30-Something Working Group

Floor Speech

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to be able to kick off what I hope will be a very interesting hour. Every week we try to get together at least once as members of the 30-Something Working Group at the pleasure of the Speaker of the House to talk about some of the most pressing issues, not only to this country at large, but in particular to the young people of this country. I appreciate the Speaker giving us this opportunity.

We are hopefully going to be joined today by some of the veteran 30-Something Members, but we are going to kick today off with Mr. Altmire of Pennsylvania and myself and our special guest today from New Hampshire, young-at-heart Paul Hodes.

Madam Speaker, I think the gentleman from Georgia is right on one point at least, that this is a sobering week here in the halls of Congress. We have had a lot of bad news this week. We have mourned the death of far too many young people at Virginia Tech. We have mourned the loss of one of our own here on the House floor. We are wrapping up a month in which we have seen 86 more soldiers die on the battlefields of Iraq amidst a growing civil war, a war now that has cost over 3,300 lives, 24,000 wounded and $379 billion spent.

Our friend who just gave the final 5-minute speech on the other side of the aisle suggested that the silence was deafening from the Democratic side tonight in this Chamber. Well, we were talking all day. We were talking last week and the week before. There was no silence on this side of the aisle. For the first time, for the first time, this Congress picked its head up out of the sand to realize what is really happening over in Iraq.

You can talk all you want about failure and defeat and victory, but you have got to be a little bit clear about what we are talking about over there, because maybe we entered into a fight with an army commanded by Saddam Hussein, but we have now got ourselves mired in what is a civil war.

Madam Speaker, I got the chance, along with five other Members of this body, three Republicans, three Democrats, to go over to Iraq and Afghanistan a few weeks ago, and we asked the generals on the ground a very simple question: Of all of the fire that you find yourselves in the middle of on the streets of Baghdad, tell us what percentage of that which is directed at U.S. forces is a fight from insurgents directly against the United States, and tell us what percentage of that fire is sectarian strife, Sunnis and Shia fighting each other.

I have to tell you, listening to the other side, you would have no clue that the answer was 90 percent. Ninety percent of the fire directed at U.S. forces is simply by virtue of us being in the middle of what has become a civil war there.

So you can continue to bury your heads in the sand while we talk about this tonight, but we choose not to. We chose to side with the American people, 60 percent of whom say unequivocally that they want a timetable to bring our troops home. We sided with the Iraq Study Group, some of our top foreign policy leaders in this country, Republicans and Democrats, who unanimously stood up to say it is time to redeploy our forces. We stood with some of the brightest and most courageous military generals.

We have come to the position that it is de rigueur for generals to speak out against the war, because it seems that there is a new one coming out and talking about the tragedy of this war every day. Well, this didn't happen up until the Iraq conflict. You have never seen this number of former military men standing up and suggesting we need to set a different course.

So maybe this is a little bit of a quiet room tonight after a very long day, but, yes this was a loud and boisterous hall earlier tonight, because for the first time in a long time, this Congress stood up and excerpted the will of the American people.

Before I kick it over to Mr. Altmire and Mr. Hodes, let me just quickly talk about what we did here today.

You want to talk about supporting the troops. Let's talk about the fact that this bill had every dollar that the President asked for in it, and more. And more. We put in more money to make sure that every single troop has the equipment, the protection, the armor that they need.

This bill has $1.7 billion in additional money beyond what the President asked for for veterans, $1.7 billion beyond what the President asked for for healthcare for our existing armed forces.

You want to talk about supporting the troops, then you better look at the words and the numbers in this bill, balls what the President wanted, he got, and we put more on top of it to make sure that every single soldier

is taken care of on the battlefield, and when they return to this country, they are not just given average healthcare, but they are given the gold standard of healthcare when they come back here.

What we did on that bill was for the first time suggest that this commitment cannot be open-ended. For Mr. Hodes and Mr. Altmire and myself, we have gotten the opportunity over the last few weeks to go back and talk to our constituents, and you are having to turn over a bunch of different rocks as time goes on to find people who are still willing to say that we should have absolutely no end to our commitment there. That we should do virtually nothing to force the Iraqis to stand up for themselves.

Let me give you one important quote from this week. Folks on the other side of the aisle will say that this timetable is somehow harming our efforts there. They maybe should speak to our own Secretary of Defense, who just this week said this: ``The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably have had a positive impact in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment.''

Our own Secretary of Defense, the spokesman on matters of war for this President, says that our discussion here about ending our open-ended commitment, about forcing the Iraqis to stand up for themselves, has had a positive effect. So to our friends on the other side of the aisle, they might want to check with the administration before they cast aspersions on the work that we are doing here.

The last thing to say. The last thing to say. We better put some definition on what war we are fighting here. I know Mr. Hodes wants to say something about this as well. This is not a war for us that needs to be fought between two sectarian parties in Iraq. This is a war on the people that attacked this country. Maybe some people on the other side of the aisle haven't noticed, but the people that attacked this country came from Afghanistan, a country that we have left behind.

