more people in our country and throughout the world.” A Democrat, Mitchell entered the Senate in 1980 and served as Senate majority leader from 1989 until 1995. He led the 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, wrote the first national oil spill prevention and cleanup law, led the Senate in its passage of the first child care bill, and was principal author of the low-income housing tax credit program. He played a key role in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement and creation of the World Trade Organization. Prior to his appointment to the U.S. Senate in 1980, Mitchell served as a federal judge in Maine. That position, he said, was the only job he ever held that had any actual power. “The majority leader of the Senate only has the opportunity to go around and beg people to do things that they ought to be doing without being asked,” he said. “When I chaired the peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, I had no power to tell anybody to do anything. But when I was a federal judge, I had the au-
“There is, of course, a never-ending tension between the preservation of order and the rights of the individual.”
thority to order people to do things, and I’m pleased to tell you that, in every instance, they followed it to the letter. I really loved that part of the job.” His favorite part of being a judge, he said, was the opportunity to conduct naturalization ceremonies, at which he would administer to immigrants the oath of allegiance to the United States and make them American citizens. Mitchell’s mother was an immigrant from Lebanon and his father was the orphan son of Irish immigrants.
Courtesy UVA News Services/Dan Addison
Law School News …
George Mitchell, recipient of the 2012 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law, was U.S. Senate majority leader from 1989 until 1995.
“It was always a very emotional ceremony for me,” he said. “[My parents] had no education. My mother couldn’t read or write. She worked nights in a textile mill. My father was a janitor. But because of their efforts, and, more importantly, because of the openness of American society, I, their son, was able to get the education they never had and was able to become the majority leader of the United States Senate.” After each ceremony, Mitchell said he would always speak with the new citizens and their families, asking them about their fears, their hopes, their dreams and how they came to America. “Most of us are Americans by an accident of birth,” he said “Every one of them is an American by an act of free will, often at great risk and cost to themselves and their families.”
Mitchell told the story of how he once asked a young Asian man who had just become a naturalized American citizen why he came to the United States. “He replied in slow and very halting English,” Mitchell said. “’I came,’ he said, ‘because in America everybody has a chance.’” This man, he said, who could barely speak English, was able to summarize the true meaning of the United States in a single sentence. “America is freedom and opportunity,” he said. “Although we now face very serious challenges at home and abroad, I’m confident that we’ll meet those challenges, as we have before, and emerge a stronger and better nation.” Despite its imperfections, he said, the United States is the “most free, the most open and the most just society in all of history.” Mitchell, who served as President Barack Obama’s Special Envoy for Middle
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