Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. This is a religious war that we helped to create in part. It did not exist until the bull sort of rushed into the China shop, but I think we all find it appalling, some of us, this simplistic terminology that gets rolled out here that we cannot leave until victory has been achieved. Explain to me what victory is because if we have to stay there until we have completely eliminated a civil/ religious conflict, well, it was not raging for the decades before we got there and is one that has almost no historical bounds. That is a difficult victory to ask our brave men and women to achieve, to try to somehow remediate a dispute between Shia and Sunni that cannot be resolved through the military actions of our men and women. Victory is much broader than that. Victory is about going after the fight that really mattered in the first place which is in Afghanistan, Mr. Speaker. Victory is about making sure that we secure our borders here at home; that every container that comes into American ports gets checked; that every airport has the proper screening technology to make sure that the ports of entry who brought in the terrorists who harmed this country have all the technology they need to make sure that it never happens again. That's victory in the end. So it's frustrating as a new Member to come down here and to listen to this new terminology get thrown out there that doesn't have any basis in reality. That is part of what we did on Friday as well, to start to broaden that definition of what victory means and try to challenge the people to rise to that.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. What we have gotten ourselves into, this is a religious war.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. The Web site now, Mr. Ryan, is updated.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. The bipartisan spirit preached by the 30- something working group put in practice.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, there is going to be a lot of stuff over the next couple months about Executive privilege and who said what, and there may be a lot of terms that may not seem like it matters to regular people. The heart of the matter is the difference between America and some Third World nations out there is we have a system of blind justice which holds people accountable for their actions based on whether they were right or wrong, whether they broke the law or didn't break the law; not whether they have some powerful friend sitting in the halls and corridors of power in Washington, D.C. or their State legislature. That is what separates this country from a lot of other places in the world where you can get hauled off to jail simply because you have fallen in disfavor with someone who is in a high political position. That is the essence of the genius of this country, that we have made sure that our legal system operates separate from our political system. There is going to be a lot of commotion about Executive privilege. What it comes down to is what may have happened is that this administration violated one of the basic principles of American democracy: don't mix justice with politics. And you are very right, maybe people wouldn't have found out about this if we did have Democrats in the majority.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I know that some of this administration are supposedly not great students of history; but if you read of recent Presidencies, you might find out if you tell the truth right off the bat, you get yourself in a lot less trouble than if you try to place the blame.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Meek, just as a transition to Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I would just say, elections matter; and there is probably no better example of that in recent history than the election in November. Things have just changed here. The air is different, the priorities are different, the rate of action is different. And, Mr. Meek, I get why we had to have an election in order to change course in Iraq. I understand that this is a very difficult subject that has divided people for a number of years. Over the past several years, people, large numbers of people came to the conclusion that we needed to change course from the President's policy, that we needed to put a Congress here that is going to start standing up to this guy and insisting that there are some other fights that matter in this world, and that we need to invest back in Afghanistan, that we need to make sure that our borders here are protected and that we needed to start redeploying our forces. So I get that we had to go to a national referendum in order to set a new course. That is an important issue that has divided people. Now, people have come down pretty firmly in the past 12 or 18 months on the side of a new direction. That is why Friday, to me, was maybe the most gratifying day in the short number that I have been here. But, Mr. Meek, I don't get why we had to have an election to decide to support veterans.