[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 80 (Thursday, May 15, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H4053-H4057]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              SUBSIDIARITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from California (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to 
speak about the role of government in our collective political lives 
and of the relationship between such government and civil society.
  It has been 219 years since this new constitutional republic formally 
entered the international stage. In 2008 I am privileged to stand in 
this historic Chamber of the United States House of Representatives in 
the second session of the 110th Congress. We should, representative and 
citizen alike, take great pride in our collective perseverance. Our 
longevity and survival as the numerically and geographically largest 
and most prosperous republican form of government in recorded human 
history is a testimony to the strength of this polity.
  An important part of that proud history has been our commitment to 
seriously debating the contours of any entity which we constitute to 
exercise power over the source and content of self-government: that is, 
``We the People.'' In other words, we must continue to ask ourselves, 
what is the proper scope and role of governmental powers in and around 
our lives?

                              {time}  1645

  My colleagues, ``subsidiarity'' is a word not often used on this 
floor. Yet, is a word and concept which is foundational to much of what 
we do as representatives, the system of government under which we 
operate and the presuppositions upon which much policy is debated in 
this Chamber as well as in that other body.
  Subsidiarity. It has been defined as the belief that ``a community of 
a higher order should not interfere with the life of a community of a 
lower order, thereby taking over its function.'' Subsidiarity ``holds 
that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization 
which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In 
other words, any activity which can be performed by a more 
decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited 
government and personal freedom.''
  Other intellectual and philosophic traditions have spoken of sphere 
sovereignty, principle pluralism and federalism. But behind all of 
these complex-sounding terms is a simple fact, understandable by each 
of us, that there should be a proportional relation between the 
proximity of an individual and the amount of power of any governmental 
entity, be it local, county, State or Federal, may possess in relation 
to them.
  In other words, that government which is closest to us is usually the 
best government for which we should give function. Let me give the 
analogy of a human body. If we would say the body politic is like a 
human body, we would say that a healthier body politic is one which, 
like the human body, is infused with activity, or energy. In other 
words, if you had a human body, and you had oxygenated blood that only 
went to 90 percent of it, that 10 percent might very well die and be 
considered unhealthy.
  If you would have 100 percent of the oxygenated blood go to the 
brain, the rest of the body could not function, and the body would 
therefore die. Similarly, with the body politic, if all the power and 
if all the energy is visited here in Washington, D.C., the rest of the 
body politic tends to wither. It loses its energy. It loses its 
enthusiasm. And ultimately, it withers and dies.
  Thus, as citizens, we do not, or should not, think it wise nor 
reasonable to immediately ask the Federal Government, the unit of 
government that is most distant from our lives, to solve each and every 
problem which our family, our neighborhood, our town, our city, our 
county, our State, or our region can address. Or, as academics may 
describe it, subsidiarity provides appropriate discernment for 
responses to respective needs in particular ways.
  Foundational to the proper functioning of subsidiarity is a 
commitment to constitutionalism and the rule of law. In 1852, that 
great ex-slave, writer, abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass, 
called the Constitution ``a glorious liberty document.'' Because of the 
principles contained within it, and the antecedent rights which it 
protects, we cannot quarrel with Douglass' description. His description 
is apt because the Constitution enshrined a system of government, based 
upon a moral foundation, which thereby allows the people to rule 
through majorities, and nonetheless simultaneously protects fundamental 
minority rights.
  Now, while we ourselves have not always lived up to it, subsidiarity 
requires, and the Constitution affirms, that no citizens, based upon 
arbitrary and amorphous demarcations like skin color, are permitted to 
be excluded from ``the governed'' from which consent is required.
  Thus, intrinsic to a proper understanding of and commitment to 
subsidiarity, the rule of law embedded within the Constitution requires 
a reasonable moral foundation upon which to anchor our commitment to 
law and the system of governments which we implicitly or explicitly 
support. As Robert P. George has written, ``Where reason has no sway in 
practical affairs, the sole question is who has the power.''
  Severance from a moral foundation would leave our belief in and 
carrying out of the rule of law without a means by which to be secure. 
Law itself becomes power. Arbitrary will becomes the corrupted lodestar 
of societal comprise and the entire depth of justice, which now becomes 
a completely vacuous term. To use an analogy from Roy Clouser in his 
book, ``The Myth of Religious Neutrality,'' ``even the most violently 
anarchistic organization would quickly fall apart if it became devoid 
of all observance of norms of fairness or trust among its own 
members.'' And while although often unnoticed and unspoken in the day-
to-day happenings of politics and life, the rule of law, 
constitutionalism and subsidiarity are vital guide-rails of our 
collective republican lives.
  As Professor Robert George has said, ``The obligations and purposes 
of law and government are to protect public health, safety and morals, 
and to advance the general welfare, including preeminently, protecting 
people's fundamental rights and basic liberties.
  ``At first blush, this classic formulation, or combination of classic 
formulations, seems to grant vast and sweeping powers to public 
authority. Yet, in truth, the general welfare, the common good, 
requires that government be limited. Government's responsibility is

