WHEREAS, The Legislature finds Ellen O’Kane 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’Kane 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’Kane 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’Kane 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 reproductive 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’Kane 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; 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, 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; and

WHEREAS, On May 5, 2009, Representative Tauscher was nominated by President Barack Obama to be the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security; and

WHEREAS, On June 25, 2009, Representative Tauscher was confirmed to the position of Under Secretary of State by a voice vote of the United States Senate and resigned her seat in Congress the next day to take the position; and

WHEREAS, Representative Tauscher represented the United States at numerous international meetings and negotiations, including setting into motion the New START Treaty, the first major nuclear arms reduction and limitation agreement with Russia in over two decades, which was signed in 2009, and ratified in 2010; and

WHEREAS, Representative Tauscher served the Obama administration as Under Secretary of State until February 7, 2012, when she was named Special Envoy for Strategic Stability and Missile Defense, a position she held until August 31, 2012; and

WHEREAS, In 2013, Representative Tauscher was elected chairperson of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group of 28 global retailers, and led efforts that created industry safety standards in response to the fire and collapse of a Bangladeshi garment factory that killed over 1,000 workers; and

WHEREAS, In March 2013, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., appointed Representative Tauscher as the chair of the Governor’s Military Council and was tasked with expanding defense industry jobs and investment in California; and

WHEREAS, On September 17, 2013, Representative Tauscher was named as an independent member of the Board of Governors for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and served as chair of the Board of Governors beginning on February 16, 2018; and

WHEREAS, On June 2, 2017, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., appointed Representative Tauscher to serve on the Board of Regents of the University of California; now, therefore, be it