CSPAN - Public Affairs Events
Aired: 2026-04-14
Duration: 52:59


=== Unfiltered Democracy on C-SPAN (02:25) ===

[00:00:00]  And they're almost perfectly balanced.
[00:00:02]  28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate.
[00:00:08]  Republicans watching Democrats, Democrats watching Republicans, moderates watching all sides.
[00:00:14]  Because C-SPAN viewers want the facts straight from the source.
[00:00:18]  No commentary, no agenda, just democracy, unfiltered, every day on the C-SPAN networks.
[00:00:26]  California Democratic Representative and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi talked about the current state of U.S. politics during a discussion with former CNN journalist Frank Cesnow.
[00:00:36]  They also respond to recorded questions from students.
[00:00:40]  Hosted by George Washington University, this is just under an hour.
[00:00:59]  Thank you so much for being here.
[00:01:00]  My pleasure.
[00:01:01]  We really appreciate it.
[00:01:02]  We were here a few years ago, you know, and things have changed a little bit.
[00:01:06]  Yes, they have.
[00:01:07]  How are you doing?
[00:01:09]  Fair.
[00:01:11]  You want to explain?
[00:01:12]  Personally, great, but countrywise fair.
[00:01:15]  Well, there's a lot happening in the world.
[00:01:16]  It is.
[00:01:17]  And there's a lot happening on the Hill.
[00:01:19]  There's a lot happening politically.
[00:01:20]  We'll talk about all of that.
[00:01:21]  But I think we should start with the news, because there's a lot today.
[00:01:24]  Well, before we do, I want to say how happy I'm to be at George Washington.
[00:01:28]  Thank you all for being here.
[00:01:29]  And I've known Frank for decades when he was a young reporter covering what we were doing regarding China and Asia and the rest.
[00:01:38]  So thank you.
[00:01:38]  I'm sorry.
[00:01:39]  And CNN was a brand new idea.
[00:01:42]  Brand new idea.
[00:01:43]  When there was no, it was before MSNBC, now MSNO, before Fox, before the internet, before, imagine that.
[00:01:50]  Imagine that.
[00:01:51]  Somebody said that in class today.
[00:01:52]  They go, before the internet, when was that?
[00:01:55]  No, no, when I was one of the, we have these events with young people where they're doing their different communications.
[00:02:05]  And I said to him, when I came to Congress, there were only three networks and CNN was just becoming a platform.
[00:02:13]  They said, what do you mean three networks?
[00:02:15]  I said, well, ABC, NBC, CBS.
[00:02:19]  Ancient history.
[00:02:20]  So let's start with the news, okay?
[00:02:23]  A lot of things happening today.

=== Trump Feuds With The Pope (05:17) ===

[00:02:26]  Donald Trump and the Pope have started something of a feud.
[00:02:30]  You are a prominent Catholic American politician.
[00:02:33]  The president said that the Pope is too liberal.
[00:02:35]  He said he's terrible for foreign policy.
[00:02:40]  And he posted an image today, the president did, of an AI-generated image, apparently, with him looking like Jesus.
[00:02:45]  The Pope said, has been speaking out against the war.
[00:02:48]  He says, I'm not afraid of the Trump administration.
[00:02:50]  What is going on?
[00:02:55]  You'd have to ask a psychiatrist.
[00:03:00]  You'd have to ask a psychiatrist.
[00:03:02]  As a devout Catholic and the rest, and I wear these bracelets that say faith and charity, if you believe in the goodness of the American people, that gives people hope.
[00:03:17]  And very prayerfully I wear these.
[00:03:19]  And when I see the president put himself in a I can't even speak of, you said it, but then he has like flames coming out of his hands like he's some kind of, it really isn't even worthy of a conversation.
[00:03:35]  It's really worthy of a diagnosis.
[00:03:40]  Should the Pope have refrained from saying these things?
[00:03:43]  Has he gotten himself involved politically in ways that are...
[00:03:46]  He hasn't.
[00:03:47]  He's speaking about values.
[00:03:49]  And popes have always spoken about values.
[00:03:52]  And for this president to criticize that is inappropriate.
