30-Something Working Group

Floor Speech

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be here again to spend a small amount of time on behalf of the Speaker's 30-something Working Group. I thank the Speaker of the House for allowing us this opportunity to come and share with our colleagues and share with the American people some, I think, very important thoughts on what is happening today.

It was interesting, I got to hear the end of our colleagues' remarks from across this side of the aisle; and one of the things they have asked of this Congress, and you hear it over and over again as we talk about this war in Iraq, is that we have to finish the job. And I think there is a question that has to come before that subject. We have got to start asking a little bit more in this place what that job is. I think that is what this debate is about, in part, this week, and the debate that we have renewed here since we have brought the House under new leadership. What is the job that we need to be doing in order to keep this country safe?

The answers to that have come in piecemeal fashion, in dribs and drabs over the past year. But maybe the most substantial piece of information, new information that helped us decide what that job is, was when we got last summer evidence through the National Intelligence Estimate that started to tell us that if our job is what we think it is, which is to do everything we can to keep this country safe, then our own Intelligence Community, the dozens of intelligence officers and organizations that contributed to that report came up with one unfortunately startling conclusion, and that was that our efforts in Iraq are on more days making us less safe as a Nation than making us more safe.

Why? Because we have not only destabilized the region, but we have created what that report called a cause celebre in that country, where extremists and terrorists around the world now see Iraq as their proving ground, as their training ground, and as their breeding ground.

So what we are debating here today is, I think, exactly the question that is posed by the other side of the aisle: Let's start talking about finishing that job. That job is ridding this world of fundamentalism and terrorism and extremism that poses a threat to us no matter where it is. It is not confined by the borders of some country in the Middle East that we occupy today. It doesn't know the borders of nation states. It poses a threat to us in all forms and from all places.

And so this debate this week, the supplemental bill which this House will vote on shortly, is about refocusing our mission, starting to deal with the realization and the reality of a conflict against terrorism that goes far beyond the borders of Iraq.

Part of what this bill is going to do is not only redeploy our forces, but also bring our troops out of harm's way in that country. You can't ask them to be a referee in what has become a religious conflict in that country, one that military leader after military leader, our own commanding general on the field there, General Petraeus, has said himself just earlier this month that there is no military solution to what has become a civil and religious conflict on the ground.

Job number one is to recognize the limits of our brave men and women in Iraq. They do an unbelievably admirable job every day. We are so grateful, especially those of us in the 30-something Working Group who consider those men and women our contemporaries, that they have chosen to defend this Nation so that others of us are able to serve this country in a different way. In order to honor them, in order to support those troops, we need to bring them out of a fight that our military forces cannot win alone.

But this is also about refocusing that effort, and I think that is what we have to keep on coming back to here, is there are fights still worth fighting in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, where we are on the verge of losing control of that country back to the very forces that gave cover and umbrage to the people who attacked this Nation on September 11. Remember, it was not Saddam Hussein that flew planes into tall buildings in New York, it was Osama bin Laden's organization called al Qaeda that used Afghanistan and the Taliban as its place and center of operation. And that country, as we have shifted more forces away from Afghanistan into Iraq, is now falling back into chaos, and part of our mission here has to be a realization that there are places worth fighting, and there are places in which military forces cannot quell ongoing violence. Afghanistan is still a fight worth fighting.

But it is also about focusing our efforts back here at home. And one of the secrets starting to come out, and thanks in part to the work of Representative WASSERMAN SCHULTZ and Representative Meek and Representative Ryan, the work they did here on the late nights on the floor of the House, we were able to hear a little bit about this in the past year, was that this Congress over the last several years wasn't doing justice to the issues of homeland security, wasn't doing everything that we should be doing in order to protect our own people and our own borders here at home.

So this supplemental bill that everybody hears about that the Congress is going to vote on is not only going to finally do exactly what the will of the people have asked for in the election of last November, which is set a new course in Iraq, but it is also to start refocusing and redoubling our efforts back here at home.

The $2.6 billion in this bill will be rededicated to the efforts to make sure that terrorism does not find harbor on the shores of this Nation. Over $1 billion for aviation security, $90 million for advanced checkpoint explosive detection equipment, $160 million to increase air cargo screening, $1.25 billion for new port transit and border security, $150 million for nuclear security. We can go on and on and on. We are going to finally step up to the plate as a Congress and make sure that we are spending money to win the fight that matters to finish the job.