We had a chance to visit Afghanistan just a few months ago, and we found that the Taliban is in a resurgence there. We found that the new power player in the Middle East, Iran, is starting to meddle in the affairs of Afghanistan, in part because we haven't put the money and the troops and the resources and the infrastructure dollars behind our effort there to make sure that it is a self-governing country.

We have got fights all over the globe that this country needs to be a part of if we really want to talk about making this country safe. So when we talk about redeployment, we mean it. It is not just about withdrawal. It is not just about taking every single troop who is over there and bringing them home to their families. We would love to do that. There is not a single one of us who hasn't spent an amount of time with the National Guard and the Reserve troops that have been so heavily stressed by these multiple deployments. There is not one of us who has not sat with active duty families who have seen their family members deployed once, twice, three times, over to Iraq and Afghanistan.

We would love to bring every single one of them home. But we know that the reality of this new world order is that we have got to have a much more global view. We have got to make sure that we have the troops necessary to be committed all over the globe, to make sure that we recognize how broad the threat to this country is today.

That is not what we are doing right now. That is not what we are doing. In fact, what we have done is created a safe haven for terrorists. We have created what our own intelligence community calls the cause celebre for the Islamic extremist movement in this world, to find shelter in Iraq, to breed, to train, and then to present an even greater threat to this country.

So, yes, Madam Speaker, there was a little bit of celebration on this side of the aisle when we passed this bill tonight. Not because this isn't the most serious subject that this House will face over the next 2 years. It certainly is. We take that as a grave responsibility that it so deserves. But because it is about time that we picked our heads up out of the sand and said in our gut, in our conscience, we cannot allow our military forces to continue to be the referee of a civil war. And in our gut and in our conscience and in our head we know that this fight is broader than just what happens on the streets of Baghdad. This is a global fight against the people that took us on, and by redeploying those forces, by doing the right things by the soldiers who are on the ground in the middle of this civil war, by making a commitment as strong as ever to our troops and to our veterans, we finally, we finally, started imposing a foreign policy that will guarantee the security of this country, not just for the next week or the next month, but decades and hopefully centuries.

Madam Speaker, I would like at this point to yield, if I could, to a good friend and one of our new 30-Somethings, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Altmire.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I want to read it one more time, Mr. Altmire, just because it backs up everything you said. I want to read it one more time. Secretary Gates. ``The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably have had a positive impact in terms of communicating to the Iraqis this is not an open ended commitment.'' I mean, that's worth saying again, because for all the rhetoric that we get about what we are doing here and what kind of impact it has in Iraq, we have our Secretary of Defense telling us exactly what has been our intuition for years; that the only way, Mr. Altmire, just like you said, the only way for us to exert any pressure on the Iraqis to stand up for themselves, to get their military shop in order, to get their civil shop in order, to get their political stop in order, is to tell them that we are not going to be the crutch that they can rely on in the long run. We've recognized that here for a very long time. Our Secretary of Defense now joins us in that.

And at this point I would like to turn it over, yield to Mr. Hodes.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Hodes. The three of us are new Members. We came here on that tidal wave of increasing popular angst against this war. And this place shouldn't be dictated just by what happens in elections, but elections have to mean something. When the people get a chance to go out there every 2 years and weigh in on the direction of their Federal Government, they have to feel, at some level, like what they say matters.

And, Mr. Hodes, I mean you are right. When they pick up the paper whatever day it is going to be when he actually vetoes this, the feeling inside, that voter who thought they went out and cast a courageous vote for Mr. Altmire or Mr. Hodes or Mr. Murphy who decided to make a change when it doesn't happen very often that you have a change like this, maybe once every decade or every two decades, well, they are going to lose just a little bit of faith in this process. And every day that we continue to have an administration that refuses to honor where the American people want the course of this war to go, which, as we have said over and over again, it is not just the American people but it is the American people being backed up by generals, being backed up by the foreign policy community, the Iraq Study Group, there is a little piece of democracy that dies every day that that happens.

Let me just bring up an additional topic here. When I got out into Baghdad on the day that we were in Baghdad, what we saw was the escalation in progress. What the escalation essentially is, is it is asking these soldiers who are on their second or third tour of duty over there, who would normally do 12-hour shifts patrolling these incredibly dangerous streets, trying to dodge sniper fire, trying to keep clear of the increasing number of IEDs, roadside bombs, now those troops, after the 12-hour shift, aren't going back to safe barracks; they are lodging themselves in the neighborhoods, in some of the most dangerous, war-torn neighborhoods of Baghdad. They are living in bombed-out buildings with little or no electricity or running water, in squalid conditions. That is what the escalation is.

Now, if this was a fresh round of troops, if this was a group of young men and women who were there for the first time, maybe you could understand putting them in that position. But that is not what this is. Twenty-three percent of all the troops who are being deployed right now are National Guard and Reserve troops. Eighty-eight percent of those National Guard and Reserve troops are so poorly equipped that they are rated not ready right now. That is from the Washington Post, about a month back.