[00:03:57]  Now, in terms of the new Pope, he's from Chicago, and he is, I think, a great Pope.
[00:04:07]  But I believe in the Pope.
[00:04:08]  I believe that the Holy Ghost comes down and chooses who the Pope is, and his voice is very important.
[00:04:15]  So that's my Catholicism.
[00:04:19]  And I also carry Christ on my shoulder.
[00:04:23]  I believe he's my Savior.
[00:04:24]  I carry him on my shoulder, and to see him desecrated by whatever you want to call that is just...
[00:04:32]  But you know what?
[00:04:34]  We don't agonize over that.
[00:04:35]  We just organize about how we want to go forward.
[00:04:38]  It is too distracting, and that's its purpose, to distract for the president.
[00:04:45]  You think that's why he's doing it?
[00:04:47]  Distract?
[00:04:47]  Distract and...
[00:04:48]  Do you think this was intentional?
[00:04:50]  To distract?
[00:04:52]  Of course.
[00:04:53]  He's a master distractor.
[00:04:54]  You have to give him credit for that.
[00:04:56]  He's a master distractor.
[00:04:58]  So what should the Pope do now?
[00:05:00]  Drop it?
[00:05:01]  Move on?
[00:05:01]  No, no.
[00:05:02]  Where are you coming from with this?
[00:05:05]  Are you kidding?
[00:05:06]  You go, Pope.
[00:05:09]  No, I mean, really, we're talking about somebody who...
[00:05:14]  Remember, let's put this in a context.
[00:05:16]  On Easter Sunday, the president used the F word and said all these bastards and all the rest are going to pay.
[00:05:24]  And then he said, I'm going to destroy civilization there, and there's no coming back from it.
[00:05:32]  Why wouldn't a Pope say that that's just not the right thing?
[00:05:36]  This is a man who wants a Nobel Peace Prize, for God's sake.
[00:05:40]  So in any case, putting it in the fuller context of what the President has said in the last days leading up to this, and then criticizing the Pope for saying, blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth, as the Beatitudes say.
[00:05:58]  God bless him for that.
[00:05:59]  And I'm so glad that he's there to be able to say what he believes.
[00:06:06]  And again, to hopefully, I mean, the American people have rejected this.
[00:06:12]  By and large, you know, this is not something that people have faith.
[00:06:16]  They have faith that Christ is our Savior.
[00:06:18]  Whether you believe or not that he is God, you believe that he is a Savior, that he believed in great things and the rest.
[00:06:26]  And this guy's trying to put him...
[00:06:28]  Well, let me just say this.
[00:06:30]  Here's my thing.
[00:06:32]  Now, I believe as a Catholic that when Christ came down from heaven, he participated in our humanity.
[00:06:42]  And in doing so, he enabled us to participate in his divinity.
[00:06:49]  So that every single person has a spark of divinity in them.
[00:06:54]  And we have to treat people with respect.
[00:06:58]  Everybody, including, you know, who.
[00:07:00]  And because they have a spark of divinity.
[00:07:03]  And so do we, each of us.
[00:07:06]  So we have to respect that spark of divinity and how we treat people.
[00:07:11]  As the Bible tells us, it's a stranger, the great Good Samaritan, all of that.
[00:07:16]  Whether it's a homeless person on the street, an immigrant coming into the country, whatever it is, spark of divinity.
[00:07:24]  In the second or third century, there was actually a Jewish, a Hebrew theologian who said that because of that spark of divinity, when you come in the room, thousands of angels precede you because you have that spark.

=== Respect Every Spark of Divinity (06:21) ===

[00:07:43]  So that's what I believe.
[00:07:44]  So you're asking me what I think of that.
[00:07:48]  And that's just so far away from faith.
[00:07:53]  And it doesn't look like there's any basis of faith connected to what he's doing.
[00:07:59]  We'll see how the community is.
[00:08:00]  Well, you start a religious conversation.
[00:08:05]  All right, next to.
[00:08:05]  Let's start it.
[00:08:06]  You know that.
[00:08:07]  Next piece of news while we're on good things.
[00:08:09]  You're from California.
[00:08:10]  You're chair of the party.
