The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Remembering Rex Lee (Executive Session)” mentioning Charles E. Schumer was published in the Senate section on pages S1494-S1496 on March 11.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Senators' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Remembering Rex Lee
Mr. LEE. Madam President, I come to the Senate floor today in recognition of an anniversary of sorts. My late father, Rex Lee, died 25 years ago today after an extended and heroic battle with cancer.
I prefer to remember my dad not as someone who was ill but someone who was full of life and healthy for most of his life--in fact, his entire life, even while battling with a significant illness.
Rex grew up in the small town of St. Johns, AZ. It is a really, really small town. In fact, we used to joke that he may have been 21 years old before he realized that the true name of the town wasn't
``Resume Speed.'' It was a little dot along the highway in eastern Arizona. It was a place that he loved, and it was a place where he learned to love those dear to him and close to him, a place where he was taught in school and in church, where he learned to serve his fellow beings.
He attended Brigham Young University as a freshman in the fall of 1953, somewhat under protest. He had wanted to attend the University of Arizona, like his cousins Mo and Stewart Udall before him.
His parents told him: You can go wherever you want, but your first year needs to be spent at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT.
He went there and was immediately smitten with the place and commenced a relationship that would extend for the rest of his life and would significantly impact his life in many, many ways.
Halfway through college, he left to serve a 2\1/2\-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico. During that time, to say he became fluent in the Spanish language and the Mexican culture would be an understatement. It was a fluency that never really left him.
While I was a missionary many decades later, he used to write me letters in Spanish, and even after I had been speaking and studying the language for some time, I knew I had to keep my Spanish dictionary close to me when I read letters from my dad, written in his adopted native tongue, Spanish.
While serving as a missionary there, he briefly met Janet Griffin, whom he would later marry and who was my mother. Janet was the daughter of an employee of the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Treasury Attache in the Mexican Embassy.
While they didn't interact much then, they reconnected when they were both back at Brigham Young University about 6 or 8 months later. It wasn't exactly love at first sight for my mom, but it was for my dad. They went on to have seven children together, and I am grateful that they did. I am the fourth of those seven.
My dad ended up going to law school at the University of Chicago. As it turned out, the law suited him well. He liked it, and it liked him back. He ended up finishing first in his class at the University of Chicago. He clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice White. Shortly after that, he joined the Phoenix law firm of Jennings, Strouss
& Salmon and represented clients, both big and small, individual and corporate, mostly civil but also some criminal cases.
But he loved the law. He loved the opportunity that he had to represent clients. He loved the challenge that each case brought him. He loved the opportunity to digest large volumes of information and condense it down into a single legal brief and then into a single oral argument that he could present in court.
His enthusiasm was so intense that once in a while a judge would pull him aside afterward and ask him why he was so intense about the case, and he would respond by saying: OK, I will try to dial down the intensity next time.
Little by little, he became more conversant in court, never to the point of being chatty or inappropriately familiar, but at a point where he felt he was able to have a conversation with the judge and able to communicate to the judge the facts and the law of the case in a simple way.
As they were raising their seven children, there were a lot of things that were unexpected in life, including seven very loud, rambunctious children; including the fact that one day, as he was practicing law in Phoenix, he got a phone call informing him that Brigham Young University would be opening a law school and they wanted him to be its founding dean. I was just 1 year old at the time.
That is how my family ended up in Utah. We ended up being connected to Brigham Young University basically for the rest of my life ever since then.
My dad, in addition to serving as the dean of BYU's law school, served as the Assistant Attorney General during the Ford administration, over the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. And during President Reagan's first term, he served as Solicitor General. This is when I had my first real exposure to the law.
I found during that era of my dad's service that I could miss school once in a while if I asked my parents if I could just go with my dad to court. He would go into court, and it felt a little bit like sitting in an extended session of church in a different language. It may not sound exciting, but I was impressed by the majesty of the whole event. As much as anything, I was impressed by how much my dad generally enjoyed being in court and making arguments. He had a way of making it fun.
After serving as Solicitor General of the United States, he went back to BYU and resumed his teaching career while simultaneously continuing to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court as a private practice litigator.
It was during that period of time, in June of 1987, that my father, while at the peak of physical condition, an avid runner and marathoner, got the news that he had stage IV non-Hodgkin's T-cell lymphoma, a pretty deadly and advanced form of cancer. With a young family still at home, this hit us pretty hard. We were afraid that we were going to lose him.
Through the able help of some excellent doctors and as a result of a fortuitous set of circumstances culminating in him receiving some experimental treatment then going on at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, they were able to prolong his life, and he lived nearly another 9 years. They put him into remission within a few months, very nearly losing him in the process, but then he came back.
He had some of the best years of his life after that bout with cancer. It was just a couple of years after that that he was asked to serve as president of Brigham Young University. I still remember this happened shortly after I had been accepted as a freshman at BYU, just as I was graduating from law school.
Later that summer, as I was preparing to enter as a freshman at BYU, I got a letter in the mail. The letter was signed by my dad. It was a letter that welcomed me to the university and then ended with the words: ``I look forward to meeting you on campus this fall.'' So I put it on the refrigerator with a Post-it note, saying: ``Dad, thanks so much for the really personal note.''