We know that the number of Active Duty and Reserve brigades in the United States that are considered combat-ready, zero. None of them. We have maxed out our military. We have asked, Mr. Hodes, as you said, our men and women to do everything we have asked them to do, and we have got to start asking ourselves the question, have we asked them to do too much?

One day they are in the middle of a firefight. The next day they are sitting down and trying to mediate a dispute between two rival neighborhood groups. The day after that they are overseeing the construction of a water filtration plant. They are, within a 3-day period, being asked to be fighters, diplomats, and civil engineers.

Having gotten to spend a couple days on the ground with these folks, they are by all measure the best people that we could send over there, the bravest, the most capable. If there is anyone in this world that could do this job, I know it is them. I knew it intuitively from back here in the United States. Having spent a few days on the ground, you know it from the moment you talk to them. But we have maxed them out.

And why I try to get here as often as I can to hear Mr. Murtha speak here on the floor is because there is no better in talking about this subject than Mr. Murtha. He said it here tonight: There is no one more in touch with the troops than he is. And our danger is not just in asking them something they may not be able to do, but permanently damaging the capability of this military going forward.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, I want to yield to Mr. Altmire in a second.

But let me just underscore this to say none of us are happy to be in this situation. Myself, I think that this is the best course. I think that we need to set in law a sense of when our commitment is going to end there. The only way we will finally complete the training of our military and our Armed Forces within the Iraqi community is to give them a sense of when they will have to stand up for themselves.

Now, at the same time, there is no perfect option. In fact, there may be no good option here. We all have to admit at some level, Republicans and Democrats, that we have gotten ourselves into a mess here that there is no pretty way out of. And that is part of what government hasn't been pretty good about talking about. This administration, it is all about black and white to them. It is good or evil. It is right or wrong.

There is a lot of gray, and we created most of that gray by being the bull in the china shop there. But what we put forward today, what the majority of this caucus supported this afternoon and this evening is not the perfect, and it is probably not even the good, but it is the best that we can do in a very bad situation. And it is certainly the best that we can do by the brave men and women who are fighting.

So as proud as we are, I think, Mr. Hodes and Mr. Altmire, standing up today and finally getting our head out of the sand and putting some direction in what has been a directionless conflict, at the same time it is a sobering day because we all admit, especially as new Members who didn't participate in the lead-up to this very troubling time, that getting ourselves out of it isn't going to be an easy process and it is not going to be a very brief process.

With that, I will turn it over to Mr. Altmire.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I want to make sure everybody knows that there are no hard lines in the sand in this House. And, in fact, the bill that we voted on today is different from the bill that we voted on about 2 weeks ago. In fact, what this House voted on, and what many Members insisted upon several weeks ago, was a hard deadline in the sand that said that we had to be out of Iraq by next spring or, at the latest, next fall. And many of us stood up and said, for the reasons we talked about tonight, that in order to get the Iraqis to finally stand up for themselves, we have got to give them that sense.

The bill that we voted on today in an effort to bring the President to the table, to get him to sign a bill that puts every dollar he asked for, and, more for troops and veterans was a goal. It was a goal. Now, there are a lot of us who wanted to see more than a goal. All of this is an effort in compromise. But that goal even is apparently objectionable to this President. And I have a feeling that this House will move again and will try to come up with yet another means of resetting our policy and our course in Iraq that is acceptable to this President.

So if anybody has any idea out there that the House of Representatives is just saying X and the President is just saying Y, no, we're trying to make that effort. And you know what? People are going to look in the paper this morning and see a vote that has a lot of Democrats voting for it and a lot of Republicans voting against it. Lest they think that that's been the case day in and day out here, in fact, it's been the exception to the rule in how we have conducted ourselves in this House. The 100 hours agenda, making changes on our economic policy, our health care policy, our national security policy, our homeland security policy had record numbers of Republicans. We stood together and we have stood together on everything from the minimum wage to stem cell research to even the budget.

So we have made great progress, I think, in this House on bringing back together some of that partisan divide. Lest people look up at the vote that we took tonight and think that we didn't honor our pledge to really start to bring that back together, I think we have in large part.

And I think that's important to say because I know, Mr. Hodes, that as important as it is to the new Members to get Iraq right, to get health care right, to get energy right, it's also really important for us to start bridging some of the gaps here. And it pains us when these things do hit party lines, but on something as important as Iraq, the vote is what the vote is. And we'll get back to building those bridges as soon as we get beyond it.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That doesn't sound like pork.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That doesn't sound like pork either.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That doesn't sound like pork to me, Mr. Hodes.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well, it pains me to admit that I spent far too much of my life watching this House from a distance. And so I share those thoughts and I am so glad Mr. Altmire would bring that up on this day.

With that, before we end our hour, we're going to allow our honored guest, who we hope is joining us for the first of many visits with the 30-Somethings.

As our veteran Members abandon us, our new Members step up. And Mr. Hodes, if you might inform folks how they might find us via e-mail and via the Web.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much. I thank the Speaker for giving us this opportunity once again.

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