[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 274-277]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   PRESIDENT OBAMA'S INAUGURAL SPEECH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Collins of New York). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from 
Minnesota (Mr. Ellison) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of 
the minority leader.
  Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Speaker, thank you for allotting the time. I 
appreciate it very much.
  My name is Keith Ellison. I'm here today to reflect on what I believe 
was a historic speech for the ages yesterday. President Obama met the 
historic challenge, met the historic moment; and I just want to talk 
about my feelings about how important that speech really, really was. 
President Obama, you should understand, was called upon to make his 
second inaugural address. And inaugural addresses, historically, are 
speeches that people don't always remember, but there are some that we 
will never forget because of how important they are.
  His first speech 4 years ago was a speech during which, over the 
course of 18 minutes, he talked about trying to reach out 
diplomatically. He talked about the importance of trying to come 
together to solve common problems. And I think the basic attitude of 
the first speech was conciliation in an effort to try to work out 
problems both foreign and domestic.
  In this speech, however, President Obama set forth what I believe was 
a clear, concise agenda based on values that he owns. I was so proud to 
hear President Obama talk about the need to address climate change. He 
reminded us that you can believe in climate change or you can 
disbelieve in climate change, but the fact is our storms are harder, 
the drier weather we are seeing is causing forest fires, and we are 
seeing climatic catastrophes associated with climate change. We're 
seeing the consequences of it. So if we ignore the cause, we cannot 
ignore the consequence. I was so proud to hear him say that.
  He also spoke out boldly for equality, human rights and civil rights 
for all Americans. I remember that he said, and you may recall, too, 
Mr. Speaker, he said, we will never forget Stonewall, Seneca Falls, and 
Selma. These are three iconic moments in civil rights history when he 
talked about the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, and 
the African American movement for civil rights; but they all added up 
to one thing, which is that an American is an American is an American. 
It doesn't matter what your color is, what your sex is, or who you love 
and want to be with. What matters is that you are an American and 
entitled to the full protection of the law in these United States.
  I think it was very important for him to do so. It represented an 
evolutionary moment in American history that a President being 
inaugurated into his second term would stand up for the first time and 
say ``civil and human rights for all people.'' I thought it was a great 
moment, and I found myself cheering even though I hadn't planned on 
doing so.
  But he didn't stop there. He specifically said we need to stand here 
and protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, three critical 
programs this Nation depends on, three critical programs that seniors 
depend upon. But not only do seniors depend on them. Also we know that 
seniors and people live on survivors benefits. When their loved one who 
gets Social Security dies, children are entitled to get survivors 
benefits. And these survivors benefits are literally putting food on 
the tables for millions of families all across this country.
  But not only that. People with disabilities get Medicare and Social 
Security. And he stood up for these programs, reminding us that this 
richest country in the history of the world--the richest country in the 
history of the world--does not need to throw its poor, its vulnerable, 
and its aged under the bus. We are not too broke to make sure that our 
senior citizens, our children who are on survivors benefits, and people 
who are vulnerable economically, we're not too poor to make sure that 
there's something for them and that they have a livelihood and a way to 
make it forward.
  Imagine the richest country in the history of the world saying, I'm 
sorry, Grandma, but we got to cut your benefits because we can't make 
it. The reality is that when he gave that speech and he specifically 
identified those three programs as central to the American Dream, the 
American promise, I was proud. And I said, that's right. And I tell 
you, I was so happy to hear him say that.
  But he didn't even stop there. He talked about the need for 
immigration reform and the fact that for so many people around the 
world, America is still the land of opportunity and that we cannot sit 
by as 12 million people live in our country in the shadows with no 
pathway toward citizenship. The President specifically called on us to 
do something about it.