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, it is good to see you in the Chair this evening. This has been a pretty amazing first 3 months for a new Member such as myself, who just joined this Chamber after having watched it from afar for a number of years. As our majority leader said at an engagement earlier tonight, this has really been one of the most remarkably productive Congresses in as long as he can remember being here. That is important. That is important to me. Mr. Speaker, we are going to be joined later tonight by Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who is just beginning her second term. I think she shares a lot of the same frustration that the new Members do, that for all of the important policy changes that this Congress has started, whether you want to talk about raising the minimum wage, starting to repeal some of these massive tax breaks we have given to the oil industry, the very important action that we took on Friday that we will talk about in terms of Iraq and the new direction that this Democratic Congress is beginning to set on what we do in Iraq, maybe the most important thing was that we started getting this place to work again and starting to give our constituents out there faith that Congress is back to work for the people of this country. Instead of sort of waiting for the special interests and the lobbyists to line up and come into the offices of the prior leadership to tell them what they wanted, now actually we have got the American people, middle-class families, working class families, their priorities are back in charge here again. That is what makes me proud to be part of this group. This is the hour that the 30-Something Working Group gets to spend on the floor of the House. I am proud to be a member of that group, a new member, proud that Speaker Pelosi has allowed us this opportunity. We are going to cover I think a couple of subjects tonight. We will certainly talk about what happened here on Friday. But I want to first just rewind for a second, to rewind to what happened when we first got here in January. Because it is interesting. I watched C-SPAN occasionally when I got home from the campaign trail, I got home from the State capital where I served in Connecticut for a few years, so I have some familiarity with some of the talk that goes on in this place. But now I get to sort of listen it to with new ears, because now I listen to a lot of the revisionist history that gets thrown around this place late at night, listen to our friends on the other side of the aisle, and they are friends. It is important to put up this chart, Mr. Speaker, to remind the American people that we actually can be friends when it actually comes to putting on the floor of the House of Representatives up or down votes on issues that matter to regular, middle-class families out there. We can talk about 68 Republican votes along with the Democrats voting to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. When we raised the minimum wage, set that bill on a path forward in this House, we got 82 Republican votes for that. Stem cell research, passed 253-174, 37 Republicans. Better prescription drug programs for our elderly, 24 Republicans. And on and on and on. When it matters, where you put up-or-down votes in front of this House for things that make lives better for regular people out there, you are going to have Republicans and Democrats agreeing. So we are friends. We are friends when we put things before us we can all agree on. But there has been some revisionist history. There has been some interesting 20-20 hindsight happening on this floor often. We heard just a little bit of it before. A lot the decrying about the situation that our Federal budget has gotten into is pretty curious, seeing that the reason that I am here in large part is because a whole bunch of people out in northwestern Connecticut who voted for one person for 24 years decided that the budget priorities, along with the priorities on our foreign policy, were gravely out of whack. A $9 trillion deficit, Mr. Speaker. A President that inherited a budget surplus, who ran on very fiscally conservative principles, managed to turn that into a record deficit in his first 6 years in office. A Republican Congress, I am sure there were some Democrats that were at the trough as well, but a Republican-led Congress that was complicit in racking up record amounts of debt that we know are not owned in large part by domestic banks but are increasingly owned by foreign banks, Asian banks and, in fact, it will put us in a very difficult position with when we are sitting down at a table to negotiate foreign policy with a lot of these foreign debt holders that have fairly decent leverage over us. So we hear a lot about how we need to do something about this deficit. How it is our children, our children are going to be crippled under the weight of this deficit. They absolutely are. They absolutely are. We had 6 years with a Republican President, 6 years with a Republican House, a Republican Senate for much of that time. Could have fixed it during that time; didn't get the job done. Let's take a look at this chart for just one second. Let's make this clear, when we borrow money, all of this debt that we have racked up over the past several years, it is owned by Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Caribbean nations, Taiwan, OPEC nations, right down the line. That is who owns our foreign debt. That is what places us in incredibly compromising positions when we try to bring them to the table to be a multilateral player in actions throughout this world. So here is why I am here: I am here because people in northwestern Connecticut wanted us to finally challenge this President on his disastrous policy in Iraq. I am here because they were sick and tired of the programs that make communities strong, the health care programs, education programs, job training programs, we are getting slashed and burned and cut to the bone by this Congress, while they gave away more and more massive tax breaks to their friends in the upper .1 percent of income earners in this Nation. But they are also upset because the party that I think they thought was, you know, you see it in the polls, people for years and years and years thought that the Republicans were the ones that could manage their money and the Democrats they weren't so sure on. Well, they finally wised up after a while to realize that this place wasn't so responsible even under Republican rule; that in fact after budget after budget that got put before here, that President Bush