 I'm going to try not to get upset talking about. Well, it's been interesting. It's what he was meant to do. There's something very fishy about Ross Eisenbrink. And I know that because I have seen him land a fly on the nose of a trout from 30 yards. I can't think of a worker protection measure in my time on the hill that wasn't benefited by Ross's expertise. Ross was running the marathon for workers. He is there every single day fighting on the issues that matter, that he cares deeply about them, that he's put his life into it. He saw the injustices. He couldn't just sit by and do nothing about it. The notion that workers and their families should be told beforehand when an employer knows that their jobs are going to be eliminated is just a very basic notion that almost everybody in America agrees with. I find it inspiring how he is as motivated now as he was a long time ago. He has never deluded himself into thinking that you can be comfortable and go along with people who are powerful, not break any eggs, and still achieve things that matter. I really love the people here. And almost everyone here is someone who I was involved in hiring. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's an honor to be here. His policy contributions are probably too numerous for me to go over. But I will just say, personally, there was probably no expert advocate who I learned more from. In this day and age, there really are not that many people who care enough about workers and labor unions and the kinds of policies that they need. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it is also about the creativity and the intelligence that he brings to the agenda so that really bad things can be stopped. Bad ideas are like zombies. They're hard to kill. They keep rising up out of the grave and lumbering forward. And you have to keep fighting them. The best part of having him up on the hill is that he kind of took an issue that no one understood and made it clear how it affected working people and made us all care about it and go back the next day and fight a battle that we really didn't have the energy for. America's middle class has suffered through decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality that can't be corrected without changes in a range of federal policy that have worked against them. He's a man who worked many years in Congress, worked many years in the federal government, but has never lost his passion and always brings forward that sense about what's right and wrong. Yeah, probably. Really? Yeah, they... He became the champion of young people. Many of them are my students. And so after Ross's work to show that interns are exploited all over, I was able to tell my students about their exploitation. There must be something missing. Ross is a lawyer, but he can play an economist on TV and often has and has done it very well. If there's any one event that really earned my respect, it had to be Ross appearing on the Colbert Report. Tonight is a lawyer fighting against unpaid internships, but if any of my interns ask, he's the president of Uzbekistan. Please welcome Ross Eisenbray. It was both intimidating and fun. I was definitely nervous. We're coming on. I was warned not to try to be as funny as Colbert, because I couldn't be in it. We'd piss him off. What should we do? We should be paying these interns. Anyone who works for someone else for their financial benefit should be paid for their work. Okay, so as a college... One of his great joys is fishing, and it's also one of my son's greatest joys, Nikki's 13. And this past Saturday, we went out to try to catch the shad run in the Potomac. But when we were all finished and we got in the car, my son said, he's what I want to be when I grow up. And I said, well, who, what do you mean? And he said, Ross. He said, I mean, imagine you do good things, you try to make the world a better place, and you have fun, and you go to beautiful places and you go fishing. This is the federal register of the announcement of the overtime rule signed by Tom Perez, Secretary-General. I was a little bit shocked that they were doing that without any warning to me, but I was touched. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very sweet. You know, I think Ross, like other people, is inspired by being able to come to work and work in an environment where everybody has shared values. And I always relied on him, I call him my bench coach, that he would always be there to tell me honestly, Larry, don't do that. Or Larry, you really need to do that. And I relied on his counsel to make sure that I was following the true North Star. As an advocate, as an expert, you have so many competing staff asking you for things, asking you for a work that, quite frankly, we should be handling on our own. I consider him not just a, like, treasured colleague, but a dear friend. And I know a lot of us here feel the same way. Well, I'm leaving behind a really strong group of people who I couldn't feel better about. And I just, I want to see them succeed in anything I can do to help them, I would. Well, I don't plan on even remembering him because, like I said, I'm going to be contacting him frequently. Oh, my God. Who will miss him? We're not going to miss him because he's not going anywhere. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I'm going to keep him as close as I can. I think everybody in America owes a debt of gratitude to Ross Eisenberg. And I think EPI needs to start a campaign that's something like, be like Ross. I will miss him a lot. I mean, I rely on him still, you know, to this day for advice and for mentoring. EPI has been around for 30 years. And I expect 10 years from now, EPI will be there at the front lines. You know, he's got a great family. He's got so much to be proud of, just got to wish him well into the future. And of course, I'll really, really miss him. Let me give you a hug. I'm in a great partnership. He will. He will. When we call him, he will come. I know. We're also never back down from a good fight.