[[Page 275]]

  Now, the President knows that guns are a volatile issue. He didn't 
smack the issue of gun violence prevention right on the head, but he 
did mention the victims of Sandy Hook; and he did tell us that children 
have a right to be safe at school, thereby signaling that, you know, 
yeah, we are going to do some things about the proliferation of guns, 
high-capacity clips, and background checks, things that make sense, not 
taking away the right to own a gun, but to do commonsense gun violence 
prevention measures that I think will make everybody safer. In fact, if 
you're looking at the news right now, you know that there was another 
shooting today in Texas--today--today.
  So the bottom line is that the President laid out a vision, an 
inclusive vision, for America. The President got up in front of the 
world stage, all the Members of Congress, Ambassadors, Senators, the 
Supreme Court, and everybody assembled and said, This is the direction 
that we're going in. We're going to say Americans, whatever their 
background, are included within the promise of America. We're going to 
address income inequality. We're going to protect the social safety 
net.
  Now, some pundits--you can always count on the punditry to throw salt 
around--they said, well, it didn't reach out to the Republicans. Well, 
I think that Republicans are on Social Security, Medicare, and 
Medicaid; and they probably, or at least their parents, appreciate 
protection of that program. Republicans live on this planet in which we 
see the temperature rising and the consequences of global climate 
change hurting more and more people. Some Republicans are black, some 
Republicans are Latino, and some Republicans are gay. And when they 
heard that they are included in Obama's vision of America, they must 
have felt good about that.
  So I don't agree that this speech didn't reach out to the full range 
of the political spectrum, left and right. I think that if you're in 
the category that he mentioned, that no matter what your political 
ideology may be, that you would feel that, yes, this includes me.
  Now, I think the President's speech was also great because it was 
courageous. No President has ever mentioned before the gay community in 
the United States; and most people like myself and most people are what 
we call straight or heterosexual.