[[Page H4054]]

primary when the questions involving defending the Nation from attack 
and subversion, protecting people from physical assaults and various 
other forms of depredation, and maintaining public order. In other 
words, however, its role is subsidiarity: To support the work of the 
families, religious communities, and other institutions of civil 
society that shoulder the primary burden of forming upright and decent 
citizens, caring for those in need, encouraging people to meet their 
responsibilities to one another while also discouraging them from 
harming themselves or others.''
  Subsidiarity, then, is formed upon a commitment to the rule of law so 
that in our various spheres of societal life, anarchy and normlessness 
do not start to behave as is they have defined the rules of engagement 
in the fields of activity once and for all.
  The commitment to the rule of law makes plain why an appropriate 
understanding of the limited judicial function is so important in 
democratic self-government. As Judge Andrew Kleinfeld of the 9th 
Circuit has written, ``that a question is important does not imply that 
it is constitutional. The Founding Fathers did not establish the United 
States as a democratic republic so that elected officials would decide 
trivia, while all great questions would be decided by the judiciary. 
That an issue is important does not mean that the people, through their 
democratically elected representatives, do not have the power to decide 
it. One might suppose that the general rule in a democratic republic 
would be the opposite, with a few exceptions.''
  Thus, when I hear that my friends on the other side of the aisle 
asked the Supreme Court Justice nominees whether they, in the course of 
their tenure, are going to ``expand freedom'' or constrict freedom, and 
when I hear current declamations that nominees need to understand it is 
their duty, their job, their purpose, as judges, to ``stand up for 
economic and social justice,'' I am incredulous as to what these words 
and terms mean. Freedom for whom? Freedom to do what? To whom? Whose 
interpretation of economic justice should be ``stood up?'' Whose 
interpretation of social justice? How do these ends relate to the role 
of a judge, which is to rule on specific cases, not engage in abstract, 
roving, philosophic speculations?

