The Future Forum
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the previous speaker for exercising tremendous leadership in helping to forge this, the Future Forum. I am proud to join him in
being a founding member of this important caucus, one that I hope will go out and touch the lives of many young people throughout the country.
In having a conversation with the previous speaker about what brought him to public service and what brought me to public service, I was relaying my personal story, and that happened to involve September 11. I was not one of the heroes by any means, just one of the ordinary Americans working in the private sector straight out of college,
attempting to pay off a ton of student loans, and right here in the Washington, D.C., area, just a couple miles from the Pentagon, that bright blue-skied beautiful morning when the world suddenly changed.
Mark Twain had said a long time ago that America's two best friends in the world are Miss Atlantic and Mr. Pacific. September 11, 2001, proved that that was no longer the case, that we were not a separate fortress unto ourselves and completely removed from the problems around the world. That was, as the previous speaker mentioned, such an important event in my life and in the lives of so many people in their thirties and younger.
As a member of this September 11 generation, I decided right then that I would devote my life to public service. The very next year, actually, on September 11, 2002, I began my graduate program in public policy and embarked on a path that about 14 years later has led here to serving in the Halls of the House of Representatives, attempting to
make a difference, solve problems, and do so on a bipartisan basis.
I know there are many people on the other side of the aisle, good Republicans, who feel the same way I do; that we can have our legitimate debates, that we can have our debates on public policy, but that when it comes, of all things, to the security of the American people, we need to put the nonsense aside and actually focus on
protecting our people.
So, Mr. Speaker, when we had come down here and planned to speak about the Future Forum, I had expected that my speech would be about the student loan debt crisis, something that is deeply affecting our generation, a generation that is more indebted than any other in our Nation's history. But, instead, we are here to talk about the fact we are just 3 days away from seeing the Department of Homeland Security completely shut down, seeing the furloughing of 35,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security.
On the very same day that information was released, three American citizens attempted to join ISIS, which should be called Daesh, the so-called Islamic State, who truly are evil and would do whatever they could to harm any one of the 310 million of us living in this country.
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I think it is a sad commentary that just a decade and a half later that we are here at an incredibly dangerous time, mind you, in some ways actually more dangerous than the days immediately following September 11, and instead of talking about how we can come together in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion, pass this what should be
noncontroversial bill to fund our Department of Homeland Security, the fact that we are right here caught up in a partisan fight over this is deeply disappointing and does not at all jibe with the spirit of September 11, and I think the spirit of a generation that was called to serve in the wake of those events.
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I am proud of the fact that a part of the district I represent is the city of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Fire Department, one of the largest and oldest in our Nation, also a number of volunteer fire departments in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. There are so many of them around the country. To put them in this position is just deeply unfair.
I am also thinking, as I am looking to my friend to the right, fellow freshman, Mr. Moulton, he happens to be from Massachusetts. They right now are devastated with mountains of snow that fortunately most of us in the rest of the country, while we have had snow, not nearly the way they have had it in New England. It is important to note that a number of those who work in FEMA are the officials who receive those grant
applications, those emergency applications that so many in Massachusetts and Vermont and other parts of New England and other parts of the country are applying for right now because they have been so overstretched, given this incredible winter that we have had and record breaking in terms of snow. So they can keep on doing the applications and applying for assistance. The only problem is, come Saturday, we shut down the Department of Homeland Security, there will be no one on the other end to receive them.
I want to make one final point, and I think that this really strikes at the heart of why we are here and why the Future Forum was created.
This is my first year in the House. I might end up serving one term, might end up serving 10, who knows? For anyone who serves here, they all talk about the fact that it goes by extremely quickly. We, right now, are Members of a body with an approval rating of approximately 9 percent. I don't want to dedicate my life to public service in an area that is so poorly regarded by the American people. That is not something I want to do. I don't think that is something that other Members on the other side want to do.
It is important to our American democracy that whatever your ideology may be, whatever political positions you may have, we have to show the American people that their institutions of government can work. The American people, the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans, have lost confidence in us, in all of us. I don't think this kind of a political fight, frankly, benefits either side. I think it is only a race to who loses less. We can end this now. Let's do the responsible thing, the mature thing, the right thing. Fund Homeland Security, and then get on to the important debates that we must be having.
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