The 30-Something Working Group
Floor Speech
THE 30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - May 09, 2007)
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, I would like to welcome my colleagues to another addition of the 30-Something's hour. I would like to thank the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for allowing us the opportunity to get together and talk not only about some of the most important issues that face this hall this week and at this moment but also talk a little bit about how these issues are of particular concern to people of younger generations in this country.
We are going to be joined today, I know, by Mr. Altmire, who just gave a very compelling 5-minute address to the House and, hopefully very soon, by Ms. Wasserman Schultz, one of our favorite members of the 30-Something Group.
Madam Speaker, hopefully we will get to touch on a few different topics, but I think we need to touch on at the beginning of this hour the subject that really dominates the debate in Washington, D.C., right now, that dominates
most of the discussion out in the coffeehouses and pancake breakfasts and pasta dinners happening across this land, and that is, what is happening in this town? What is happening in Washington, D.C., inside the beltway? And that is, why can't government figure out what everyone else has figured out across the country, that we need to set a new direction when it comes to this country's policy in Iraq.
Now, I am certainly starting to feel that frustration. People thought when they weighed in on the national elections in the beginning of November of last year that they were actually saying something; that when they stood up in record numbers in some parts of this country and made courageous decisions district by district to replace long-time incumbent Members this Congress with relatively new Members, such as myself, such as Mr. Altmire and some 40-odd number of our friends on this side of the aisle that became new Members this January, they thought that it meant something. They thought that that voice that they spoke with in the beginning of November was going to be heard down here. And I can tell when I go back to my district, and I just came back this last weekend and I have been back every weekend since we have been down, that the patience of the American people is starting to wear thin. Now, it is not necessarily directed here. I think some people are still in some sort of sense of euphoria that we finally have a Congress that is listening to the American people again. Their anger is directed at the President of the United States. Their anger is directed at an administration that just doesn't seem to get it, that refuses every step of the way to step up to the plate and have some type of accountability for what is happening here, refuses to listen to the American people.
And the American people have spoken in the election, and they continue to speak today. A CNN poll that came out just a short while ago said a majority of Americans, 65 percent, oppose the Iraq war, and a full 54 percent disapprove of the President's decision to veto the Iraq accountability bill last week. Nearly six in ten Americans, in a recent Gallup poll, support setting a firm timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops out of Iraq; 61 percent of Americans, in another CNN poll, favor a bill that sets benchmarks that the Iraq government must meet to show progress that is being made in Iraq; 55 percent of Americans think it was the wrong thing for the United States to go to war in the first place. That is an amazing number, Madam Speaker; 55 percent of Americans, the majority of the Americans, now today believe that it was the wrong decision to go into Iraq in the first place.
Before the time of Mr. Altmire and me, the 30-Something Democrats, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Meek and Ms. Wasserman Schultz, liked to point out third-party verifiers. It is not just our saying it. Things that we stand here and say have actually been said time and time again by people who know what they are talking about and the American people.
Here is third-party verification: The American people by large numbers support not only the actions of this Congress when it comes to setting firm benchmarks for the Iraqis to stand up for themselves but also to set firm timetables by which we would start to redeploy our troops. Now, the American people join a growing hegemony of opinion within our foreign policy community. There are very few times when Republicans and Democrats outside this hall decide to agree on a course forward on something as weighty as the foreign policy issues that confront us in the Middle East. But the Iraq Study Group, five Democrats, five Republicans, Mr. Altmire, came together and told us, it is time to set a new course. It is time to start bringing our troops home, start redeploying them to fights that matter. Record numbers of retired generals.
Now, it has become kind of de rigueur to see on a daily basis retired generals from across America to come out and start to criticize the President's policy. This didn't happen before in these numbers. This is not the normal course of business for the men and women who have spent their lives fighting and leading American troops to then turn around after they have left their military service and criticize the very government that they have worked for, fought for and bled for all of those years. But that is what is happening today because the stakes are so high. The American public, bipartisan leaders on foreign policy issues and former military leaders are standing up and saying enough is enough.
We need to set a new course.
