Progress Reports: Jared Allen
D.C. Gears Up for the Centennial
Representative Bob Latta of Ohio wants official commemorative coins minted in his honor. Latta’s colleague in the House of Representatives, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, wants his likeness to replace that of Ulysses S. Grant on the face of the $50 bill.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who served in his administration for seven years as a speechwriter before launching his own career in public office, will be content having a small, elegant dinner with five of his former West Wing colleagues — over California wine, of course. While fellow Californian David Dreier, the top Republican on the powerful House Rules Committee, wants to put together a reunion of all of the dozens of members of the House and Senate who road his coattails into office in 1980.
From large to small, traditional to quite innovative, there are no shortage of ideas for honoring President Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
And even with the February 2011 Reagan centennial anniversary months away, members of Congress and other government officials are wasting little time in putting together their plans for honoring one of the most memorable, influential and honored leaders in American history.
“We’re going to have a whole year of events,” said Dreier, who was one of 35 new House members elected in Reagan’s 1980 landslide presidential election.
Dreier is already at work planning a reunion of the Congressional class of 1980 to coincide, as he put it, “in a really big way” with what would be Reagan’s 100th birthday on February 6, 2011.
“We’ve been talking about a reunion for a long time,” he said. “We’re going to make a pretty big deal of it.”
And even before the February 6th anniversary rolls around, Dreier is eying a date toward the end of 2010 for a special program at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, California to further showcase all that has come to define the Reagan legacy.
But these will be only the beginning of the festivities.
Simi Valley’s former mayor and its current Congressman, Elton Gallegly, in January 2009 introduced the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act, which was signed into law that June.
The commission was formed to make recommendations for the official honoring of President Reagan, and to assist federal and local agencies as well as civic groups in implementing additional celebration activities on scales large and small, including everything from local parades to special postage stamps and coins.
Along with Gallegly, officials on the eleven member commission include Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and Jim Webb (D-Va.), Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Fred J. Ryan Jr., the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Board of Trustees, and Congressman Bill Foster (D-Ill.), whose district is home to Reagan’s birthplace of Tampico, Ill.
Gallegly — who on a muggy May Friday marking the end of a brutal eight-week stretch of Congressional work immediately perked up at the mere mention of the Reagan centennial — said the commission is scheduled to have its first meeting in the coming weeks, and that he, Fred Ryan and other members of the Foundation Board have already begun discussing ideas to be incorporated into the commission’s eventual recommendations.
Gallegly offered no early hints at what some of those might be.
“But we know what the objectives are,” he said.
“This is a bipartisan effort to promote the life accomplishments and to promote the ideals that Ronald Reagan bestowed upon us over the last 100 years,” said Gallegly. “And we’ll establish a program that is the most effective in best celebrating Ronald Reagan, accomplishments, and legacy.”