put before this Congress was rubber-stamped over and over and over again and led to some of the most fiscally irresponsible policies that this Congress has ever seen, that this Nation, in fact, has ever seen. Largest Federal debt in the history of this country, growing by the day. Now, here is the good news: it's changing. Now, as many times as folks on the other side of the aisle want to talk and use the term ``biggest tax increase in the history of the Federal Government,'' well, I'm still searching through that budget resolution, I'm still searching through what I am going to vote on this week and I don't see it. I don't see it because it's not there because we are actually going to do the responsible thing. Because what happened to create this Federal budget deficit was not just these massive tax breaks that they gave away to the folks way at the top, top, top of the income bracket, but they also spent money in a way that would have your eyes spin to the back of your head if you dug into some of the things they were doing here. A Medicare prescription drug program that deliberately ties the hands of the Federal Government, doesn't allow the Federal Government to negotiate lower prices with the drug industry, Mr. Speaker, making millions, hundreds of millions, in dollars in profit for the drug industry at the expense of American taxpayers. A defense policy which asks virtually no questions of how we spend our money in Iraq. We find out that there was $9 billion sent over to Iraq on pallets, thrown out of SUVs in duffel bags, unaccounted for; disappeared in that country. Stories of these pork barrel projects that would make your head spin, the ``bridge to nowhere'' in Alaska, simply the tip of the iceberg when it comes to some of the frivolous spending that happens from this supposedly fiscally conservative Congress. You could run through the examples over and over and over again. Mr. Speaker, we just had a hearing in the Government Oversight Committee that I sit on where we found out that the government does audits, each Department does an audit every year to try to make sure that we are spending money in a fiscally sound manner, just like any business would, that government should act like a business. Well, the analogy isn't particularly apt in a lot of facets. But when you are talking about at least having generally accepted accounting principles to make sure that money comes in and goes out in an efficient manner, well, yes, we should start acting like a business does. The only agency in the Federal Government that can't give a clean audit year after year after year, the Department of Defense. Nobody here is putting pressure on them to account for how they spend money, to make sure that the billions of dollars that we hand to the Department of Defense in order to protect this country is being spent in the means that make sure that we are not saddling our children or grandchildren with the enormous amount of debt that we have racked up in this Congress. I mean, you want to talk about spending money wisely, our friends on the other side of the aisle have to look themselves in the mirror, have to wonder why this election happened. I know that this war was a major factor in people's choice at the polls. I also know that were a lot of people in my district, and I have got the run of the economic spectrum in the Fifth Congressional District, from people living in places like New Britain and Waterbury that used to have good, solid middle-class jobs who are still struggling to get back to that level of sustenance, to folks that are doing pretty well with their lives that have made a buck in this economy. Those folks at the upper end of the economic spectrum are wondering how this government is spending their money. So this week we are going to put a budget before this House. And Mr. Meek, who has joined us and Ms. Wasserman Schultz, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, can talk more intelligently than I can about this. We are going to finally put a budget before this House that is going to start to reflect the priorities of the American people; we are going to get our financial ship in order. All the things that folks over there talk about are actually going to be reality in this budget. We are going to make sure that we invest in the programs that make America strong. We are going to make sure that we end this disastrous policy of unbalanced budgets. We can do it in the next 5 years. That budget says that we can and we will. And it is going to continue at a pretty important precedent that we have set in this Congress, which is to change course on some of the most disastrous policies of this administration, particularly the vote that we took on Friday on the war in Iraq, and I know that we will talk about that, but also start to get our fiscal ship in order, to put our money where our mouth is. It is one thing for people to come up to this dais day after day after day and talk about fiscal responsibility. It is another thing to actually do it and put it into practice. The budget that we are going to vote on will be, as I have learned, this place calls a pay-as-you-go budget. It is simply this, what every family lives with every day. You want to spend some new money, show how you are going to pay for it. You want to cut some taxes, show how you are going to account for it. Pretty simple budget rule, Mr. Speaker. But not to be too partisan here, it took a Democratic Congress in order to start playing by those very simple rules. So, Mr. Speaker, I want to want to hand it over to Mr. Meek for some words, who normally gets to kick off this hour. But let me say that it has been a proud first three months. Probably the proudest day I have had was on Friday, when we came together to stand up to the President's policy in Iraq. It is going to be another proud week this week when we set the budget policies of this country straight and we finally stand up to the President and don't do what every other Congress has done, which is take this massive document, throwing our deficit into an increasingly upward spiral, throwing our families into turmoil. We are going to finally take this very weighted document and hold it up to the light, not just rubber-stamp it. It is going to be another good week here, Mr. Speaker. And with that, I yield to Mr. Meek.