  The rule of law, our constitutional framework, and an appreciation 
for the complexity of society, which genuine subsidiarity inherently 
takes for granted, demand better.
  While what I've outlined provides the legal framework and structural 
timber for the division of power and cultivation of society, we the 
citizens are nevertheless the most important factors in such a 
commitment to subsidiarity. Subsidiarity requires a commitment by the 
citizens of the republic to comport themselves with self-restraint, 
with virtue and with respect for one's fellow citizens.
  As the father of our Constitution, James Madison, exclaimed, ``to 
suppose that any form of government will secure liberty and happiness 
without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea. We do not depend on 
or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose 
them.''
  M. Stanton Evans points out that ``the reasoning of the Founders in 
this area was identical to that provided for Edmund Burke 
contemporaneously in England. Self-government required observance of 
the moral law, respect for rights of others, restraint upon the 
passions. Virtue was thus a necessary precondition to a regime of 
freedom, and a Nation that lost its religious moorings was considered 
ripe for tyranny. Conversely, since religious belief and ethical 
conduct were matters of volition, the Founders also believed that 
liberty was integral to ideas of virtue.''
  Thus, in order for subsidiarity to remain viable, we, as citizens, 
must work to cultivate the proper virtues within ourselves as well as 
strive to be meaningful in the lives of those around us, usually 
starting with our families, our friends, our community, neighbors and 
our fellow employees.
  On the other hand, society would not endure were each citizen to take 
upon himself or herself the maximum amount of criminal activity 
possible. Rampant and widespread destruction would lead to nihilistic 
physical and cultural chaos. Greater resources would then be needed to 
attempt to contain and mitigate such behavior. The people's health, 
safety and likelihood of perpetuating society by bringing future 
generations into life would become severely constricted and diminished.
  George Will in his masterful work ``Statecraft As Soulcraft'' 
explained, it is obvious that ``the restraining strength of individual 
habits and social conventions must be inversely proportional to the 
strength of restraints enforced by law.''
  In addition to these individual consequences, the collective 
consequence of our view of government as one people would be tarnished. 
As Will again tells us, ``regardless of democratic forms, when people 
are taught by philosophy and the social climate that they need not 
govern their actions by calculations of public good, they will come to 
blame all social shortcomings on the agency of collective 
considerations, the government, and will absolve themselves.''
  Now in stark contrast, subsidiarity not only respects the various 
institutions and complexities laden throughout collective society, it 
also allows time for proper and respective maturation to take place. As 
George Will writes in regard on the bloodshed of mid-18th century 
America, ``what the Nation learned in Lincoln's lifetime was that the 
social cohesion which proceeds from shared adherence to a public 
philosophy and shared emulation of exemplary behavior and values is not 
the result of spontaneous combustion. It takes work. But by whom? And 
with what? Such work is done with laws and other institutions. It is a 
citizenry working on itself, on its self, collectively; on its selves, 
individually. It is applied political philosophy.''
  It is important to re-emphasize here that subsidiarity offers no 
congratulatory pat-on-the-back for its citizens. As genuine humility 
and an honest appraisal of humanity attest, we are all here works in 
progress. Aristotle observed that man ``is the best of all animals when 
perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice 
because man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and 
virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite sends 
ends.''
  The dry wit of that great English parliamentarian and political 
philosopher Edmund Burke is instructive when he notes that ``the effect 
of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please; we 
ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk 
congratulations.
  As Madison and Lincoln, two of our most prescient American statesmen 
might explain, because men are not angels, government is necessary, yet 
we must constantly appeal to the better angels of our nature, for 
failure to do so would result in the crushing of our intrinsic nature 
and the invaluable and incomparable dignity of our fellow man.
  My friends, subsidiarity is an important, and some would say 
indispensable, philosophy not only for the reasons I already cited, but 
also because of the flexibility it allows the leaders, the statesmen, 
of such a multifaceted republic. Such statesmen do understand the 
nature of law. We know that law is much more than a mere necessary evil 
or a clever contrivance or potent payback mechanism for partisan gains. 
No. Law is nurturing. Law is conforming. Law is inculcating.
  As J. Budziszewski has written, ``we know at least that the law 
cannot be neutral. Everything a government does it founded on some 
understanding of what is good. Moreover, no law that has effect at all 
can fail to have effect on character.''
  Furthermore, true statesmen and women and leaders are discerning, 
wise and prudent. Again, George Will has observed that statesmen who 
are unaware of the ideas that shape the institutions currently in their 
custody, and uninterested in the ideas that shape the expectations and 
tolerances of the citizenry, are statesmen governed by forces they 
cannot comprehend.

                              {time}  1700

  Such statesmen are apt to think they have more range for effective 
action than they actually have, and they are apt to have less than they 
would were they more aware of the connections between the life of the 
mind and the life of society.

[[Page H4055]]