[00:08:12]  Your colleague, Eric Swalwell, resigned today from the Congress.
[00:08:18]  He withdrew from the gubernatorial race in California.
[00:08:23]  Did you tell him to resign?
[00:08:25]  Oh, I think that was his decision.
[00:08:27]  I think it's a smart decision.
[00:08:29]  The right thing to do?
[00:08:30]  Yes, the right thing to do, yes.
[00:08:32]  Not to subject members to have to take a vote on something like that, and not to subject your family.
[00:08:37]  Probably five times in the history of our country has anybody been ejected from the Congress.
[00:08:43]  Why should you be the sixth?
[00:08:44]  If you have a challenge that you have to address, it's best addressed not as a candidate for governor and not as a member of Congress.
[00:08:53]  Some Republicans and others are saying that Democrats turned kind of a blind eye, that they knew what he was up for before the election.
[00:08:59]  That is absolutely positive.
[00:09:02]  It's true that they may say that, but it is absolutely not possible.
[00:09:04]  You have no idea that.
[00:09:05]  None whatsoever.
[00:09:07]  None whatsoever.
[00:09:09]  I had none whatsoever.
[00:09:10]  What happens in California now?
[00:09:13]  He was in many of the polls the leading candidates.
[00:09:15]  Yes, he was.
[00:09:16]  That's gone.
[00:09:18]  There's an army of candidates out there.
[00:09:20]  And California has this quirky law because it's ranked primaries, right?
[00:09:24]  Well, you could end up with two Republicans on the ballot.
[00:09:27]  Well, it is quite.
[00:09:29]  I agree that it is a quirky law.
[00:09:31]  I do not agree that there'll be two Republicans at the top.
[00:09:34]  I just want one because then it's all over.
[00:09:37]  The election's all over.
[00:09:39]  Yeah, no, the people will speak and they will choose, and I'm a big, big belief in that, and let the people speak like they did in Hungary and got rid of Orban.
[00:09:52]  You've declined to endorse anybody in this race.
[00:09:55]  Yes.
[00:09:56]  No, Dave.
[00:09:56]  Are you rethinking that?
[00:09:59]  Am I rethinking it?
[00:10:00]  Well, I want to see what the public, I've endorsed in my own, the race to succeed me in Congress.
[00:10:05]  I want to see what the public, the people think and how they want to go forward.
[00:10:10]  There are plenty of good candidates in the race, probably too many good candidates in the race.
[00:10:16]  But again, see, I always think if you're in a race, if you're in a race, two things can happen.
[00:10:24]  You can win the election, and that's up to the public.
[00:10:28]  And you could win the campaign.
[00:10:30]  That's up to you.
[00:10:31]  How you present yourself, what are your values, what is your strategy, how do you get things done?
[00:10:37]  And so you come at a winner whether you have won or not, because you shouldn't fight every fight as it's your last fight.
[00:10:44]  There might be other races that you can for.
[00:10:46]  But if you run and you have no prospect except can be a detriment to the Democrats being at the top of the ticket, then you really should rethink that.
[00:10:59]  One more political question, not from this country, but from Hungary over the weekend.
[00:11:03]  Huge vote, sort of many people saying sort of a political shot around the world.
[00:11:06]  Victor Orban loses 16 years.
[00:11:10]  Two-thirds, he lost by two-thirds.
[00:11:12]  More people turned out to vote than any time since the fall of the wall.
[00:11:15]  What do you make of that?
[00:11:16]  And what does it mean for the sort of right-leaning conservative movement?
[00:11:24]  Well, first of all, I do not believe that Americans should intercede and interfere with elections in other countries.
[00:11:33]  You don't think Vance and Trump should have been saying that he was their guy or banner?
[00:11:38]  No, I don't think they should have, but they certainly took the vote down.
[00:11:41]  So after all is said and done.
[00:11:44]  But no, that's always been the thing.
[00:11:48]  We always were contending to make sure that one party or another was not involved in like the elections in Ukraine, Iran, excuse me, Iraq, when that all happened, let them have their own election.
[00:12:03]  This is an American election.
[00:12:05]  It's their election.