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, 9 years ago on this floor, Congressman Floyd Spence, the Republican Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had this to say about the bill withdrawing American forces from Bosnia: ``The time is long overdue for Congress to express its will on behalf of the American people.'' I couldn't say it better myself. In this place, the People's House, the will of the people must mean something. Elections must mean something. And if the 2006 election represented anything, it was that the American people were tired of the lack of oversight and accountability from this Congress, and they were tired of a war with growing numbers of casualties, and mounting costs with no end in sight. They asked for a new direction from this Congress, and The U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, is the answer to their call. There are many of us who feel uncomfortable giving this President another dime to spend to perpetuate this misguided and shortsighted strategy in Iraq. But I come here to support this legislation because for the first time since the start of this disastrous engagement, Congress is making sure that any further spending on this war comes with unprecedented support for our troops and veterans, and a real plan to redeploy our forces and resources to fights that we can still win. This Administration has been wrong on just about everything about Iraq--there were no weapons of mass destruction, we were not welcome as liberators, the country has plunged into a civil war, and we have no exit strategy. The days of issuing a blank check to this Administration with no questions asked are over. As we enter the fifth year of this war, people in Connecticut and across the country demand a change in our policy in Iraq. This bill is the change that they asked for.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I feel like I should admit something to you now.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you talk to Members on the other side of the aisle, and I think they share that same concern for veterans. I mean, they do. We are not suggesting that anybody in this Chamber was sitting here intentionally deciding that they were going to create the situations that happened on the ground at Walter Reed. It is just a matter of choices. It is a matter of the choices that were made here. And whether they were made consciously or unconsciously, it resulted in an abysmal situation for veterans. The choices that ended up getting made here when it came to the fiscal situation in this country was to hand out massive, unprecedented tax breaks to the top 1 percent of income earners in this Nation while we were fighting a war. While we were fighting a war. It never happened in this country. We have never asked this country to go into war without asking the entire country to sacrifice in order to pay for it, because here is the thing: The cost of the war isn't just the guns and the troops and the tanks and the armor. It is the health care for the people that come back here afterwards. The cost of the war is the whole thing. And so we ended up short-changing our troops and short-changing the people that came back here because we decided that what was more important was to hand out another round of tax breaks, this last one to the persons in our districts, the rare folks who are lucky enough to make $1 million a year. They got $40,000 back from that tax cut. I know if I showed up at their door and asked them, if you had to choose, if you had to choose as someone who is taking in income of $1 million or more a year, would you take the full value of that tax cut if you knew that that was going to leave the decrepit conditions that we have found at Walter Reed, that that was going to result in waiting times of up to a year for services for the men and women that fight to protect us overseas? I know what their answer would be, and it should have been the answer of this Congress. It now does get to be the answer. The answer now gets to be that our priority is going to be making sure that those folks are taken care of when they come home. And do you know what? We have already voted for tax cuts in this Congress. You can do both. You can still find a way to provide targeted tax relief to people who need it, as the small business tax cut bill here in the House a couple of weeks ago, and honor those commitments.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. For a period of time, it might have been the gentleman that currently serves as our Vice President.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Correct.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That is correct.