That job, Mr. Speaker, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, has to be done with the recognition that Iraq has become now a place that, on more days than not, presents a greater danger to this country by creating a hotbed, a training ground, a proving ground for terrorists. We need to start refocusing our efforts on fights that matter.

This is going to be one of the more important pieces of legislation that will come before this Congress, and I think it will honor that job that we are entrusted with, which is to protect this Nation from those that would do harm to it.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you are exactly right. There is a new day here. And I don't have the comparative experience that you do. I watched this place as an observer for the last several years. One of the reasons that I ran was you sit around in coffee shops and local community halls, and people generally don't pay much attention to the division of labor down here. I mean, people aren't necessarily talking about in their daily lives the co-equal branches of government. They are not thinking too much about the separation of powers. But you know what? They were forced to talk about it in the past several years, because people didn't understand how, in record numbers they were turning out, not only in elections, but in community meetings, to tell their Members of Congress that they needed a change in Iraq, because, not only did they have moral and intellectual objections to what we were doing over there, but they were talking to the families of those troops who were being sent over there without body armor. 18 months it took until our forces over in Iraq had the body armor that they needed. They were looking at statistics like the one we just found out earlier this month which said that 88 percent of the National Guard and Reserve troops are so poorly equipped that they are rated not ready by the military; that we have not one active duty reserve brigade in the United States that is considered combat ready. And so people out there were hearing over and over again from the families of the troops, the troops themselves, which was backing up their own instincts about the backwards nature of our policy in Iraq. And they wondered where Congress was. And they watched this place sort of shut down for a number of years. And they couldn't understand why their elected Members of Congress weren't standing up and asking some questions. I mean, at the very least, asking some questions about what this president was doing over there.

Mr. Speaker, there were six opportunities since this war began for this Congress, on supplemental appropriations bills, to stand up and try to perform some perfunctory oversight over this war; four emergency

supplemental bills, two emergency spending funds in the Department of Defense authorization bills, six times this Congress, under Republican leadership, had an opportunity to stand up and say, you know what? We are going to give you some more money to conduct this war, but we are going to put some strings on it. We are going to try to check your authority in some even elementary way. Not once. All six times this Congress stood down. Despite a lot of yelling and screaming from one-half of this chamber, this Congress stood down and gave President Bush virtually every single thing he wanted.

Now, listen. I understand you might have been lulled into a sense of complacency here. This Congress heard from this president over and over again that things were going well, things were going fine, everything was going to be better. We find out now that all along this administration knew that things weren't going well. In fact, they knew things were pretty terrible on the ground and they were plotting this new strategy, a very different one than I think the American people intended on Election Day. They wanted a new course of direction in Iraq. They didn't necessarily think that that policy was going to be escalation. I think they were counting on de-escalation. It was a slightly new direction, Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

But here is the thing, is that people in this country became constitutional scholars over the last couple of years because they started scratching their heads when they picked up the paper every morning as this war was going nowhere but downhill, and there was deafening silence coming from Congress. And so there is a lot of commotion in here about this emergency supplemental bill because it has got some policy in it. We are actually, instead of rubber stamping the President's requests, we are actually saying, if we are going to give you another dime for this war, then we are going to make sure that you honor the will of the American people, that you step up to the plate and listen to the foreign policy community that this Nation has expressed through the Iraq Study Group; that you listen to your own generals, many of which who will tell you over and over again, that though there might be a political or diplomatic solution to what happens on the ground in Iraq, that it cannot be a purely military solution; that you start listening to the families of those troops who have cried out for years to equip them when they go over, to make sure that they are protected when they serve overseas, and to make sure that their health care is taken care of when they come back; that we actually conduct this war, redeploy our forces in a responsible manner. For the first time, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, this Congress is stepping up to the plate and actually conducting that type of oversight.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Reclaiming my time for a moment, in Connecticut we have the same problem that you talk about. It takes hundreds of days for veterans simply to get qualified for the benefits once they return. I mean, of all the benefit programs that this government runs, it would seem that the veterans program would be the easiest to qualify people for, right? Because what is the qualification? You served in the military. You fought for this country. There is a record of it. It is not hard to find. And yet we have constructed so much bureaucracy and so much red tape.