[00:12:06]  And so for the vice president to go there and the president to be on the phone, blah, blah, blah, well, two-thirds they lost by.
[00:12:15]  He won two-thirds of the vote.
[00:12:17]  What's it mean?
[00:12:18]  It means a reversal.
[00:12:19]  I've met with Orban years ago when he was relatively new prime minister.
[00:12:24]  I visited there on my way back from a delegation on my way back from Afghanistan.
[00:12:30]  And the ambassador was Elenikas, Sokobos Kulanakis, appointed by Obama.
[00:12:39]  And so we met with everybody, including Orban.
[00:12:45]  And what happened was he won, he didn't win big.
[00:12:49]  He won a lot of seats by a little bit, which was really a lesson because that tells you you can make a big difference with a small margin over a lot of seats.
[00:13:01]  Changed the Constitution of the country, limiting freedom, changed freedom of the press, which you were talking about earlier, got rid of universities and people that he didn't like or want to have Iran was really not a democracy.
[00:13:17]  And worse than that, the problem why I'm so glad he's gone is he interfered with the EU.
[00:13:24]  Quite frankly, in my view, if he had acted that, if Hungary had acted that way before Hungary was applying to the EU, they should never have accepted them.
[00:13:36]  But it's harder to get somebody out once they're in.
[00:13:39]  There is a method, Title X, but it's hard to get them out.
[00:13:44]  So for him to lose by two-thirds means that this new government, again, listening to the people who elected them, can make changes to have freedom of the press, to have freedom of expression, to have freedom of education, all the things that he reversed.

=== Lessons From The Constitution (15:21) ===

[00:14:04]  Is there a lesson for us, for this country, and our politics from your perspective from this?
[00:14:10]  I think that our current administration is a lesson for us.
[00:14:14]  It is, I mean, really, come on.
[00:14:16]  This is, look, I'm going to just, you talked earlier about the House and this and that.
[00:14:21]  Let's talk about that.
[00:14:23]  The House of Representatives in the Constitution was a very special place.
[00:14:30]  And I'll come back to this question.
[00:14:33]  Madison, who would become president, served in the House.
[00:14:38]  And in earlier time, when they were writing the Constitution, he saw the House as a place sympathetic to the people.
[00:14:48]  So that when they wrote the terms of office, the president had four years.
[00:14:56]  Why wouldn't the House have four years?
[00:14:58]  Because our founders wanted to be, to have a vote on that president right away.
[00:15:04]  So the president comes in, he has his first year or whatever he is doing, and the very next year is a referendum on the president of the United States, hence the off-year elections.
[00:15:16]  And that's really, really important.
[00:15:19]  And in the Constitution, there were no direct election of senators at that time, not state legislatures, this or that, named them.
[00:15:27]  So they didn't have a term.
[00:15:28]  So this was the critical thing.
[00:15:30]  Four years, two years.
[00:15:32]  And then with all of that, they said they did not want a monarch.
[00:15:39]  You know that.
[00:15:40]  They did not want a monarch.
[00:15:42]  In all the discussions, if you read about the writings of the Constitution, for example, Hamilton must have used the word demagogue 14 or 15 times in his concern, but they did not want a monarch.
[00:15:56]  And that's why the beauty of the Constitution, the exquisite beauty of the Constitution, is a separation of powers, equal branches.
[00:16:07]  Let's see, Jamie Raskin would correct me if I say co-equal branches of government.
[00:16:11]  He said, no, we are preeminent.
[00:16:12]  Article 1, the legislative branch.
[00:16:15]  You know, it's funny you mention that because I have my Constitution with me.
[00:16:19]  And Article 1 says, Section 1, all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which will consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.
[00:16:31]  But the section I like, and that I think is very interesting, that's when we're having this conversation, is Section 8, which says the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay debts, to regulate commerce with foreign nations, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, to declare war, to provide for the calling forth of the militia to execute the laws of the Union.
[00:16:59]  But so many of these things have been lost.
[00:17:02]  Yeah, by this administration, by this administration.
[00:17:05]  And I disagree with what some of the panels said earlier.
[00:17:08]  She was talking about that earlier.