                              {time}  1510

  But all of us know that there is prejudice against the gay community. 
There's no denying this. There's no sense in denying it. We all know 
that these folks are our neighbors, they're our coworkers, they're our 
friends, and we know that they have suffered because of prejudice 
against them. For a President to stand up and say this isn't right and 
that everybody is included in the American Dream, I thought was a great 
moment. It was a first. It was historic. I think that President Obama 
seized the historical mantle and said, I'm not going to sit up here and 
use a bunch of flowery, vague language. I'm going to get up here and 
talk about what I really believe in. I was so proud of Obama yesterday. 
I admired how he handled himself and what he said.
  I think over the past 4 years, President Obama has, in my opinion, 
bent over backwards to reach out to the Republican Conference. He has 
really accommodated them in a whole number of ways, and yet their 
conference--and the record is clear--has come forward and said that 
their goal over the course of the last 4 years was to make him a one-
term President. Well, they failed. He's a two-term President. So the 
question is: Are we now going to come together? Is the caucus of ``no'' 
now going to say there are some things we're willing to work with? I 
hope so.
  Let me tell you. My dad was a Republican for many years. Of course, I 
love my dad and loved him when he was a Republican. He was what I would 
call a ``sensible Republican.'' He believed in watching the money. He 
believed in getting the most out of every dollar. He believed that the 
government had a limited role and shouldn't get in everyone's business. 
Today, we have folks who are not in the realm of even negotiation. 
They're willing to shut the government down, allow our country to go 
over the fiscal cliff and default on America's debt just to get their 
way. That's an extremist position. This is an extremist ideology. It's 
not a reasonable thing to say.
  Now, some of them will come up here and talk about how big the debt 
and the deficit is. Wait a minute. When we say that we want to cut oil 
subsidies to Big Oil companies, they don't want to do that. When we 
want to raise some taxes on the wealthy so we can use that money to 
lower the deficit, they don't want to do that. I doubt anyone who says 
they're outraged by the debt and the deficit, and we give credible 
solutions on how to lower it and they say ``no''--I begin to doubt that 
that's really what they're concerned about.
  The speech yesterday that the President gave, I believe, is a good 
starting point. The President is not negotiating with himself. He's 
declaring his position. The other side in the political divide can 
declare their position, and then we can come together and negotiate. 
I'm a huge supporter of the President, but I kind of believe that what 
he used to do, he used to state his values, then he used to anticipate 
what the other side would want, then he used to try to come together, 
bring both sides together, and then he would go to the table and 
negotiate. So we would end up not with a liberal position, but with 
sort of a centrist position, and we would start out right there, and 
then anywhere we would go from there would be further to the right. So 
if we're lucky, we end up with a center-right position.
  Now I think we start with, as we are proud to be the progressive 
liberals that we are, we start out with what we believe in, then they 
say what they believe in, and then we negotiate, and maybe we'll end up 
in the middle. But I don't want to end up in the center right anymore. 
I want to end up with some reasonable compromise that protects Social 
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; that protects civil rights for all 
Americans; that addresses this massive income inequality; that 
addresses climate change; that moves us toward a green economy; that 
allows people who are immigrants to have a pathway into the 
respectability of life in American society. The President did not 
disappoint last night. I believe in those things. Clearly he does, too. 
And I was so proud to see the President stand and deliver for these 
important values.
  Over the next several weeks, Mr. Speaker, we're going to be in a huge 
debate. We just finished the whole debate on the so-called fiscal 
cliff. It really wasn't a fiscal cliff. That was just the name the 
press loved to call it, but the reality is it was a set of budgetary 
deadlines and tax deadlines. We were able to come up with a deal, but 
the worst part of the deal is what wasn't in it. That's why I voted for 
it. I wasn't thrilled with the deal, but the thing I didn't like about 
it was the stuff mostly that was not included. Because even though I 
was happy to extend unemployment for a year, that was good. Even though 
I was happy to raise taxes on the richest Americans, because I believe 
it's their patriotic duty to help their country out, that was good too. 
I believe those were good things.
  I thought the fact that we did not deal with the debt ceiling, the 
sequester, and the continuing resolution really just put us in a 
position where a few months later our Republican friends would say: 
You're going to cut vital programs for Americans who need them, or 
we're going to shut down the government. You're going to cut Head 
Start, you're going to cut food stamps, you're going to cut Social 
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or we're going to default on 
America's debt. This is the hardcore bargaining position they've been 
trying to ram down our throat.
  I'll never forget Speaker Boehner, who said, ``Look, if they don't 
take these cuts in one loaf, we'll feed it to them a slice at a time.'' 
That's a quote.
  And so I was concerned that this deal we just did, this so-called 
fiscal cliff deal, the New Year's Eve deal, even though there were 
things in it that I thought were good, I was concerned,

[[Page 276]]