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. And there is the rub, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, is that it is one thing to decide to clean house and say okay, everybody goes. I am not going to examine all of your pasts and your political connections and whether you have done what you have asked, because I haven't served one day. I am just going to come in as a new president, which is their prerogative, and just clean house. That not what happened here. In fact, there is a reason why somebody within the White House actually recommended that they fire everybody, because they knew that if you are going to start firing prosecutors, people that are given by the public and by this government the very grave responsibilities of carrying out our system of justice, then you better not inject any politics into it, because the worst thing that can happen to the American justice system, and for all of the inefficiencies of government, one thing we can stand very proudly by, is our system of blind justice. We do have a system of justice that by and large makes decisions without political influence. If you are my neighbor and you did something wrong, no matter who you know, now matter how powerful you are, now matter how much money you have, you are going to pay for it. You are going to be held accountable for it. But if prosecutors throughout this country start having to look over their shoulder every time that they decide to try that rich guy or that influential guy or politically powerful guy, and they have to wonder whether the consequence of that decision is going to be the political boss somewhere decides their job shouldn't be their's anymore, then that has immense, immense consequences for our system of government and our system of justice. I know it is just eight. I know it is just eight. But if that message that those eight guys, men and women, those eight men and women, who for some reason displayed some act of political disloyalty to the President, don't get to hold their job anymore, then that has an unbelievable chilling effect on the rest of our prosecutors, and I think it has dire consequences for our system of justice. So it is a big deal, and it should be a big deal. I hope that the President sees the light of day and decides to put the people that were responsible for this decision before Congress so that everything can be aired out. His offer now is obviously certainly not acceptable. As the chairman of the Judiciary Committee today said, Representative Conyers, said we might as well go down to the bar down the street and have this conversation, because that is about as much meaningful information as you are going to get out of that conversation.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be here again to spend a small amount of time on behalf of the Speaker's 30- something Working Group. I thank the Speaker of the House for allowing us this opportunity to come and share with our colleagues and share with the American people some, I think, very important thoughts on what is happening today. It was interesting, I got to hear the end of our colleagues' remarks from across this side of the aisle; and one of the things they have asked of this Congress, and you hear it over and over again as we talk about this war in Iraq, is that we have to finish the job. And I think there is a question that has to come before that subject. We have got to start asking a little bit more in this place what that job is. I think that is what this debate is about, in part, this week, and the debate that we have renewed here since we have brought the House under new leadership. What is the job that we need to be doing in order to keep this country safe? The answers to that have come in piecemeal fashion, in dribs and drabs over the past year. But maybe the most substantial piece of information, new information that helped us decide what that job is, was when we got last summer evidence through the National Intelligence Estimate that started to tell us that if our job is what we think it is, which is to do everything we can to keep this country safe, then our own Intelligence Community, the dozens of intelligence officers and organizations that contributed to that report came up with one unfortunately startling conclusion, and that was that our efforts in Iraq are on more days making us less safe as a Nation than making us more safe. Why? Because we have not only destabilized the region, but we have created what that report called a cause celebre in that country, where extremists and terrorists around the world now see Iraq as their proving ground, as their training ground, and as their breeding ground. So what we are debating here today is, I think, exactly the question that is posed by the other side of the aisle: Let's start talking about finishing that job. That job is ridding this world of fundamentalism and terrorism and extremism that poses a threat to us no matter where it is. It is not confined by the borders of some country in the Middle East that we occupy today. It doesn't know the borders of nation states. It poses a threat to us in all forms and from all places. And so this debate this week, the supplemental bill which this House will vote on shortly, is about refocusing our mission, starting to deal with the realization and the reality of a conflict against terrorism that goes far beyond the borders of Iraq. Part of what this bill is going to do is not only redeploy our forces, but also bring our troops out of harm's way in that country. You can't ask them to be a referee in what has become a religious conflict in that country, one that military leader after military leader, our own commanding general on the field there, General Petraeus, has said himself just earlier this month that there is no military solution to what has become a civil and religious conflict on the ground. Job number one is to recognize the limits of our brave men and women in Iraq. They do an unbelievably admirable job every day. We are so grateful, especially those of us in the 30-something Working Group who consider those men and women our contemporaries, that they have chosen to defend this Nation so that others of us are able to serve this country in a different way. In order to honor them, in order to support those troops, we need to bring them out of a fight that our military forces cannot win alone. But this is also about refocusing that effort, and I think that is what we have to keep on coming