Tuesday, September 25, 2007 American University Kennedy Political Union’s  Artemas Ward Week Celebration Thank you for the invitation to join you at the Kennedy Political Union.  Let me also commend the Director of the Union, Amanda Fulton, for her leadership.  I am very pleased to have her as a constituent. American University is a terrific center for learning in our nation’s capitol and I am proud to say that my sister Caroline graduated from this distinguished institution and that for a number of years my father taught classes at the affiliated Institute for Learning in Retirement. I salute American University not only for its long tradition of providing a forum for the free exchange of ideas, but also for being named the most politically active campus in the country by Princeton Review.   In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I am the grateful beneficiary of some of that political activism.  When I first ran for congress in 2002, we had many campaign volunteers from American University.  So if you are on the five or six year plan here at AU and were involved in our 2002 campaign – thank you, it made a difference! Speaking of political activism, I have just come from Capitol Hill.  There is a long tradition on Capitol Hill of opening each day with a prayer, sometimes from a visiting pastor.  And I recall a day about a year ago when the visiting pastor started a prayer out loud and abruptly stopped saying the prayer out loud and began to whisper something no one could hear.  Several members of congress anxiously approached the pastor and asked, why did you stop saying that prayer out loud, surely you were praying for the 435 members of congress.  The pastor shook his head and said, no, I started to do that and then I looked out at the members of Congress and decided I had better pray instead for the American people. Well, a little prayer and the last midterm Congressional elections and things have changed on Capitol Hill.  I am proud to have cast my first vote this year for the first woman speaker of the house in American history – Nancy Pelosi.  Now I happen to think things have changed for the better, but I know that is easy for me to say now that I am now in the majority party.  But whether you think things in Congress have changed for the better or the worse – one thing is clear – elections do matter. Today in the House of Representatives we had a vote that reflects the changes from last election – we had a very important vote on expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program – known as the S-CHIP Bill – to millions more children in need of health insurance coverage.  This bill now goes to the Senate, which is expected to vote on this bill on Thursday with bipartisan support.  The total cost of $35 billion over five years is completely paid for by an increase in the federal tobacco tax.  That contrasts with the more than $200 billion the President is requesting for this year alone in Iraq – which is put on our national credit card. Now I want to read you a statement someone made in support of expanding the S-CHIP program.  Here it is and I quote: “America’s children must also have a healthy start in life. In the new term, we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for the government’s health insurance programs.  We will not allow a lack of attention, or information, to stand between these children and the health care they need.” that was a statement made by President Bush in his September 2004 speech to the Republican National Convention.  Unfortunately, the President appears to have reversed course. In a speech last July in Cleveland, Ohio, he said, “People have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to the emergency room.”  The proposal he has put forward would, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, actually toss more than a million children who are currently receiving healthcare from the program off the program. I very much hope the President will reconsider his threat to veto this children’s health bill.  If he vetoes the bill, we will have a vote to override the veto, but we do not currently have enough Republican votes to overcome the veto. The biggest losers will be millions of America’s children. But whether you support or oppose the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program – one thing is indisputable. Elections do matter. The children’s health bill would never have come out of the old congress. Here are some of the other major measures the new Congress has passed: a higher education bill that contains the largest increase in federal support for college students since the passage of the G.I. Bill by reducing the costs of student loans and expanding Pell grants. It is entirely paid for by reducing the subsidies paid to banks and other lenders.  It has been sitting on the President’s desk since last Tuesday.  I hope he will sign it soon.  For the sake of students who come behind you, call the White House now. The new Congress also passed a far-reaching lobbying and ethics reform bill that will loosen the grip of special interests on Capitol Hill.  Every public interest group from Common Cause to Public Interest to PIRG has called the bill a piece of “landmark” reform.  You probably didn’t even know it had been passed since the President signed it late one Friday night so Congress wouldn’t get the credit.  There are no Rose Garden signing ceremonies for important achievements of the new Congress. The new Congress also raised the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25.  It was scandalous that it had not been raised for 10 years while members of Congress got pay raises each year. And we passed the recommendations made by the bipartisan 9-11 commission. They had been sitting around for three years. We passed a record increase in veterans’ health benefits. The soldier’s motto is “Leave no soldier behind on the battlefield.”  We also want to make sure no wounded soldier is left behind when he or she returns home. We are also poised to pass a far-reaching bill to start to bring our energy policy into the 21st century, reduce our reliance on foreign oil and address the inconvenient truth of global climate change. Now, I believe these are important achievements of the new Congress.  But I want to make a different point.  The point is that the outcome of elections clearly has an impact on the direction of our country.  Some people get cynical and say it doesn’t matter who is in control of the White House or the Congress.  They say their vote just won’t matter.  My view is this: you can agree or disagree with positions the Congress or the President takes, but no one should complain about the quality of the representation in Congress or the White House if he or she doesn’t exercise the right to vote. My father was in the Foreign Service, and I was born in Karachi, Pakistan. As I was growing up I visited many parts of the world where people yearned to have the right to vote and to speak their minds without landing in jail.  