[00:17:10]  She's been tracking this.
[00:17:11]  She's studying that.
[00:17:12]  It's not just this administration.
[00:17:14]  But, oh, please, if you do not see that there's something very different, that this Speaker is not even a Speaker of the House.
[00:17:23]  He just does what the President says.
[00:17:25]  That's not.
[00:17:26]  Your dear colleague.
[00:17:27]  Yeah, my colleague.
[00:17:31]  And I thought you were going to read something else.
[00:17:34]  The only person mentioned from Congress in the Constitution is the Speaker of the House.
[00:17:42]  Awesome power.
[00:17:43]  This is the people's House.
[00:17:45]  It is not the President's toady.
[00:17:47]  And that's what it has become.
[00:17:48]  Now, there have been times back and forth where there'll be more or less power going to the White House or that, depending on if we're in war or whatever it is.
[00:17:58]  But there has not been anything like the total abdication of the legislative branch to the President, House and Senate, but especially the House.
[00:18:09]  Especially the House.
[00:18:10]  You have been in the House, as I mentioned, for 39 years, I think seven presidents, eight presidencies.
[00:18:16]  You've seen war and recession and impeachment, Democrat and Republican impeachments.
[00:18:22]  You've seen all manner of sorts of crises and breakthroughs.
[00:18:25]  But this devolution of power, as I think you and others call it, is real and it's got tremendous implications for the checks and balances in this country.
[00:18:35]  What do you think can be done?
[00:18:36]  What tangible steps need to be taken?
[00:18:40]  And some have actually said that you may have even, without probably wanting to, or maybe did, by centralizing power so that you could be an effective Speaker, in some ways contributed to this.
[00:18:51]  What could be done to strengthen the House and the Congress?
[00:18:55]  Well, first of all, we just have to honor the Constitution.
[00:18:58]  We have to honor the oath that we take to protect and defend the Constitution, which has three co-equal branches of government.
[00:19:07]  You asked the question earlier, could they have perceived a rogue, whatever?
[00:19:11]  Yeah, they could.
[00:19:12]  That's why they had impeachment in the Constitution.
[00:19:14]  They could foresee a rogue president.
[00:19:17]  They could not see at the same time a rogue president and rogue's cowardly Senate not to honor the fact that the president violated the Constitution.
[00:19:28]  But what can be done is really just to forget about him.
[00:19:34]  You know, just this is this is not a path that has any merit whatsoever.
[00:19:41]  I've been there a long time.
[00:19:43]  When I went there, we had Democrats and Republicans.
[00:19:46]  It was like a giant kaleidoscope.
[00:19:48]  One day, all of us over here would be opposed to all of us over there.
[00:19:53]  Two days later, the back rows would be opposed to the ones in the front.
[00:19:57]  Everybody was a resource to everyone.
[00:20:00]  And certainly we had our political views as to the role of government, but that was that, but it didn't dominate everything.
[00:20:10]  And so, again, everybody was a source.
[00:20:12]  Everybody could be a vote for your next bill that you might have.
[00:20:16]  And it wasn't this way.
[00:20:18]  In fact, one of the joys of going was that you would be able to debate issues and listen to the other side, respect the people who sent them here to Washington or there to the Capitol.
[00:20:32]  And it was the fun of it was the debate of it and the challenge.
[00:20:37]  You always hope for a high split your way, but you didn't always get that.
[00:20:41]  But tomorrow was another day until I would say Newt Gingrich and then nothing compared to what we have now.
[00:20:48]  Do you think it's just a question of the people changing?
[00:20:51]  You don't think that there are actual structural things that have taken place on the Hill, in the Congress, with the White House, the relationships between the gerrymandered districts, which have driven the parties to the wings, truly.
[00:21:06]  That is not true.
[00:21:07]  You say truly.
[00:21:08]  I object.
[00:21:09]  There are when we tried, we're going to win the House.
[00:21:14]  I'm just telling you this.
[00:21:15]  We're going to win the House in November.
[00:21:17]  That's an absolute fact.
[00:21:19]  People say, oh, you're arrogant.
[00:21:21]  I said, I'm not arrogant.
[00:21:21]  I'm confident.