  Twenty-seven years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that he 
had served in the cabinet or subcabinet of four presidents. He said, 
``I do not believe I have ever heard at a cabinet meeting a serious 
discussion of political ideas, one concern with how men, rather than 
markets, behave. These are the necessary first questions of government. 
The Constitution of the United States is an immensely intricate 
judgment as to how man will behave given the circumstances of the time 
in which it was written. It is not at all clear that it is working 
well, given the circumstances of the present age, but this is never 
discussed.''
  A commitment to subsidiarity requires much greater responsibility 
from our leaders, our policymakers and our representatives. My goal 
today is not to spell out precise policy prescriptions for every 
foreign and domestic issue before us. After all, that is most of what 
we do here. These are, without a doubt, important, but they do not 
comprise the whole of human endeavors nor the scope of activity within 
our policy. We must never lose sight of the importance of culture in 
our deliberations.
  One example of where we can strengthen the bonds of social capital in 
communities, while also working within reasonable budget 
considerations, is the partnering of private and charitable entities 
within the faith-based initiative. Now, some pouncing on the first 
word, as if it represented a perverse combination of a belief in 
unicorns with a draconianism of State-mandated medieval indulgences 
have ridiculed this endeavor as a corruptly--oh--divine, power grab 
given patronage and power to theocratic institutions in our society, 
but nothing is further from the truth.
  The faith-based initiative is merely an endeavor to treat faith-based 
charitable entities that provide social services as equal partners, 
partners on equal footing with nonfaith-based charitable entities in 
our society. You know, if a person is starving, does the source from 
where the food that quenches his hunger matter? If a person is without 
clothes, does it matter where the clothes come from that cover their 
nakedness? I don't think so. In reality the faith-based initiative is 
about eliciting greater public and private support for the smaller and 
often faith-based organizations which play a vital role in meeting 
human needs everywhere in our country.
  A true appreciation for subsidiarity may encourage parishioners so 
situated to kindly and gently admonish and encourage our various 
theological traditions and establishments to meet the humanitarian and 
simple life needs of their fellow men and women. Perhaps larger and 
more elaborate parking lots, gymnasiums, multimedia screens are not of 
immediate concern to the poor, the homeless, those without clothing, 
the hungry, the starving or the repentant prisoner about to enter 
society. The principle of subsidiarity helps such intermediate 
organizations and individuals make such determinations and meet such 
needs.
  Economically, subsidiarity encourages us to reaffirm the time-tested 
virtue of the legitimate exchange of goods and service known as free-
market capitalism, as well as the virtues of the industrious employee 
and diligent citizen. Subsidiarity requires us to not immediately seek 
a Federal solution to every local, county or State problem. It teaches 
us to be ever cognizant of the fact that the laws of economics. The 
laws of supply and demand cannot be suspended.
  Subsidiary reminds us life is not easy, and affluence is not as 
abundant as the air we breathe, that each of us, as many of our 
forefathers and ancestors did, must sacrifice, strive, delay gratifying 
our immediate wants and desires, and develop our skills and attributes, 
which most enable us to provide an honorable service or good to the 
rest of society in return for appropriate compensation.
  Over the years, many have written about the creative destruction and 
the cultural contradictions of capitalism. They have observed that 
capitalism, besides causing societal anxiety and consternation by its 
capacity for ever-changing technology and innovation may also spawn the 
radical individualism and consumerism which undercuts the moral, 
ethical and altruistic branches upon which it sits, but it need not be 
so.
  We, the people, have the capacity to deny or control these 
destructive tendencies. Properly considered, subsidiarity teaches us to 
probe for ways to provide the time and capital needed for creative 
inventions and products to germinate. It teaches us to strive to 
provide for the needs of our own respective and concentric circles of 
responsibility while adjusting to ever-changing demand and supply 
chains.
  These lessons are especially apt today as ideas and energy have 
replaced capital and labor is the central pillars of economic thought 
and comparative advantage. If our children and grandchildren are to 
compete successfully in this new world, we must aggressively seek 
innovative ways to attract investors and manufacturers.
  Yet, rather than harnessing the great potential, it seems that some 
believe that businesses, markets and profits are, by nature, evils unto 
themselves. Recently we had a candidate for the President of the United 
States threaten to take profits from private industry. Now, I would 
suggest this is a dangerous bit of rhetoric.
  To the contrary, it has become an almost universal judgment that on 
the level of individual nations' international relations, the free 
market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing sources and 
effectively responding to needs. We all recognize, says Father Richard 
John Neuhaus has written, that the State has an important ancillary 
role in providing a framework of law and order in which people can 
attend to the business that is properly theirs, but note the word 
``ancillary,'' not ``primary.'' It is thus an affront to human dignity 
to repress the human capacity to create, to invent and to be 
enterprising.
  As society and technology change, as they always have, it is up to 
each of us to help one another transition through the inevitable 
historical changes that bring excitement, as well as much fear and 
adversity or anxiety. The principle of subsidiarity helps us to 
appreciate the fact that communities, towns, cities, counties, States, 
they are often at the forefront of developing the changes needed to 
build sustainable and healthy communities in a constantly changing 
world.
  The concept of subsidiarity ultimately rests upon thing strength of 
individuals and families, and, in that regard, helps to remind us to 
protect the units of society which are at its most basic building 
blocks and bonds. Mere biology attests to the fact that the human race 
is perpetuated by the holistic union of men and women. Therefore, 
societies have recognized the indispensable role that families have 
played in the health of society. Marriage must be strengthened for 
other levels of society, the schools, the neighborhoods, the 
communities to flourish.
  Although this concept has been drowned in the hot caldron of partisan 
political soup, and it's timely today because of the decision of the 
Supreme Court in my home State, I believe that Robert George has 
properly addressed the issue in these words. ``If we are to restore and 
secure the institution of marriage, we must recover a sound 
understanding of what marriage is and why it is in the public interest 
for law and policy to take cognizance of it and support it. Marriage is 
a prepolitical form of association, what might be called a natural 
institution. It is not created by law. The law recognizes and regulates 
it in every culture. Nowhere is it treated as a purely private matter. 
Some toy with the idea that marriage could be privatized, and others 
wonder whether it might be the best solution to the controversy over 
same-sex marriage.''