And I understand that a lot of the folks in the Department are trying to do a lot with not enough funding to do the job, but it is time that we cut through it because we shouldn't be talking about a system that is of inferior care or equal care to that of what you or I get or people in this community get. Our veterans' health care system should be the gold standard of care in this country. We should accept nothing less than the best that our health care system can offer. And we know not only through the recent revelations at Walter Reed, but also simply in the conversations that we have door to door.

It was amazing to me in this last election, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, as I went door to door over the summer and fall. I did it almost every night, and almost without exception if you knocked on the door of a veteran, someone that had served in World War II through the more recent conflicts, almost without exception health care came up, whether it was a personal problem they had had with the system or a problem that a family member or one of their brothers and sisters in arms had encountered when they came back. Almost every single veteran brought that up because they have a notion, and it is exactly right, that when they come back here, their community should be able to stand up for them and make sure that they continue to be healthy, certainly make sure that the injuries they received in defending this country are treated expeditiously, efficiently, and with the best care possible.

And so it was remarkable to me how often this issue came up, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, just as you talked to people door to door. It was so real and so palpable because to the people who have served this country, there is no greater dishonor, and I am speaking as someone who has not served, but who has had the honor to know many that have, no greater dishonor to them than to come back to a country that doesn't express a deep and daily sense of gratitude for that service.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, for all the bad news that I heard on the campaign trail, the good news is this bill that we will vote on will honor that service, one of the biggest infusions of funding support for the veterans' health care system that this country has ever seen. And I can just hope that when I go back out there this summer, when I am going out just to knock on doors to check on people in a noncampaign environment, that you will hear a very different story, that they will feel finally their stories are being heard.

I yield to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Reclaiming my time just for one point. Before coming over here, I was reading a really interesting front-page article, and I think it was a recent Newsweek or Time, and it was entitled, sort of, The Downfall of the Right, and it was talking about how the sort of conservative ideology has really fallen by the wayside in the past several years. And one of the things it had talked about was that when the class of 1994 was ushered into office, there was a sort of purity to their ideology. You disagreed with a lot of the things they stood for, but they did come in here as reformers. I mean, they did come in here and set a whole new bunch of rules for this House, how this place was governed. They changed the franking rules. They put in term limits. And you could have disagreements with some of the results of that ideology, but they did come in here with some real ideas rooted in some intellectual discussion about how you change Congress.

And what this article was sort of pointing out was that over time, over the last 12 years, the ruling party of this Congress became one that was guided by a set of ideas to one that was guided by a collection of special interests; that it was simply kind of an amalgamation of different lobbyists and different industries that would sort of pull and push for control over this place, and it stopped being one that was guided by any real ideas about how to move this country forward.

And it was an incredibly interesting survey on how the Republican Party has changed over the years. And if you want to know why their reign ended after 12 years, in

part I think it is a recognition from the American people that this place stopped being about ideas and in the end started being about those special interests.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. For a period of time, it might have been the gentleman that currently serves as our Vice President.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you talk to Members on the other side of the aisle, and I think they share that same concern for veterans. I mean, they do. We are not suggesting that anybody in this Chamber was sitting here intentionally deciding that they were going to create the situations that happened on the ground at Walter Reed. It is just a matter of choices. It is a matter of the choices that were made here. And whether they were made consciously or unconsciously, it resulted in an abysmal situation for veterans.

The choices that ended up getting made here when it came to the fiscal situation in this country was to hand out massive, unprecedented tax breaks to the top 1 percent of income earners in this Nation while we were fighting a war. While we were fighting a war. It never happened in this country. We have never asked this country to go into war without asking the entire country to sacrifice in order to pay for it, because here is the thing: The cost of the war isn't just the guns and the troops and the tanks and the armor. It is the health care for the people that come back here afterwards. The cost of the war is the whole thing.

And so we ended up short-changing our troops and short-changing the people that came back here because we decided that what was more important was to hand out another round of tax breaks, this last one to the persons in our districts, the rare folks who are lucky enough to make $1 million a year. They got $40,000 back from that tax cut.

