House Journal: Page 1913: Thursday, May 1, 2003
And finally, one of the reason why I am leaving is I want to spend more time with
my family, with my wife. The first day that I was here, my wife has always given me
very sound instructions, I didn't always pay attention to them but, she said, "Richard",
I was sitting right over there where Representative Reasoner sits, "Richard, now your
starting here today and I know you, keep your mouth shut for five days." I'm sorry, I
didn't last five minutes. And some of you remember that. It's very difficult to talk
about the things that you really thought were important. People always ask me what
is the most important thing you have done in politics? I never can answer that.
Because I didn't do it, we did it. It takes 51 people to adjourn this place, no one does it
by themselves. And I hope they will always remember that. That is the real key to
working together. But I am a very humbled, grateful person. I can't think of how
lucky I am. I served in the military for eight years of active duty and I was always
grateful to come back to Iowa. What a great place to be from. Proud to say that I am
from Iowa. From Iowa City, Iowa, great place, a place to raise our kids. And we have
the capacity here to make it better. I think we did it this time, but I think we have
work to do. Maybe I'll go home and write a book. I won't publish it for about twenty-
five years, but I might write a book.
Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate working with you. You know we didn't come in
here dancing goody two shoes around the floor. I think we came in here at swords
point on many things. You got here about a year ahead of me and I think that we work
together pretty well, I like that. Both as Majority Leader and when you assumed the
Speakers chair. I want you to know I appreciate your work. Mr. Gipp, we have been
friends for a long time and we will remain so. I have enjoyed coming to work every
morning to find out what we were going to do that day and how we were going to get it
done. I don't want to start mentioning a lot of names, but I want you to remember the
first day that I walked in this door, a man by the name of Hubert Houser was the
former county supervisor, a conservative cattle farmer from western Iowa, walked up
to me and he said I hear that your interested in working on mental health. He said I'm
going to have a little informal meeting, you want to work with it? So, we did. We
started working on that and out of that came something called Senate File 69 and a
way to fund mental health bill that maybe will be done yet, we need to finish that. But
the guy that took his place is Danny Carroll. I think that Mr. Carroll and I have some
opinions about things that are different from one another's once in a while. We got
some things done here, I think. You know why? I trust Mr. Carroll. That's important
in this place, we need to trust one another. We need to earn that trust, and we need to
continue it.
So, thanks a lot. I'm going to go, goodbye, thank you.
REMARKS BY SPEAKER RANTS
Speaker Rants offered the following remarks:
For the last three years, Representative Myers and I have had a lot of opportunities
to go to a lot of functions and speak together. I always hate going after Dick Myers.
No more true than tonight. You will be missed Dick, and missed a lot.
I want to start tonight by saying that I am working on three and a half hours of
sleep and we will see if I can make it through this.
© 2003 Cornell College and
League of Women Voters of Iowa
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