Mr. Speaker, because of what wasn't in it. I believe the American 
people and our markets, our business people, deserve to have this 
budgetary issue resolved in a way so they can actually plan.
  My Republican friends correctly point out that there is uncertainty 
when Congress doesn't solve problems, but they're the ones causing the 
uncertainty. In fact, they are guilty of creating the problem that they 
criticize the most. They say that we shouldn't kick the can down the 
road. They say we should have some finality. But they're the ones who 
are not agreeing to some finality. They say that we need to make sure 
that we get some real job creation, but they're the ones cutting into 
the public sector, causing us layoffs from the Federal Government, and 
therefore State governments. And of course, people who have government 
jobs spend money too, which leads people who they do business with to 
have jobs. If you work for the EPA and you go to a local grocery store, 
you spend money there, which allows the cashiers and the stock people 
to have jobs.
  Everything they say they don't want it seems like that's what they're 
for. They don't want job cuts, they don't want job losses, but they 
create them. They don't want uncertainty, but they create it. They want 
finality, but they avoid it. It doesn't make any sense. They say they 
want to reduce the deficit, but they enlarge it. So my point is: What's 
really going on here?
  I think President Obama has just kind of had enough and has said 
rather than trying to figure out how to do a deal with these folks who 
keep moving the goalpost, I'm just going to say what I'm about, I'm 
going to declare what my values are, and they can come to the table and 
represent their own point of view, and we'll find a way, hopefully, to 
get to a point where we can agree and go forward. Even if we hate the 
deal, even if we don't like it, at least maybe we can move forward so 
Americans can at least be able to plan for their future.
  Mr. Speaker, I think that Presidential inauguration speeches are 
important. They do lay out an important path. I was reviewing, Mr. 
Speaker, the inaugural speeches of President Abraham Lincoln. I'm a 
huge fan of Abraham Lincoln. I wouldn't call myself an expert or 
scholar of Lincoln, but I'm sort of an amateur reader of everything 
about Lincoln.
  In Lincoln's first speech, he was conciliatory. You will recall, Mr. 
Speaker, Abraham Lincoln, when he was elected, as soon as he was 
elected, Southern States began to secede even before he was 
inaugurated. South Carolina, Mississippi, the other States, they 
started seceding each before he was inaugurated. As soon as he was 
elected, some of them said, We are out of here.
  So when he came to his inaugural speech, the first one, he was trying 
to keep the Southern States in and trying to keep the border States 
from leaving. So he said some things that were so conciliatory, that 
even the abolitionists of the time thought that he wasn't what they 
were hoping for. He wasn't really against slavery. He said he was, but 
they thought that he didn't prove it. They thought he was halting, they 
thought he was too cautious, and they criticized him for this.
  But after the Civil War broke out and so much blood was spilled and 
so much harm was done to our Nation--620,000 people died in the Civil 
War--President Lincoln came back 4 years later. On that speech, his 
second inaugural speech, it was a bold defense of the union cause and 
an argument that slavery must go.

                              {time}  1520

  He didn't pull any punches on the second one. Now, he was not 
bodacious, and he was not offensive--he was trying to be as 
conciliatory as he could be--but he made very clear that America was 
going to be, one, whole and not divided and, two, that it would be 
slave free. He didn't water it down, as some pundits think that Obama 
should water his position down. The second time around, after we went 
through all the big fights, President Lincoln stood firm and spoke 
firmly and clearly but also in a conciliatory way about what he 
believed in. I don't know. Maybe there were some people back in 1865 
who might have said, Well, Lincoln ought to be a little more 
sympathetic to the South, and he ought to try to work with them more.
  Look, I'm not trying to compare this budgetary fight to the horror of 
slavery. There is no comparison, not at all. I'm not trying to say that 
our Republican colleagues are in any way sympathetic to slavery. 
They're not. That's not true. I'm simply trying to make the point that 
when you start out trying to work with somebody and you can't get 
anywhere, and when you go through all the travails and difficulties of 
trying to get somewhere and you can't, then at the end of the fight, if 
you win, you're probably going to say, Look, I tried to work with you 
and you wouldn't work with me. I ended up coming out on top on this 
thing, so now I'm going to bargain for my position.
  This is not to say the President is not going to negotiate. This is 
not to say the Democrats aren't going to negotiate. We are going to 
negotiate. We believe that the democratic process requires an eye 
toward compromise, but I also believe that we went to our constituents 
in 435 districts around this country and that we told them what we 
believed in and we told them what we stood for, so they deserve for us 
to at least articulate that position. If we have to make a compromise 
on some things for the sake of the Union, for the sake of the Nation, 
we should do that, but we should never act like we don't believe in 
what we do, in fact, believe in, which is Social Security, Medicare, 
Medicaid; which is confronting income inequality; which is equality for 
all Americans regardless of race, color, sexual preference; and all 
that kind of stuff. We should say what we believe in. We should say 
that we believe that a woman should earn every penny that a man makes. 
We should say these things. We should not be afraid to be who we are 
and articulate our vision of the world. Then when we go to the 
negotiating table, there might be some things we have to give up, and 
there might be some things we get, but we should never make any mistake 
about what we're all about.
  So I'm really proud of the President tonight. I feel the President 
did a fine job for America yesterday, and I wish the President well. I 
do know that the President, in being a man of reason, will listen to 
Republican arguments as to what they would like to see happen, but I 
also believe, based on what he said yesterday, that he is going to 
fight for what he believes in, too. He warned us against dogmatism, and 
he also said Look, don't confuse absolutism with principle. So that's 
sort of a warning to our side a little bit in his saying, look, I am 
going to have to negotiate some things. But when he sits around that 
table, we know where he's starting from, and that makes me feel good.
  I wish all the best for this Presidency and this Congress because I 
think that, if the Republicans are successful and if the Democrats are 
successful and if the President is successful, then America will be 
successful. So I'm here to say that I hope we do negotiate, but there 
are some things that, quite frankly, I'm not willing to cave in on--
Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare beneficiary cuts. They're asking 
for cuts from the people who have already been cut.
  Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that 20 percent of widowed women on Social 
Security have nothing but Social Security to live on, and yet we want 
to reduce their benefits? Do you know that a full third of widowed 
women on Social Security depend upon Social Security to the degree of 
90 percent of their incomes? We're talking about people who are making 
somewhere between $17,000 and $24,000 a year to begin with. You cannot 
go to people who already have so little and say give me back even more.
  This is at a time, because of our housing foreclosure crisis, when 
rents in nearly every city have gone up, and this is at a time when we 
have limited vitally important programs that help ease the pain of 
poverty for Americans. So there are some things that we are going to 
protect in this and that we are

