The Future Forum

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for getting this time for this important message and to just talk with people. That is really what this body, at its very best, does: we talk amongst ourselves, we solve problems.

What you are hearing about today, namely, that we are 3 days away from shutting down our own national security, is an example of this body not solving a problem--in fact, causing a problem.

You think: Who is causing this? Why is our security going to shut down in 3 days? Who is doing this? Who is shutting down the Department of Homeland Security?

The sad answer is that we are doing it to ourselves. There is no reason for this manufactured crisis.

I want to share my story from 9/11. 9/11 is something that, in our generation, we all remember where we were. It is like the Kennedy assassination to our grandparents' generation or like the Moon landing. Everybody knows exactly where they were and what they were doing when we heard about the Twin Towers.

I was at a conference near Washington, D.C., here. Like anybody who was near one of the sites, it was scary because we didn't know what was going on. The rumor was: all planes are flying into buildings, we are under attack.

They thought there were bombs at one point. It was a madhouse to try to escape the area and get out of the city. We drove all the way back to Colorado, and I never got to see what was happening to the towers in realtime or the immediate aftermath because, for the next 25 hours, I was just listening to it on the radio in the car, and my friend and I took turns driving.

That was a unique moment when people came together. It didn't matter if you were Democrat or Republican. Our petty differences melted by the wayside as we came together around a national response.

In many ways, it is sad to see our Nation go back to those same kind of partisan divisions which, unfortunately, reduce our national security. When we are talking about the Department of Homeland Security--which I would point out was set up after 9/11. That was set up to ensure that something like 9/11 doesn't happen again.

It coordinated agencies in a new way that didn't occur before, encouraged intelligence sharing among the agencies about domestic threats, and now, a lot of that work is just 3 days away from being defunded over a totally different issue, one that we are happy to talk about, by the way.

I mean, we talk about DREAMers and what a pathway to citizenship could look like and immigration reform and what the President can do and can't do, and those are all important discussions, and there are many diverse opinions in this body about them.

I would hope nobody with any opinion, no matter how extreme, would hold our national security hostage over this. I am reminded of what one of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle said, disappointed in his own party over this particular strategy.

He said: ``Unfortunately, we have taken a hostage that we don't want to shoot.'' I think that is very much the case. Yes, they are taking our own security of our Nation and the Department of Homeland Security hostage. Do they actually want to shoot that hostage?

Our friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they are not bad people. They believe in protecting our country. I hope they don't go through with it, but they have gotten themselves into this predicament over rhetoric that threatens to jeopardize our national security.

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We had a young lady from our district--you mentioned people--we had a young lady from our district, 19, from Lafayette, Colorado, who tried to get over to Turkey and then to Syria to join ISIS.

Fortunately, for her parents, for her family, frankly, for her own life, thanks to the efforts of the Department of Homeland Security, it was interdicted. Her travel plans were detected, and she was detained at the airport and not allowed to join ISIS.

Thank goodness we had the Department of Homeland Security connecting those difficult-to-connect dots. I don't even know how they did it to this day because, obviously, people go to Turkey on tourism all the time, but they used several points of information to figure out that this young lady was trying to join ISIS, and, thankfully, they were able to return her to her family.

That is the kind of thing that, unfortunately, happens every day across our country. If in 3 days this Congress doesn't take action, we are tying our own hands behind our back in our fight against terrorism, which makes absolutely no sense.

Look, you and I, Mr. Swalwell, I am sure, were equally passionate about our views on immigration. We would love to see DACA expanded, and I would love to see a pathway to citizenship, but it would never cross my mind, no matter how I want to see those things, that I would shut down the security of the country just to get it.

I think most Americans don't think that way. I mean, here we are as some of the young Members, I think that perhaps some colleagues on the other side are acting even younger, like preschoolers and kindergartners here, where they either get all the toys or they are not letting anybody else play with them.

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We haven't named them yet.

That is the approach here. If they don't get their exact way, well, fine, we are not going to keep the Nation safe. I mean, that just doesn't make sense in any deliberative body, like we all grew up thinking that Congress was the lofty deliberative body.

That just doesn't make sense, that kind of reasoning.

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Good. Good. We are all still in our thirties.

But look, I think that what is happening is that when people of all ages, but particularly young people look at Congress and they look at this kind of thing with, ``Well, you, yourselves, are shutting down security?'' when they look at that, when they look at when the whole government shut down, again, do we remember why? Not really. I don't remember why the Republicans shut down government. There wasn't really a reason. They gave up, and they reopened it. It didn't make sense. When people see that, they lose faith in this institution; they lose faith in democracy; they lose faith in themselves. We can't allow that to happen.

The only way for this body to change, for the quality of government to change, is for people to be invested in that change, to have that same sense of solidarity that came after 9/11, not just around disasters, but every day; when it is election day, to make sure to vote; when it is time to write and call your Congressperson, if you have a Congressperson who thinks it is okay to shut down the Department of Homeland Security, call that Congressperson, show up at their town hall meeting. Guess what. It is not okay to play games with our national security.

As my colleague from Pennsylvania pointed out, many kindergartners are more mature than somebody who either wants to have it their way or not at all and to send all the toys home. That is really what we face here in this scenario. I think we have really hit upon one of the reasons that people of all ages, but particularly younger people, are losing faith not just in this institution, but as a part of the democracy it represents and how it really is our role to try and reinfuse that hope in not just, again, the competency of this institution, but the institution of representative government and the vision that our Founding Fathers put in place through the Constitution.

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