My dad had a great sense of humor, and notwithstanding his love of law and his professional accomplishments, at home, he was just our dad and our friend. In fact, calling him just our dad doesn't really even do it justice. He was someone who had so much energy and enthusiasm for life.
When we were little kids, he would come home from work, and we played a great game. We called it ``run around dad,'' and we didn't know that that wasn't necessarily an entertaining game. We didn't know that it probably wasn't that fun for him, but we would run around him, and he would figure out ways to trip us, and it was hilarious every single time it would happen. My mom would watch patiently in the corner, realizing that after four or five trips, someone was going to cry, but it all worked out OK.
Our dad taught us to work hard. He taught us to be kind to each other and to others, and he did that not just through the profession of his faith with words--and there was that. Of course, he was a devoutly faithful father and husband, and he taught us to pray and to read and love the Scriptures, but he also taught us those things through his very actions.
I remember when I was a boy and decided that I wanted to set up a small business enterprise shoveling driveways, and after a couple of particularly heavy snowstorms, I wasn't sure whether I could complete all of the jobs that I had. He offered to be my indentured servant. I graciously offered to pay him, but he said: No, this one is on me. You are not going to pay me. You can get paid, in fact, for the fact that I am going to work for you. It was a fantastic deal. It was one of my favorite memories of my life because he had a lot of other things to do, but he chose to help me, not just to teach me to work but also so he could spend time with me, and it was a lot of fun.
He loved amusement parks. He loved roller coasters, and he loved being really, really exceptionally, unusually, embarrassingly loud while going down said roller coasters. He loved to ride, and he loved every aspect of it, even when he knew how it was going to end.
As my brother Tom once remarked, recalling the circumstance in which my brother Tom had asked my dad for the name of a particular tool that my dad was using while assembling a swing set, he said: Dad, what is that?
My dad looked at it and couldn't tell whether it was a wrench or something else. It was a specialized tool used only for a swing set. My dad said to him: I don't know what it is called, but when you need one of those, nothing else will do.
Tom later remarked, that same description can be used of my dad. There is not really a single word that you can place to describe him, but when you need one of him, nothing else will do.
During most of the last 6\1/2\ years of his life, he was serving as president of BYU. He stayed exceptionally busy. He even managed to argue a case or two in front of the Supreme Court every single year he was serving as president of BYU, even though during most of that time his cancer had come back. It had come back in a slightly different form--slower growing but less treatable.
Notwithstanding the pain that he was enduring and the discomfort caused by the treatment, he never lost his optimism, the zeal for his work, or his love for his family. He was such a blessing to all of us to watch him go through that. We didn't feel sorry for him as much as we should have, but part of the reason we didn't feel as sorry for him is that unless you really paid attention, you couldn't tell he was in pain. He didn't complain about it. It certainly didn't slow him down, not at least until the very end.
I will always remember, as if it were yesterday, the moment when I took him to the hospital for what I feared would be the last time, and indeed it was. Just a couple of weeks before his death, I was in my second year of law school, and my mom and my wife let me know that things weren't going well and I needed to go and help my dad get to the hospital.
As we were wheeling him into the hospital that day, I could hear him. He was almost unconscious. Once we got him into the hospital, they put an oxygen mask over him. His voice was muffled, but he was muffling something. I listened closely, and because I was, by then, a second-year law student, I recognized some of the legal vernacular that he was using, and I quickly discerned, based on some of his appellate briefs that I recently had read, he was preparing for what he hoped and expected and genuinely believed would be his next argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. And I thought: Way to go. There to the bitter end, he is ready for what is next. He is ready to stand for vindicating the interests of his client and for doing his job and doing it well.
At no moment during any of this, notwithstanding his service in education, in government, and the practice of law, and his extended church service as a lay minister in my faith, did I ever feel that we were neglected as a family. To be sure, he was gone a fair amount of time. He was a busy man, but when he was home, he was 100 percent home. He was all in. He loved--or at least if he didn't love it, he at least had us convinced that he loved being at home and loved working with his kids, studying with them, and helping them with their homework.
When someone serves you that well, that faithfully, and that consistently over that many years, it has an effect and a very positive one. To this day, I still, from time to time, hear his words echoing in my head reminding me to do things as best as I possibly can do them; reminding me, as a lawyer, when you are in court, when you have won your case and you know you have won it, he said sit down and don't say another word; reminding me that when you have got a choice between a ten-cent word and a three-dollar word, choose the ten-cent word every time if it will do the job; reminding me to be kind to others and that you will never regret doing so. He reminded me to give others the benefit of the doubt. Those are things that stick with all of us.
So I know I speak certainly for myself and for my siblings--Diana, Tom, Wendy, Stephanie, Melissa, Christie, and my mom Janet--that we miss him. The State of Utah and the Western United States and the United States of America is a better place because of the fact that he was here. I will never forget, on the morning of March 11, 1996--again, exactly 25 years ago today--I saw the Sun rising over the Wasatch Mountains to our east in Provo, UT. It was at that moment when I realized that it would likely be the last time the Sun would rise with my father on the Earth. The Sun has risen and set on that same mountain range many, many thousands of times since then, but we remain better off for the fact that he was here.
If he were here, I would tell him: I miss you, Dad. I love you, and I thank you.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SCHUMER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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