back to here, is there are fights still worth fighting in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, where we are on the verge of losing control of that country back to the very forces that gave cover and umbrage to the people who attacked this Nation on September 11. Remember, it was not Saddam Hussein that flew planes into tall buildings in New York, it was Osama bin Laden's organization called al Qaeda that used Afghanistan and the Taliban as its place and center of operation. And that country, as we have shifted more forces away from Afghanistan into Iraq, is now falling back into chaos, and part of our mission here has to be a realization that there are places worth fighting, and there are places in which military forces cannot quell ongoing violence. Afghanistan is still a fight worth fighting. But it is also about focusing our efforts back here at home. And one of the secrets starting to come out, and thanks in part to the work of Representative Wasserman Schultz and Representative Meek and Representative Ryan, the work they did here on the late nights on the floor of the House, we were able to hear a little bit about this in the past year, was that this Congress over the last several years wasn't doing justice to the issues of homeland security, wasn't doing everything that we should be doing in order to protect our own people and our own borders here at home. So this supplemental bill that everybody hears about that the Congress is going to vote on is not only going to finally do exactly what the will of the people have asked for in the election of last November, which is set a new course in Iraq, but it is also to start refocusing and redoubling our efforts back here at home. The $2.6 billion in this bill will be rededicated to the efforts to make sure that terrorism does not find harbor on the shores of this Nation. Over $1 billion for aviation security, $90 million for advanced checkpoint explosive detection equipment, $160 million to increase air cargo screening, $1.25 billion for new port transit and border security, $150 million for nuclear security. We can go on and on and on. We are going to finally step up to the plate as a Congress and make sure that we are spending money to win the fight that matters to finish the job. That job, Mr. Speaker, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, has to be done with the recognition that Iraq has become now a place that, on more days than not, presents a greater danger to this country by creating a hotbed, a training ground, a proving ground for terrorists. We need to start refocusing our efforts on fights that matter. This is going to be one of the more important pieces of legislation that will come before this Congress, and I think it will honor that job that we are entrusted with, which is to protect this Nation from those that would do harm to it.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you are exactly right. There is a new day here. And I don't have the comparative experience that you do. I watched this place as an observer for the last several years. One of the reasons that I ran was you sit around in coffee shops and local community halls, and people generally don't pay much attention to the division of labor down here. I mean, people aren't necessarily talking about in their daily lives the co-equal branches of government. They are not thinking too much about the separation of powers. But you know what? They were forced to talk about it in the past several years, because people didn't understand how, in record numbers they were turning out, not only in elections, but in community meetings, to tell their Members of Congress that they needed a change in Iraq, because, not only did they have moral and intellectual objections to what we were doing over there, but they were talking to the families of those troops who were being sent over there without body armor. 18 months it took until our forces over in Iraq had the body armor that they needed. They were looking at statistics like the one we just found out earlier this month which said that 88 percent of the National Guard and Reserve troops are so poorly equipped that they are rated not ready by the military; that we have not one active duty reserve brigade in the United States that is considered combat ready. And so people out there were hearing over and over again from the families of the troops, the troops themselves, which was backing up their own instincts about the backwards nature of our policy in Iraq. And they wondered where Congress was. And they watched this place sort of shut down for a number of years. And they couldn't understand why their elected Members of Congress weren't standing up and asking some questions. I mean, at the very least, asking some questions about what this president was doing over there. Mr. Speaker, there were six opportunities since this war began for this Congress, on supplemental appropriations bills, to stand up and try to perform some perfunctory oversight over this war; four emergency supplemental bills, two emergency spending funds in the Department of Defense authorization bills, six times this Congress, under Republican leadership, had an opportunity to stand up and say, you know what? We are going to give you some more money to conduct this war, but we are going to put some strings on it. We are going to try to check your authority in some even elementary way. Not once. All six times this Congress stood down. Despite a lot of yelling and screaming from one-half of this chamber, this Congress stood down and gave President Bush virtually every single thing he wanted. Now, listen. I understand you might have been lulled into a sense of complacency here. This Congress heard from this president over and over again that things were going well, things were going fine, everything was