[00:21:22]  We made a decision to win, and we're going to win.
[00:21:26]  When we win that House, we don't win by going to liberal districts.
[00:21:30]  We don't go to San Francisco and say we're going to win there.
[00:21:33]  We go to moderate districts.
[00:21:35]  So our races are in the moderate districts in our country.
[00:21:39]  So when I hear people say, oh, the left and the right, that isn't even the case.
[00:21:43]  And our party, we're going to the moderate districts to win.
[00:21:47]  But we've tracked the number of swing districts, and those have declined over the years.
[00:21:51]  Yes, you can go to certain districts that are in play, but there are fewer numbers of them that are in play.
[00:21:56]  Well, we have a lot.
[00:21:58]  How many seats do you think?
[00:21:59]  Since you're predicting, how many seats do you think you'll win?
[00:22:03]  Well, we only need three to have the majority.
[00:22:08]  I want at least 30 or 40.
[00:22:10]  But we have to, you don't add by subtracting.
[00:22:13]  We're all going out there to protect 40 districts.
[00:22:16]  So we probably are closer to 100 races that we are in.
[00:22:20]  And those are most, they're not, I mean, some people will have challenges within their, you know, a San Francisco or somebody have a race to replace me, but that's not where Democrats make any investment.
[00:22:34]  Do you think there's going to be an overwhelming win for the House?
[00:22:38]  Yes.
[00:22:39]  How then does an overwhelmingly Democratic House deal with the rest of Donald Trump and his term?
[00:22:45]  Well, it's an overwhelming victory.
[00:22:48]  It doesn't become an overwhelming House.
[00:22:50]  Well, you've got more of a, you've got to win in those numbers.
[00:22:54]  You don't have a three-vote, a three-seat.
[00:22:56]  That's right.
[00:22:56]  You've got to.
[00:22:57]  Although we won with the three-seat majority when we had it.
[00:22:59]  They can't, but we did.
[00:23:02]  So how does that house, that Democratic House, deal with the next two years of Donald Trump's presidency?
[00:23:08]  Well, the thing is, is that it is already having an impact, the fact that these people are going to lose their jobs, unless they start paying attention to their voters.
[00:23:19]  We are all concerned about what's happening to the Constitution, what's happening to rule of law, due process, freedom of the press, separation of power.
[00:23:31]  We're all concerned about that because that's a violation of the Constitution.
[00:23:35]  Freedom of the press is the biggest defender of our democracy.
[00:23:40]  And yet, fake news, this is a tactic of an authoritarian, is to mock the press so that it's not respected the way to undermine its credibility.
[00:23:52]  Undermines credibility.
[00:23:53]  So, okay, so, and even though we oppressed or different sides of issues, but not respected by this president.
[00:24:01]  Anyway, forgetting him for a moment.
[00:24:03]  So, in any case, when we win and we will win, it's not to say they did that now, we're doing this.
[00:24:15]  Forget that.
[00:24:16]  This is about taking our country to where our founders had it.
[00:24:21]  The beauty of their idea, the vision that they had of a country that was a democracy, the language they used, the most important statement in the history of the world.
[00:24:33]  And also, they believed, our founders believed in the goodness, right here, charity, the goodness of the American people.
[00:24:44]  And that's why they thought that a democracy could thrive.
[00:24:50]  If there's a Democratic House, should there be a third impeachment of Donald Trump?
[00:24:53]  Depends on if he violates the Constitution.
[00:24:56]  Has he violated the Constitution?
[00:24:57]  Well, that's a study.
[00:25:00]  I mean, when we impeached him, he gave us no choice.
[00:25:05]  And we studied it, studied it, and studied it in that.
[00:25:08]  There's a debate.
[00:25:09]  There are people in the House on the Democratic side, some who think there should be a third impeachment, some who think there should not.
[00:25:14]  And they've already made that judgment.
[00:25:16]  Yes, so what?
[00:25:17]  Where are you?
[00:25:17]  So what?
[00:25:19]  So what?
[00:25:20]  We're not even asking for a lot of people.
[00:25:21]  I want to know what you're saying.
[00:25:22]  Unless you have a case, you don't make the thing.