[[Page 277]]

going to call upon the masses of Americans to protect.
  Let me just say, Mr. Speaker, that today I don't have the ability to 
be here for the whole hour--duty calls--but I did want to offer a few 
reflections on the speech that was given. I also want to say a few 
other things as it relates to the next period coming up.
  In the next few weeks, we're going to face a debt ceiling increase. 
In fact, we have a debt ceiling vote tomorrow. We're not voting to 
raise the debt ceiling; we're voting to suspend it. I think this is bad 
policy because markets, businesspeople, and everybody else need to know 
that the Congress is going to stand by the credit rating and the debts 
of the American people. We're not going to default, and we shouldn't 
threaten that we are. It's bad. It's not a good thing to do. It's 
important for the American people to know that, when we talk about 
raising the debt ceiling, Congress is not approving new spending. We're 
not borrowing. We're saying that we're going to pay the bills on debts 
we already acquired.
  It's kind of like this: If you have a family and if somehow you're 
already obligated to pay a mortgage, if you don't have the money for 
your mortgage, you may have to go to your cousin or your brother or 
your uncle and say, I need you to help me until next week so I can pay 
the mortgage. So you now have borrowed money to pay an obligation that 
you already owe, an obligation that, if you don't pay, you will default 
on. You can also have a situation in which somebody doesn't have enough 
money but goes into a local electronics store and says, I'm going to 
buy that big screen television right there on my credit card.
  Those are two different scenarios--borrowing to meet obligations 
you've already acquired and borrowing to buy stuff you really cannot 
afford. Raising the debt ceiling is the first one, Mr. Speaker. It's 
borrowing to meet obligations we already have. It's not borrowing for 
new expenditures. So, when we appropriate money and when we have had 
appropriated expenditures in the past, we might raise the debt ceiling 
to meet those obligations, which we should do, because to do otherwise 
is to say that America is going to default on its debts, which we 
cannot do, not just for our own sakes, but this would cause 
international harm to the world economy.
  People are confused about this whole debt ceiling debate, and I don't 
believe that it's right for Republicans to just suspend the debt 
ceiling and then to put a bunch of stuff in there about the Senate and 
all that kind of stuff, some provisions that are blatantly 
unconstitutional, too, by the way. So I'm disappointed in this thing 
that's coming up, but people need to know that this debt ceiling vote 
is coming up.
  They should also know that the sequester is coming up. With the New 
Year's Eve deal, we delayed the sequester 2 months. These are massive 
cuts to the tune of, I think, around $89 billion that are going to be 
put on the Pentagon and domestic spending. They're dumb cuts. We're not 
looking at specific programs and evaluating their worth and eliminating 
some and keeping others. We're just, like, ``chop.'' This is no way to 
budget for a Nation, and I hope we can delay the sequester, but it's 
coming up soon. Republicans have vowed that they want even more cuts, 
maybe even in addition to the sequester, to negotiate. I think we 
should remind everybody that we've already had $1.7 trillion in cuts 
and that we just did $600 billion in new revenue. That's about $2.3 
trillion. How much more cutting do we need to do, particularly when 
we're talking about vital programs for Americans?
  So, Mr. Speaker, if we're going to make cuts, we should cut things 
that we really don't need. For example, Medicare part D, which passed 
in 2003, prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices with the 
pharmaceutical companies. Now, the Veterans Administration does 
negotiate for drug prices all the time, but Medicare is prohibited from 
doing so. Basically, if the pharmaceutical company says this drug costs 
this, the government has to pay, and we can't use our large buying 
power to lower a price.

