McSally discusses love for Arizona in first speech on Senate floor
Jul 30, 2019, 2:00 PM
PHOENIX — One week after Arizona’s U.S. senior senator gave her first speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Martha McSally followed with her own.
While Sen. Kyrsten Sinema focused on veterans’ mental health, McSally spoke about her background as an Air Force pilot and her love for Arizona.
“We Arizonans are known for our fierce independence, our resilience, heartiness, hard work, faith and diversity,” McSally said.
“It’s this legacy of service and patriotism that transcends generations.”
Join me as I deliver my maiden speech on the U.S. Senate floor. https://t.co/vNohpCG5CP
— Martha McSally (@SenMcSallyAZ) July 30, 2019
McSally talked about her experience pushing back against military leadership over a policy requiring servicewomen to wear head coverings when off base in Saudi Arabia and how it affected her approach to serving as a lawmaker.
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“There was an extraordinary pressure telling the top four-star brass that they were outrageously wrong,” she said.
“And me, a lowly ranking major, had every reason to believe that my career would be cut short for taking on the establishment over what I believed was wrong.”
She said she worked for eight years as a “one-woman lobbying campaign” to overturn that policy and eventually prevailed.
McSally urged Congress to work on solving the border crisis, bringing down out-of-pocket costs of health care and preventing opioid overdose deaths.
“We can solve some of these problems in the days ahead if we choose to work together — if we collectively choose to do something bigger for those we serve,” she said.