  There is a reason that all cultures treat marriage as a matter of 
public concern, and even recognize it in law and regulate it. The 
family is the fundamental unit of society. Governments rely on families 
to produce something that governments need, but on their own they could 
not possibly produce, upright decent people who make honest law-abiding 
public spirited citizens. Marriage is the indispensable foundation of 
the family.
  Although all marriages and all cultures have their imperfections, 
children flourish in an environment where they benefit from the love 
and care of both mother and father and from the

[[Page H4056]]

committed and exclusive love of their parents for each other. Anyone 
who believes in limited government should strongly back government 
support for the family.
  Does this sound paradoxical?
  In the absence of a strong marriage culture, families fail to form, 
and when they do form, they are often unstable. Absentee fathers become 
a serious problem, out-of-wedlock births are common and a train of 
social pathologies follow. With families failing to perform their 
health, education and welfare functions, the demand for government 
grows, whether in the form of greater policing, or as a provider of 
other social services. Bureaucracies must be created and they 
inexorably expand. Indeed, they become powerful lobbyists for their own 
preservation and expansion.
  Everyone suffers with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the 
most. That's why I have advocated a constitutional amendment on the 
Federal level to enshrine the historic complimentarian definition of 
marriage.
  All citizens must be afforded their civil rights and equal treatment 
under the law. There should be and are avenues whereby privileges, 
including visitation, inheritance and other rights can be extended to 
any individuals seeking to live together either through familiar 
necessity or bonds of friendship. However, these extensions should 
never be based on or related to sexual behavior, for to do so would 
thereby change our definition of what marriage is, simultaneously 
turning the children of parents in this society as a means to other 
ends, as well as leaving a marriage without terms of definition in 
terms of numerics or norms.
  Let us debate this important issue and present this important issue 
to the citizens of the republic as subsidiarity would require, rather 
than having unelected judges, as they also did in 1973 and as those 
judges in the California Supreme Court did today, transform the norms 
and laws of this country through judicial fiat.
  An issue like subsidiarity cannot and should not be shoved into 
partisan columns. It is one of the philosophic foundations for a 
collective commitment, a commitment much more important in partisan 
identity or loyalty to the commonly known term, federalism.
  To abide by this commitment we must first acknowledge there are no 
easy solutions to our individual and collective ills, false 
shortcomings and hardship. We must understand the concept of equal, 
natural antecedent rights and their intrinsic corresponding duties, as 
well as the indispensable belief and equal treatment before the law. We 
must understand that a republic in which citizens no longer look to 
build relationships between men and women meet the needs of friend and 
stranger and protect the child and orphan is a republic whose future is 
worth pondering.
  We must understand that limited government does not mean inactive 
government, does not mean simply passive reactive government, does not 
even, given certain circumstances, have to mean small government. Lest 
we forget World War II, spending on our justly used military was 
exponentially higher than other times of nonwartime spending.
  We must understand that limited government means a commitment to 
constitutionalism and the rule of law, not the rule of men. We must 
understand that a communitarianism that ascertains its supposed 
community and communal aspects from what is dictated and forced through 
Federal bonds and the greater dependence we have on the Federal 
Treasury, is no authentic communitarianism at all.
  We must understand that each of us lose the sense of confiscation 
which occurs daily in our Tax Code when costs are disbursed, when a few 
cents here and a few dollars there are ignored, and, thus, all eyes 
turn to our Nation's Capital as if it were some giant piggy bank or 
money tree continuously sprouting new currency bills, dropping seeds of 
instantly created capital and supplying jobs, as if such things were 
not the exchanges of goods and services we make of citizens but, no, 
easily dispensed commodities which exist in some filled-to-the-brim 
barrel labeled ``jobs'' in the center of Capitol or the White House.
  We must understand that it cannot be more efficient to send all of 
our tax dollars to Washington D.C., only to turn around and have them 
sent right back through a maze of confusion and delay to meet the need 
that could have been met earlier and within closer and, thus, more 
efficient proximity.
  We must understand the republic in which we policymakers demonstrate 
our purported passion for constituents by promising to meet all the 
needs of each of them, while the constituents demonstrate their 
compassion by bemoaning how much of their earned income they do not 
give to such policymakers, is a republic with a troubling future.
  We must understand that a republic in which its citizens are merely 
content to receive regular disbursements of entitlements from their 
government and no longer strive to meet those same needs of their 
fellow citizens, is a republic in need of renewal.