                              {time}  1530

  We should change that. We should introduce competitive bidding. That 
would save us a quite a bit of money, Mr. Speaker. That's a way we 
could save money.
  Here's another thing we should do. We should eliminate oil subsidies, 
coal subsidies, and natural gas subsidies. The fossil fuel industry, a 
highly profitable industry, making a lot of money, a profitable 
industry, there's no reason in a free market economy we should be 
subsidizing a profitable company. It doesn't make sense. Even if you 
are a free market person, you have a hard case to make that we should 
be handing Exxon, Chevron, and Mobil money. We shouldn't do it. We 
should end it, and any real conservative would agree with me on that. 
Now, if somebody is just trying to get money to friends, that's another 
story. But if you're really about reducing the deficit, that's one way 
to do it.
  You know, there are a number of things we could cut. There's a lot of 
Cold War weapons systems that could be eliminated. Our nuclear arsenal 
could be reduced without threatening our national security, and we 
could save money in doing it.
  There are ways to reduce the budget. There are ways to do it, and we 
probably should. But let's do it in a way where we keep Social 
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, aid for college students, 
money for investing in medical research, and groundbreaking research to 
give life to brand-new industries. You know, a lot of people don't 
know, Mr. Speaker, this thing we call the Internet was started with a 
government program--something called DARPA. A government grant helped 
fund the Internet. Yes, it did. I don't know about Al Gore, but I do 
know that the government, a government grant, put the money into the 
form that we now know as the Internet. The government did that.
  The government funded the project for mapping the human genome. The 
government. The government's not always bad.
  So we should keep some programs. We should lower others, but we've 
got to think about this thing in a different way than we are.
  All I want to say, Mr. Speaker, as I begin to wrap up is that it is 
an honor and a privilege to be able to serve in this, the greatest 
deliberative body in the world. And even though we have big fights with 
our Republican colleagues, it's an honor to serve with them, too. We're 
both here, sent here by the 435 districts that we represent to argue 
our positions and try to come to some kind of solution. I believe that 
we can have solutions if everyone has an eye toward compromise, but 
that depends upon everybody starting out carrying out the vision of the 
district they represent.
  My district wants me to stand up for Social Security, Medicare, and 
Medicaid, stand up for civil and equal rights for everybody, including 
gay people. My district wants me to find a pathway to citizenship for 
immigrants who are here. My district wants me to do something about 
climate change and move our economy toward a green economy. Now, I'm 
going to start there, and then we can negotiate with our colleagues on 
where we end up, but I'm proud that the President stood up for our 
values. I think his speech was groundbreaking, historic, and gave real 
energy to people who share his value system.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I have to curtail my hour, and I yield back 
the balance of my time.

                          ____________________