[00:25:25]  But when I became Speaker, they wanted me to impeach George Bush for going into Iraq.
[00:25:31]  I thoroughly oppose the war in Iraq.
[00:25:34]  They want to be, to this day, people say you should have impeached him.
[00:25:37]  I'm like, what?
[00:25:38]  Who?
[00:25:40]  George Bush.
[00:25:41]  I totally oppose that war in Iraq.
[00:25:43]  I said at the time, because I was the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, the intelligence does not support the threat.
[00:25:52]  People said, are you calling the president a liar?
[00:25:55]  I said, no, I'm stating a fact.
[00:25:57]  There is nothing in the intelligence that shows the threat that they are describing to go into Iraq.
[00:26:03]  But I said, you know what, you disagree with the war, take it out in the election.
[00:26:09]  That's what elections are about.
[00:26:11]  But they fought, then we won the House.
[00:26:14]  And now I won four times, Please Speaker, four times.
[00:26:18]  It's two chunks, but four times.
[00:26:21]  So again, let me just say a couple of things because there's some things that are floating around here.
[00:26:28]  Let me just say, first of all, Lincoln.
[00:26:31]  First of all, let's start early.
[00:26:33]  Thomas Paine, the Times have found us.
[00:26:36]  The Times have found us.
[00:26:39]  Thomas Paine, if Times found them, to have the courage to declare independence, to fight a war against the biggest naval power at that time and Navy was what the fight was about.
[00:26:50]  The rivers, the water, and the rest of that.
[00:26:54]  And then to sacrifice their lives, their honor, their sacred honor, their fortune, all the rest of it in that fight.
[00:27:01]  What a courageous thing for them to do.
[00:27:04]  Times found them.
[00:27:07]  They wrote a Constitution.
[00:27:09]  I just stressed something I heard you say earlier.
[00:27:11]  The Constitution had its problems because it was a compromise.
[00:27:16]  But thank God they had the wisdom to make it amendable.
[00:27:22]  And that was a blessing to our country.
[00:27:24]  So historically, over time, abolition of slavery, black men having the right to vote, women having the right to vote, women having the right to choose, marriage equality, we became more free until now.
[00:27:40]  Now they've said we don't care about the right of privacy in the Constitution or the precedent of the court overturning Roe v. White.
[00:27:50]  So now narrowing freedom instead of expanding freedom.
[00:27:55]  Madison, as I said about him earlier, he wrote the Bill of Rights.
[00:28:01]  He was disappointed because he wanted it in the Constitution.
[00:28:05]  He got it as part of the Constitution.
[00:28:08]  But look at that Bill of Rights.
[00:28:11]  First Amendment, freedom of the press, all of those things that are in that.
[00:28:16]  These people were brilliant.
[00:28:18]  So we want people to honor the oath of office to the Constitution of the United States.
[00:28:23]  Okay, then we come to Lincoln.
[00:28:25]  Times found him for him to be able to hold the country together.
[00:28:31]  And he succeeded.
[00:28:33]  And he succeeded.
[00:28:34]  And then now the Times have found us to save our democracy.
[00:28:38]  But you can't save the democracy by going to the polls and talking about what they're doing.
[00:28:44]  You have to save the democracy at the kitchen table.
[00:28:49]  Talk to them about the fact that the president passed a bill that took a trillion dollars out of Medicaid, a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, hundreds of millions of dollars, excuse me, billions of dollars out of snapped fooding children and the rest.
[00:29:04]  Why?
[00:29:05]  To give a tax cut to the richest people in our country.
[00:29:07]  That's our discussion.
[00:29:09]  What does it mean to the kitchen table of America's working families?
[00:29:13]  And that's how we save the Constitution by winning that election.
[00:29:17]  So to your point, when we're there, as I said, they already, 17 of them voted with us, 17 voted us on the subsidies for the healthcare.

=== Saving Democracy At Home (14:58) ===

[00:29:26]  The Senate, of course, has not done anything.
[00:29:29]  Six of them voted with us on tariffs.
[00:29:33]  A number of them voted with us on a jobs bill.
[00:29:36]  They've already seen that they cannot, their loyalty has to be to their voters and not to.