Now, there seems to be a very powerful sound barrier that has been built around the White House. Because for as many voices, the multitudes of American people, the multitudes of foreign policy experts, of retired generals, many of which ended their careers on the ground in Iraq, for all of those people throwing the might of their collective voices at the White House, a deafening silence.
Madam Speaker, I got the chance to go over and visit our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the first thing you're struck by is the unbelievable and unconditional bravery that they show this Nation. The capability of these forces is almost beyond explanation, and I got the chance to come back and talk to the President very briefly about it in a visit to the White House.
Those troops know that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically, that the fight that began as a battle against the autocrat that was Saddam Hussein now has become a civil war. The troops know it because they're right in the middle of it.
We asked our military leaders, how much of the fire that is being directed at American troops is the result of insurgent forces and al Qaeda forces firing at Americans and how much of it is simply a sectarian war that we find ourselves in the middle of? And the answer was the same no matter who you asked. Ninety percent of the fire directed at American forces are Sunni and Shia fighting each other, sometimes Shia and Shia fighting each other, that we are caught in the middle of.
This President, for some reason, refuses to understand how things have changed on the ground in Iraq and how things have changed when it comes to the opinion of foreign policy leaders, military leaders and the American public.
I think many of us were very proud to stand together, certainly the freshman class and as a caucus, to support our leadership's position to set a new course; and we were dismayed to see a President who is unwilling to work with this Congress. We will take another shot at that this week by presenting the President with another alternative on his desk once again to set that new direction. And from what we hear today, it will be met with the same resounding deafening silence and indifference to the will of the American people.
I am so glad to be joined here by one of my great freshman colleagues, Mr. Altmire from Pennsylvania, who I think shares with me, as new Members, as two young guys who have only spent about 4 or 5 months down here, that sort of growing sense of frustration when we go back to our districts and we hear people who wanted that change feeling like they're not getting it here because there is an administration that simply won't join that growing unanimity of opinion to set a new course.
I would like to yield to my friend from Pennsylvania.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Ms. Wasserman Schultz.
Your question is a perfect one: When will this madness end? When will we recognize that we need to set a new course, that we need to start paying attention to not just what's happening within the borders of Iraq but what's happening in Afghanistan, what's happening on our own shores, where we still haven't appropriated the amount of money to devote to the resources that we should in order to secure our own borders and our own ports?
And here is what it comes down to: If the Democrats weren't in control, the madness would never end; it would go on forever. There is absolutely no commitment, no willingness, no one on the other side of the aisle, very few at least on the other side of the aisle and certainly very few in the administration have woken up to the new reality here.
And to me, I won't say who it was, but a member of the Republican leadership the other day was quoted in the paper as saying this. This person said, you know what? The President, we are going to give him some time to put forth this plan to escalate the war in and around Baghdad.
But if it doesn't work, he is going to have to tell us what plan B is. Guess what. We are not on plan B we are on plan like double R. We have tried everything. We have been in there for longer than we were involved in World War II, and we still haven't found out what works.
Well, at some point, we are going to have to wake up to the notion that nothing that our military may try is going to work.
Now, if anyone can do this job, I think our military can do it. The problem is that we have gotten ourselves into a political quagmire, and the sooner we realize that plan A and plan B and plan C and D and E and F all didn't work, in large part because we have gotten ourselves into a mess that has probably, we hope, a political and diplomatic solution but may not have a military solution.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, let me set the stage to kick it over to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.
Here it is. The President took office January 22, 2001, $1.47; $1.47, that is like sort of a mystical number now. I can't even fathom when we were paying $1.47 for gas. Today, the average price for a gallon in the United States, $3.05.
Now, I am going to admit that in my part of the world, in northwestern Connecticut, probably like everybody's district, we have a couple of conspiracy theorists up there. We have a couple of people that are not actually willing to believe that the best of intentions are always at the root of decisions made in our political and economic system.