I know if I showed up at their door and asked them, if you had to choose, if you had to choose as someone who is taking in income of $1 million or more a year, would you take the full value of that tax cut if you knew that that was going to leave the decrepit conditions that we have found at Walter Reed, that that was going to result in waiting times of up to a year for services for the men and women that fight to protect us overseas? I know what their answer would be, and it should have been the answer of this Congress.

It now does get to be the answer. The answer now gets to be that our priority is going to be making sure that those folks are taken care of when they come home.

And do you know what? We have already voted for tax cuts in this Congress. You can do both. You can still find a way to provide targeted tax relief to people who need it, as the small business tax cut bill here in the House a couple of weeks ago, and honor those commitments.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I think it serves us well to sort of try to outline for people why this is such a big deal. Why do you have a senior member of the Republican leadership coming as close as you can come to calling for the resignation of the Republican sitting U.S. Attorney General? Why do you have the papers filled with this day after day? Why do you have the Judiciary Committee going to the unfortunate but necessary step of actually having to subpoena members of the administration to come before us?

It is pretty simple. If you are an average Joe out there, you want to know that if the guy next door to you commits a really bad crime, that he is going to go to jail, no matter who his political friends are, no matter what political connections he has; that justice should be blind. Justice should certainly be blind to politics.

Now, we can freely admit that when Bill Clinton came into office, he sent out notices that he was intending to get rid of all of the prosecutors and everybody was going to have to reapply.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. And there is the rub, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, is that it is one thing to decide to clean house and say okay, everybody goes. I am not going to examine all of your pasts and your political connections and whether you have done what you have asked, because I haven't served one day. I am just going to come in as a new president, which is their prerogative, and just clean house.

That not what happened here. In fact, there is a reason why somebody within the White House actually recommended that they fire everybody, because they knew that if you are going to start firing prosecutors, people that are given by the public and by this government the very grave responsibilities of carrying out our system of justice, then you better not inject any politics into it, because the worst thing that can happen to the American justice system, and for all of the inefficiencies of government, one thing we can stand very proudly by, is our system of blind justice.

We do have a system of justice that by and large makes decisions without political influence. If you are my neighbor and you did something wrong, no matter who you know, now matter how powerful you are, now matter how much money you have, you are going to pay for it. You are going to be held accountable for it.

But if prosecutors throughout this country start having to look over their shoulder every time that they decide to try that rich guy or that influential guy or politically powerful guy, and they have to wonder whether the consequence of that decision is going to be the political boss somewhere decides their job shouldn't be their's anymore, then that has immense, immense consequences for our system of government and our system of justice.

I know it is just eight. I know it is just eight. But if that message that those eight guys, men and women, those eight men and women, who for some reason displayed some act of political disloyalty to the President, don't get to hold their job anymore, then that has an unbelievable chilling effect on the rest of our prosecutors, and I think it has dire consequences for our system of justice.

So it is a big deal, and it should be a big deal. I hope that the President sees the light of day and decides to put the people that were responsible for this decision before Congress so that everything can be aired out.

His offer now is obviously certainly not acceptable. As the chairman of the Judiciary Committee today said, Representative Conyers, said we might as well go down to the bar down the street and have this conversation, because that is about as much meaningful information as you are going to get out of that conversation.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I think, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, it is part of a pattern. Political influence in the judiciary, we are finding that prosecutors are being fired for not being loyal to the President. We find it in some of our scientific agencies, where basic scientific accepted data is being suppressed by the administration because it doesn't meet their political goals within some of our medical approval agencies and boards. Decisions are being made based on ideology, rather than on science.

We have had hearings on a lot of these subjects in the committee that I sit on, the Government Reform Committee, and you actually get some indignation expressed, as you said, from both sides of the aisle, from Republicans and Democrats on this issue. I think there is a bipartisan frustration at the administration's willingness to inject politics into a lot of places where politics have no business.

But at the same time that I accept there is criticism coming from both sides, I also note that there were a lot of things we probably would never have found out about unless we were asking the questions, and the questions weren't getting asked for a very long time. They are getting asked now. Maybe the answers are terribly palatable.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Or forthcoming. When we get them, they are not the ones we want necessarily, but at least we are starting to get them, because we are asking them. And if you want to talk about restoring people's faith in government, we have to open it back up again. I hope that is something we can engage in on both sides.

I yield before we give the contact information.

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