going to be better. We find out now that all along this administration knew that things weren't going well. In fact, they knew things were pretty terrible on the ground and they were plotting this new strategy, a very different one than I think the American people intended on Election Day. They wanted a new course of direction in Iraq. They didn't necessarily think that that policy was going to be escalation. I think they were counting on de-escalation. It was a slightly new direction, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. But here is the thing, is that people in this country became constitutional scholars over the last couple of years because they started scratching their heads when they picked up the paper every morning as this war was going nowhere but downhill, and there was deafening silence coming from Congress. And so there is a lot of commotion in here about this emergency supplemental bill because it has got some policy in it. We are actually, instead of rubber stamping the President's requests, we are actually saying, if we are going to give you another dime for this war, then we are going to make sure that you honor the will of the American people, that you step up to the plate and listen to the foreign policy community that this Nation has expressed through the Iraq Study Group; that you listen to your own generals, many of which who will tell you over and over again, that though there might be a political or diplomatic solution to what happens on the ground in Iraq, that it cannot be a purely military solution; that you start listening to the families of those troops who have cried out for years to equip them when they go over, to make sure that they are protected when they serve overseas, and to make sure that their health care is taken care of when they come back; that we actually conduct this war, redeploy our forces in a responsible manner. For the first time, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, this Congress is stepping up to the plate and actually conducting that type of oversight.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Reclaiming my time for a moment, in Connecticut we have the same problem that you talk about. It takes hundreds of days for veterans simply to get qualified for the benefits once they return. I mean, of all the benefit programs that this government runs, it would seem that the veterans program would be the easiest to qualify people for, right? Because what is the qualification? You served in the military. You fought for this country. There is a record of it. It is not hard to find. And yet we have constructed so much bureaucracy and so much red tape. And I understand that a lot of the folks in the Department are trying to do a lot with not enough funding to do the job, but it is time that we cut through it because we shouldn't be talking about a system that is of inferior care or equal care to that of what you or I get or people in this community get. Our veterans' health care system should be the gold standard of care in this country. We should accept nothing less than the best that our health care system can offer. And we know not only through the recent revelations at Walter Reed, but also simply in the conversations that we have door to door. It was amazing to me in this last election, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, as I went door to door over the summer and fall. I did it almost every night, and almost without exception if you knocked on the door of a veteran, someone that had served in World War II through the more recent conflicts, almost without exception health care came up, whether it was a personal problem they had had with the system or a problem that a family member or one of their brothers and sisters in arms had encountered when they came back. Almost every single veteran brought that up because they have a notion, and it is exactly right, that when they come back here, their community should be able to stand up for them and make sure that they continue to be healthy, certainly make sure that the injuries they received in defending this country are treated expeditiously, efficiently, and with the best care possible. And so it was remarkable to me how often this issue came up, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, just as you talked to people door to door. It was so real and so palpable because to the people who have served this country, there is no greater dishonor, and I am speaking as someone who has not served, but who has had the honor to know many that have, no greater dishonor to them than to come back to a country that doesn't express a deep and daily sense of gratitude for that service. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, for all the bad news that I heard on the campaign trail, the good news is this bill that we will vote on will honor that service, one of the biggest infusions of funding support for the veterans' health care system that this country has ever seen. And I can just hope that when I go back out there this summer, when I am going out just to knock on doors to check on people in a noncampaign environment, that you will hear a very different story, that they will feel finally their stories are being heard. I yield to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I think, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, it is part of a pattern. Political influence in the judiciary, we are finding that prosecutors are being fired for not being loyal to the President. We find it in some of our scientific agencies, where basic scientific accepted data is being suppressed by the administration because it doesn't meet their political goals within some of our medical approval agencies and boards. Decisions are being made based on ideology, rather than on science. We have had hearings on a lot of these subjects in the committee that I sit on, the Government Reform Committee, and you actually get some indignation expressed, as you said, from both sides of the aisle, from Republicans and Democrats on this issue. I think there is a bipartisan frustration at the administration's willingness to inject politics into a lot of places where politics have no business. But at the same time that I accept there is criticism coming from both sides, I also note that there were a lot of things we probably would never have found out about unless we were asking the questions, and the questions weren't getting asked for a very long time. They are getting asked now. Maybe the answers are terribly palatable.