who he was. His policy expertise, his humble approach to the fight, his willingness to take on powerful actors, that is truly what it is to be a public servant.

I wish Carl were here so we could have him hear these stories from us directly. I am thinking now about his colleagues representing Michigan who have followed in his footsteps. They are here: Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters. I know they are inspired by the example he set.

A couple of years ago, I had a chance to debate in Michigan and called up Carl so we could get together for dinner, together with his wife Barbara. And, boy, he was just interested in every aspect of what we were doing here and how we were, hopefully, making the Senate work better.

And just not so long ago, he wrote an op-ed about how to make the Senate work better by enabling the minority to slow things down, to have leverage but keep this body from being paralyzed. So he continued to think and to engage right up to his final days.

So, Barbara, we are thinking about you. We are holding you and your family in the light, and we are doing so with such appreciation of the life and work of Carl Levin.

Thank you.

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