It was always difficult to explain to people in those places why so many Americans do not exercise their right to participate in our democracy. And the greatest untapped power for change in this democracy of ours is you – the youth vote.  In the last presidential election the total voter turnout was high by historical standards.  Even so, only 60% of eligible voters went to the polls.  In the last presidential race the youth vote – defined as people between the ages of 18 and 29 years old – was higher than at any time since 1972, when 18-year-olds got the right to vote.  Still, turnout among young voters was only 49% – with 51% of the eligible young voters sitting out the election.  That means about 20 million eligible young voters did not show up at the polls.  And in the recent Congressional midterm elections, the young voter turnout was the highest in twenty years, but still only 24% – less than half the turnout of the rest of the population. So to the students of American University – you and your fellow students around this nation have the potential to dramatically change the direction of our country by fully engaging in the political process.  Every vote does count.  Just ask my new colleague in the Congress, Joe Courtney – who won with 83 votes – we call him “Landslide Joe.” or a candidate in North Carolina’ 8th District, by the name of Larry Kissel, who lost by less than 340 votes. Now, I have to confess that I have more than a passing interest in this matter.  As the Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign, I have been charged with the task of protecting and expanding the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.  And of course I couldn’t help but notice that in the 2004 Presidential election, young people voted by 55% to 45% for the Democratic nominee for President and in the recent Congressional midterm elections, nearly 6 in 10 young voters supported the Democratic house candidate.  That means I am in the enviable position of being able to enthusiastically encourage young voters to do their civic duty, while my counterpart at the Republican Campaign Committee is not so eager to see a large turnout among young voters.  Since we are in the District of Columbia, talking about voting, I feel compelled to say how shameful it is that the Congressional representative from our nation’s capital does not have the right to vote in Congress. This is clearly a miscarriage of justice.  We passed the DC Voting Rights Bill in the House, but fell two votes short in the Senate because of a Republican filibuster.  As you may know, President Bush has threatened to veto the D.C. Voting Rights Bill if passed by the Senate.  It would send a terrible message to the rest of the world if the President were to deny the people who lived in our nation’s capital the right to a vote in Congress.  What would that say to the world about our commitment to democracy? And that leads me to the final issue I want to turn to – America’s role in the world.  As you know, forty four years ago last June, President Kennedy delivered a landmark speech at this university on world peace and the need for a new approach to the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race. In that speech, President Kennedy said: “What kind of peace do we seek?  Not a Pax Americana, enforced on the world by American weapons of war.  Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.  I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” The Cold War is now over and the Soviet Union no longer exists, but many of the themes Kennedy sounded in that speech still resonate today. In the aftermath of the terrible attacks of September 11, the United States had the opportunity to rally the world against Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the terrorists who hijacked the Islamic religion for their extremist agenda.  We had the backing to bring the world together for a common cause. We sometimes forget that within days of the attack, the United Nations General Assembly – friends and foes alike – unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the attacks against the United States.  NATO, for the first time in its history, invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stating that an attack against one is an attack against all. When the brutal Taliban regime refused to support action against al Qaeda, the United States took the appropriate military action and had the strong backing of the American people and broad support in the international community.  However, while we succeeded in driving the Taliban out of the capital city of Kabul and killed a number of al Qaeda leaders, we have not finished the job.  Indeed, Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for masterminding the 9/11 attacks, is still alive and is likely to be somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Instead of finishing the job against al Qaeda, the President decided to attack Iraq – a nation with no weapons of mass destruction and a government that was actually an ideological adversary of al Qaeda. As a result of invading Iraq, the Bush Administration squandered a huge opportunity to keep both our forces and a united international community focused on defeating al Qaeda and its virulent brand of radical Islam.  The goodwill the United States had developed throughout the world in the aftermath of 9/11 evaporated as we switched our focus from the enemy who attacked us to one who had not.  As a result, according to the National Intelligence Estimate -- which reflects the consensus opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies – the invasion of Iraq has fueled radical Islamic and anti-American forces and has allowed al Qaeda to gain new recruits around the world. We must rebuild our credibility around the world.  We must reclaim our moral standing. And we must begin to responsibly redeploy our combat troops out of Iraq and bring them home safely.  The new Congress has worked hard to bring about that change.  Last summer we sent the President a bill that would have begun the responsible redeployment of U.S. combat forces out of Iraq.  The bill was patterned after the bipartisan recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Commission.  Unfortunately, the President vetoed the bill and our effort to overturn the veto was defeated.  We will continue to press ahead, but we need more of our Republican colleagues to join us. Our country faces enormous challenges at home and abroad.  How we confront those decisions will shape our future.  The youth vote represents the greatest untapped potential for change.  So imagine the future you want and use the political process to go out and shape that future.  As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “The world needs dreamers, the world needs doers, but most of all the world needs dreamers who do.” Dream big and go out and make those dreams a reality.