WHEREAS, The Legislature finds Ellen O. Tauscher was a dedicated public servant serving the 10th Congressional District from 1997–2009; and

WHEREAS, Ellen O’Kane was born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 15, 1951, the daughter of a grocery store owner. She earned a degree in early childhood education from Seton Hall University in 1974; and

WHEREAS, In her mid-20s, she became one of the first women to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, serving from 1977–79, and during her 14-year Wall Street career, she also served as an officer of the American Stock Exchange; and

WHEREAS, In 1989, Ellen O’Kane married William Tauscher and raised a daughter, Katherine. The couple later divorced; and

WHEREAS, In 1992, Ellen O. Tauscher founded a service for preemployment screening of childcare providers. She later authored the Child Care Sourcebook; and

WHEREAS, She also created the Tauscher Foundation, which donated two hundred thousand dollars ($200,000) to California and Texas schools to buy computer equipment for elementary education; and

WHEREAS, Ellen O. Tauscher received her first political experience serving as the state cochair for Dianne Feinstein’s successful 1992 and 1994 Senate campaigns; and

WHEREAS, In 1996, Ellen O. Tauscher challenged incumbent California Republican Representative William P. Baker in a newly created Delta district comprising bedroom communities that are the most conservative in the San Francisco Bay area. She ran on a platform of gun control, women’s abortion rights, and increased spending on education, along with the reduction of wasteful fiscal spending and narrowly won, with 49 percent of the vote to Baker’s 47 percent, in a race with three minor party candidates; and

WHEREAS, “My message throughout this campaign was one of moderation and common sense,” Ellen O. Tauscher declared after her victory. “I want to go back to Washington and stand in the middle ... where most Americans stand”; and

WHEREAS, In the next two elections, Representative Tauscher won by slightly more comfortable margins over Republican candidates, defeating Charles Ball 53 percent to 43 percent and Claude B. Hutchinson 52 percent to 44 percent; and

WHEREAS, When Representative Tauscher took her seat in the 105th Congress (1997–1999), she was assigned to three committees: National Security (later renamed Armed Services), Science, Space, and Technology, and Transportation and Infrastructure. In the 106th Congress (1999–2001), Representative Tauscher resigned her Science, Space, and Technology Committee seat to focus on her two other assignments, where she remained for the balance of her career in the House of Representatives; and

WHEREAS, Representative Tauscher’s committee assignments provided her a national platform from which she also was able to serve district needs. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she outlined an activist role for the United States in the international arena. In the spring of 1999, when the William J. Clinton presidential administration coordinated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air attacks against Serbia for its invasion of Kosovo and “ethnic cleansing” of the populace, Representative Tauscher insisted that ground troops be sent; and

WHEREAS, In the 108th Congress (2003–05), Representative Tauscher played a vocal role in the Iraq War, calling for additional troops and equipment, and visiting the region four times; and

WHEREAS, Her district was the only one having two national defense laboratories, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia, and she secured nearly $200,000,000 in funding for Livermore’s “super laser” project; and

WHEREAS, Representative Tauscher also had a prominent role as the senior Democrat on the congressional panel overseeing the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the United States nuclear weapons program; and

WHEREAS, From her seat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Representative Tauscher steered federal funding to improve the San Francisco Bay area’s badly strained transportation systems, including $33,000,000 for projects in her district; and

WHEREAS, Representative Tauscher was a vocal supporter of cutting taxes, especially the “marriage penalty” and the estate tax, and she voted to override President Clinton’s 2000 veto of an estate tax repeal; and

WHEREAS, She did not support Republican proposals in the 106th Congress to slash taxes by almost $800,000,000,000 and also opposed the 2001 tax cut proposed by the George W. Bush administration and passed by Congress; and

WHEREAS, Representative Tauscher’s alternative plan of tax cuts, “triggered” only after surplus money was confirmed, became the Democratic alternative to the $1,600,000,000,000 cut proposed by the Republican Party; and

WHEREAS, In 1998, Time magazine dubbed her moderate Democratic approach to politics “Tauscherism,” a kind of middle-of-the-road politics that blended fiscal conservatism with social liberalism and reflected the political realities of her suburban district, which, until reapportionment in 2002, was more Republican than Democratic; and

WHEREAS, When the lines were redrawn by the California Legislature, Representative Tauscher easily won reelection to a fourth term, with 75 percent of the vote against Libertarian candidate Sonia E. Harden; and

WHEREAS, In 2004, Representative Tauscher won reelection with 66 percent of the vote against Republican Jeff Ketelson, and in 2006 and 2008 voters returned her to office with 66 percent and 65 percent of the vote, respectively; now, therefore, be it