I have to tell you, the cynic in me and the conspiracy theorist in me, and there is a little bit of it, wonders a little bit why gas prices dipped down, curiously, right about the time when we were all up for election and reelection. Just when there was this sort of wave of economic discontent swinging across the country and all of the people were talking about finally taking our economy back from the oil companies. Just as this country was poised to make a decision to finally end, as Mr. Altmire said, our firm decades-long dependence on oil and foreign oil in large part, why did gas prices just dip right then? And then as soon as January, February came around, creeping up and up, a little bit more and a little bit more. Now as we head into the summer, into the prime driving months of the year, we are at $3.05 a gallon.
Now, I am not willing to say that is just politics, but the cynic in me has to wonder sometimes whether or not our gas and oil companies were just hoping, hoping that they could stem the tide and that they wouldn't have a Democratic majority here who would make a difference.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. On the heels of introducing some of our colleagues and members of the administration to a gas pump, and I think you are right, it is hard to understand how people can be so indifferent to the rising costs. Maybe they haven't seen a gas pump
I want to introduce them to something else.
This is a wallet. If you are an oil company executive, your wallet is busting at the seams. So your wallet is going to look different. This is a thin wallet. This is what the American people, working-class individuals throughout this country are dealing with. They are dealing with wages that have been pretty much flat for the last 5 years.
Oil company profits over the last 5 years have gone from $6.5 billion in 2002 to $30.2 billion in 2007. I want to make sure that while we are introducing some of our colleagues and some people in the administration to a gas pump, let's also introduce them to the thin wallet. If the average worker's income doubled from 2001 to 2007, I would say no problem, you can handle gas prices that doubled over that time. But the fact is that wages for average Americans have remained flat. Why? Because we have set up an economy that is designed to fail for regular, working-class individuals in this country, the folks that we represent, the people working in small businesses, who are living from paycheck to paycheck and can't take these increases at the pump.
As much as we have to introduce people to the notion that we have to start redirecting our energy policy, we also have to reintroduce people to the fact that there are millions of Americans out there playing by the rules who simply don't have the means to deal with these increased prices.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I always think there is this pyramid of political influence out there. For a very long time, the only people that really mattered in this system were the people gathered at the tip of the pyramid, the people with the big political action committees and who could afford to hire 10 lobbyists to patrol the halls of Congress. And all of us, you know, that exist down at the bottom of that pyramid, and when we come here we get to be closer to the top than the bottom, but the regular folks who sit wondering, and even if they don't wonder if they can afford to fill their tank, they wonder whether increasing gas prices means they can save less, whether this will have some impact on their retirement savings. All of those folks that exist at the base of that pyramid didn't matter any longer.
As much as for me and Mr. Altmire, as much as we care about setting a different course in Iraq and taking on the hegemony of the oil companies and setting a new course for health care policy, I think for us this election was as much about sort of flipping that pyramid on its head and saying we have got to start taking the time to form consensus back at the base of that pyramid and having those decisions be the ones that matter here in Washington.
I have to tell you, standing here as a member of the 30-Something Working Group, nobody knows more than we do about how many Americans now stand on a precipice of jumping off a cliff to having faith in their government. Young people, whether in their 20s or 30s, but people now in their 40s, 50s and 60s have just lost any faith that what they care about will actually be reflected in what happens in Washington.
Guess what, in January, when a new Congress got sworn in, it all changed. Now, it may not change so much that things happen here with the alacrity that people may like. This government is still designed not exactly to respond overnight, but you would not be seeing the policy proposals that you are outlining, whether it is taking on the royalties and the tax breaks, whether it is taking a look at antitrust provisions, whether it is passing a strong price-gouging bill. You just would not see that.
You would hear a lot of bluster, but you would not be seeing action if we did not flip government on its head in January and start once again listening to people out in communities rather than just listening to the conversations that happen perpetually within the halls of government. All those conversations are focused on one thing, the status quo.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Speaking of props, I think by displaying that rather thin wallet before, I inadvertently started to make a case for an increase in congressional pay, for staff members here.
So, we are on honored to be able to have this opportunity that the Speaker has given us, Mr. Altmire and I, certainly to be able to join our colleagues who have been up here for the last few years beating the drum.
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