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Reclaiming my time just for one point. Before coming over here, I was reading a really interesting front-page article, and I think it was a recent Newsweek or Time, and it was entitled, sort of, The Downfall of the Right, and it was talking about how the sort of conservative ideology has really fallen by the wayside in the past several years. And one of the things it had talked about was that when the class of 1994 was ushered into office, there was a sort of purity to their ideology. You disagreed with a lot of the things they stood for, but they did come in here as reformers. I mean, they did come in here and set a whole new bunch of rules for this House, how this place was governed. They changed the franking rules. They put in term limits. And you could have disagreements with some of the results of that ideology, but they did come in here with some real ideas rooted in some intellectual discussion about how you change Congress. And what this article was sort of pointing out was that over time, over the last 12 years, the ruling party of this Congress became one that was guided by a set of ideas to one that was guided by a collection of special interests; that it was simply kind of an amalgamation of different lobbyists and different industries that would sort of pull and push for control over this place, and it stopped being one that was guided by any real ideas about how to move this country forward. And it was an incredibly interesting survey on how the Republican Party has changed over the years. And if you want to know why their reign ended after 12 years, in part I think it is a recognition from the American people that this place stopped being about ideas and in the end started being about those special interests.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Or forthcoming. When we get them, they are not the ones we want necessarily, but at least we are starting to get them, because we are asking them. And if you want to talk about restoring people's faith in government, we have to open it back up again. I hope that is something we can engage in on both sides. I yield before we give the contact information.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I think it serves us well to sort of try to outline for people why this is such a big deal. Why do you have a senior member of the Republican leadership coming as close as you can come to calling for the resignation of the Republican sitting U.S. Attorney General? Why do you have the papers filled with this day after day? Why do you have the Judiciary Committee going to the unfortunate but necessary step of actually having to subpoena members of the administration to come before us? It is pretty simple. If you are an average Joe out there, you want to know that if the guy next door to you commits a really bad crime, that he is going to go to jail, no matter who his political friends are, no matter what political connections he has; that justice should be blind. Justice should certainly be blind to politics. Now, we can freely admit that when Bill Clinton came into office, he sent out notices that he was intending to get rid of all of the prosecutors and everybody was going to have to reapply.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I am happy my application was accepted, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. The 30-Something Working Group, we were given this opportunity by the Speaker of the House, who has been so generous to allow us time on the floor to talk about issues that affect folks not only in their thirties, but issues that affect people throughout this country. You can e-mail the group at 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov, and you can always visit us on the web at www.speaker.gov/30something. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, it was a pleasure to share this hour with you.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Meek, the Speaker's 30-something Working Group, and I have been blessed for the last 2 months to be able to join you here on the floor and to have Speaker Pelosi allow us the time. Anything that you want to talk to us about, you can e-mail at 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov, a lot of the information that we talk about here, as well as information about the 30-something Working Group, at www.speaker.gov/30something. Mr. Meek, we hope the people will get in touch with us there.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We are all important in our own ways. Government Oversight and Reform, though, that was a committee that was a little sleepy here for the last few years. I have not been here with you for the last few years, but I was a watcher. I think I could see what was happening down here in C-SPAN. You did not see many oversight hearings. You did not see a lot from the Armed Services Committee, the Government Oversight Committee exercising what used to be the constitutional prerogative of the coequal branch, which is the legislative branch. Here is how things have changed. Let me put this where people can see it.