                              {time}  1715

  We must understand that a republic which insists on standing in the 
way of those who request the right to merely delay their own 
gratification by saving, for decades, through slow and meticulous 
discipline, their own earned income and assets in order to end the 
cycle of State-assisted dependency is a republic with an uncertain 
future. For policymakers to extol the virtues of the American people 
while denying them this chance to voluntarily delay their own 
gratification is the epitome of hypocrisy and double-standard.
  We must understand that a republic in which those with greater wealth 
cease to seek ways to alleviate the basic needs of their fellow 
citizens less fortunate is a republic whose future is worth pondering.
  We must understand that a republic in which local and State 
officials, as well as citizens and community groups, make their dutiful 
marches to the halls of Washington to request all-important funds from 
the miraculously self-generating Federal treasury as if it were the 
only such place such funds could be ascertained, is a republic whose 
future is truly worth pondering.
  We must understand that there are some things the Federal Government 
can and should do. Providing for the public safety and protecting the 
homeland are vital for nation-states whose existence would be pointless 
were there boundaries and territorial integrity to be compromised and 
ignored.
  We must understand that a republic in which the Federal entity 
confiscates more and more income from its citizens so that they can no 
longer freely give to their houses of worship, to their favored 
charitable organizations, to their family and friends in need, to the 
strangers and persons in close proximity to them who they can most 
rapidly assist, is a republic in need of renewal.
  We must understand that when any meager attempt to limit or scale 
back a Federal budget now totaling $3 trillion and an administrative 
state which has proven virtually impossible to shrink is met with 
accusations of cruelty, disdain, and charges of callousness, we are on 
an unsustainable course.
  We must understand that we are not atomistic individuals utterly 
without need of social capital. We are not ``unencumbered selves.'' As 
men and women, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and 
acquaintances, we know that families and communities should receive 
priority over larger more removed entities. We know that the economic, 
political, and cultural aspects of society cannot be separated into 
distinct and separate spheres. They are intertwined. Proper economic 
activity presupposes certain cultural assumptions. Political activity 
can enshrine the necessary and proper economic fundamentals of a 
capitalistic system.
  We must understand that local, State and Federal Governments are not 
omniscient repositories of unassailable wisdom all of the time. That's 
why the voluntary and intermediate associations of society are so 
important: the places of worship which also do so many acts of 
compassion, the charitable organizations, the community organizations, 
the ``little platoons of society'' daily helping, feeding, clothing, 
assisting, nurturing, training, developing, and shaping the individuals 
of this land.

