Raising A Question of the Privileges of the House

Floor Speech

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong defense of the great character of a loving friend, father, husband, and brother, Congressman Chuy Garcia.

My friends, there are moments in the Nation's history when a single life stands up and declares without arrogance and without apology that freedom must mean something for everybody or it means nothing at all.

Congressman Chuy Garcia is such a man. He is, in every profound and dangerous sense, a freedom fighter. Not in the fashion of myth or marble, but the kind born of neighborhoods where dreams have been bruised and people still need to rise. Yet, people still rise because of a Congressman like Chuy Garcia, the kind who understands that the struggle for human dignity is never finished and never optional.

Chuy Garcia's life is stitched together with the same thread that carried our greatest fighters forward, the belief that one does not have to accept the world as it is, but he glimpses into what the world ought to be. That is leadership.

Leadership is not a performance. It is not a posture. It is a way of standing with the vulnerable, a way of insisting that compassion is not weakness, that justice is not a luxury, and that democracy is not a spectator sport but a lifelong calling.

Beside me is a picture that warmed my heart from childhood. This is Congressman Chuy Garcia then campaigning with the great Harold Washington, the former Congressman from the First Congressional District.

Chuy brought the African American and Mexican communities together. There was a time--before the word Hispanic was created--we knew Chuy as a Mexican American. Chuy walked hand in hand with us in Chicago. In 1997, while he was the State senator serving alongside then Senator Barack Obama, Chuy Garcia was the chair of the Black Caucus of the Illinois State Senate.

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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. He has walked arm in arm with the African- American community, not as a visitor, not as a distant ally, but as a brother in the same long struggle for liberation. He understands that the battles of the South Side echo the battles of Little Village, that the pain of displacement, disenfranchisement, and dismissal does not respect ethnic boundaries, and that our triumphs, when we dare to claim them together, can shake the foundation of this Nation. He has marched with us, organized with us, fought alongside us because he knows that our destinies are intertwined.

Today, let us honor the courage of a man who has refused to be cowed, refused to bow to power, or be silenced by cynicism; a man who reminds us that to lead is not simply to occupy an office but to carry a people; a man who teaches us that loyalty to the truth, to the community, to the least among us is the highest form of patriotism.

Let Chuy Garcia's examples lead us out of our complacency and to a greater level of integrity and to a higher calling. Let this unyielding spirit remind us that America becomes America only when ordinary people dare to demand the extraordinary.

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