[[Page H4057]]

  Unfortunately, some view all ``government'' as oppression. Possibly 
necessary oppression, but oppression nonetheless. This too is mistaken. 
A commitment to subsidiarity provides a useful antidote to such 
fundamentally flawed, pessimistic and cynical thinking.
  We as Representatives and we as citizens should live in a polity 
which is constantly probing, analyzing, imagining, how to conserve what 
is good about the past and present while making the future a better, 
more fulfilling place for those that come before us.
  Mr. Speaker, the Preamble to our Constitution states: ``We, the 
people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, 
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common 
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of 
liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this 
Constitution for the United States of America.''
  Establish justice. Insure domestic tranquility. Provide for the 
common defense. Promote the general welfare. Secure the blessings of 
liberty. Today, the United States has 304 million people living in 50 
States, over 3,000 counties, and thousands of other cities, towns, 
villages, and local entities. My own State of California alone is 
almost 156,000 square miles, possesses over 36 million people, and 
contains over 800,000 private nonfarm business establishments. Yet, we 
know that ``our country is not a thing of mere physical locality.'' It 
is so much more. How are we then to govern ourselves spread across this 
vast, spacious, and diverse republic? It would do no harm to renew our 
commitment and endeavor to further understand the dimensions of 
subsidiarity.
  As Michael Sandel has reminded us in great detail, this self-
governing Republic has constantly been asking itself what the good 
life, the good society, and the good citizen is, should be, and can be, 
since its founding--a time before automobiles, telephones, televisions 
or the Internet. Let us never lose this perspective. After all, 
commonsense and reason adamantly demonstrate that unlimited vice and 
unfindable virtue will lead to greater resources being needed, greater 
unsustainable commitments being made, and greater constrictions being 
placed on our individual liberty. The strengthening of, and a 
reappreciation for, subsidiarity will help us all avoid such a fate.
  Mr. Speaker, you and others may have seen a great and inspiring movie 
which had the simple title ``Amazing Grace.'' William Wilberforce, who 
lived from 1759 to 1833 and was the great English abolitionist 
protagonist in that fine and very moving film, not only helped end the 
African slave trade in the British Empire, but he was also part of 69 
various societal groups as part of his effort at a societal-wide 
``reformation of manners and morals'' in England. It later became known 
as the Victorian Period, but he saw 13 and 14-year-old prostitutes on 
the streets of London, and most of society walking by and saying that 
is the way it has been, and that's the way it is going to be. He said 
it doesn't have to be that way, we can change it. When he did that, he 
engaged these nongovernmental entities in his effort to make those 
changes because he understood the principle of subsidiarity as it 
expressed itself through so many different organizations, and 
understood that if he was going to change the government, he had to 
change the culture. He had to change the people's hearts and minds, and 
that you just couldn't do it with government, you had to do it in fact 
with all of these organizations, from the families all of the way up to 
government.
  So let us today, in a different century and in a different country, 
nonetheless think anew how to encourage all citizens to view ourselves 
as not just cogs in a Federal wheel but as vibrant members, as ``little 
platoons'' ourselves, of our respective spheres of life, wherever today 
may find us.
  As Americans, Mr. Speaker, we have much of which to be proud. It was 
recently written that ``the United States is creating the first 
universal nation, made up of all colors, races, and creeds, living and 
working together in considerable harmony.'' Let us hope that is true. 
Let us always be committed to ``living and working together in 
considerable harmony.'' If we are concerned about liberty, justice, 
social or otherwise, and the common good, which all philosophies of 
human interaction and political life, no matter how libertarian or 
communitarian, presuppose, then we must commit ourselves to thinking 
with renewed vigor and energy, the presence and possibilities of 
subsidiarity.
  It is not an easy task for we are Representatives at the Federal 
level, but I think if we exercised humility and a proper understanding 
of the organization of our society and the tremendous capacity of 
individuals to do good when properly directed, and properly self-
directed, then we can rise to that challenge.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the time.

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