[00:29:41]  You think some of that loyalty is going to break with the president now because they're seeing their handwriting on the wall.
[00:29:46]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:48]  And also some of them are not, a large number of them are not running.
[00:29:52]  But the fact is, and we want to bring people together.
[00:29:56]  We have to go back to our founders.
[00:29:59]  I want to ask you this.
[00:30:01]  I mean, we have an earlier.
[00:30:04]  All right.
[00:30:04]  Let me ask the room here.
[00:30:07]  I saw that.
[00:30:09]  Show of hands if you have a great deal of confidence in the United States Congress to do its job effectively.
[00:30:18]  I don't raise my hand, not this Congress.
[00:30:21]  Any Congress to do its job effectively.
[00:30:26]  Okay.
[00:30:27]  So for the C-SPAN audience, I'd say, what, half the room?
[00:30:30]  Plus?
[00:30:31]  And speakers.
[00:30:31]  So you carry the day.
[00:30:34]  But Gallup, in February, 16% of the country said they gave Congress a positive job approval rating.
[00:30:45]  Now, I agree.
[00:30:46]  Count me in that.
[00:30:47]  Guess what?
[00:30:48]  Count me in the 84.
[00:30:50]  Okay.
[00:30:51]  Well, you were a math major.
[00:30:54]  Guess what?
[00:30:54]  It was 16% in June of 22 when you were speaking.
[00:30:59]  So the Congress just doesn't have faith in the Congress.
[00:31:02]  What means...
[00:31:03]  Congress has always been a subject of mockery.
[00:31:08]  Always.
[00:31:08]  So, you know, that is, that's, it has always been a subject of mockery.
[00:31:16]  You can't, you can't worry about that.
[00:31:18]  You ask them what they think of their own congressperson, and it's a completely different story.
[00:31:24]  It's a completely different story.
[00:31:27]  And we don't, you know, one thing you have to know about Congress, we don't, we're not the president.
[00:31:32]  You know, the president has a public pulpit.
[00:31:34]  Any president, they can go out there and be a personality.
[00:31:37]  We don't have any personality.
[00:31:39]  We're individuals all over the place.
[00:31:41]  Lots of personalities.
[00:31:44]  You and other people.
[00:31:46]  I mean, we're here.
[00:31:48]  All right.
[00:31:49]  What I would like to do now, if it's okay with you, is turn to the questions that are.
[00:31:53]  Oh, I love it.
[00:31:54]  I love it.
[00:31:54]  I love it.
[00:31:55]  Thank you.
[00:31:55]  So we have several.
[00:31:57]  Some of them are on video.
[00:31:57]  They worked on these for a long time.
[00:32:00]  So this first question is asking you about where and how you have stretched as a Speaker and as a member of Congress.
[00:32:08]  So you'll see it on the monitor here.
[00:32:11]  Let's roll the first student question.
[00:32:14]  Speaker Pelosi, according to Congress.gov, there have been 451 bills which became law while you were a representative and Speaker of the House, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the 2008 financial crisis.
[00:32:26]  The bill was eventually passed, which you called a bitter pill.
[00:32:29]  How was passing this bill a moment of compromise, particularly in how it stretched you in your political beliefs?
[00:32:36]  How did TARP stretch you?
[00:32:38]  Hi, Nicole.
[00:32:39]  Thank you for that question.
[00:32:41]  This was really, let me just give you a little background.
[00:32:43]  Nicole, here's what happened.
[00:32:46]  It was early in toward the mid of September, and all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom.
[00:32:53]  It was Bear Stones earlier, but then it was Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and then that day it was another firm going down that the government was paying to bail out.
[00:33:10]  So I called the Secretary of the Treasury and I said, you know, usually you call me and give me a briefing on what's going on, whether it's the credit markets, the global markets, whatever it is.
[00:33:23]  But I haven't heard it from you in a while.
[00:33:26]  And I want you to come down and not only brief me, but brief the members of Congress, the House leadership, the Democrats, because I don't want them saying something that could undermine the confidence in the markets and that make matters worse, even though things are terrible.
[00:33:43]  And I would like you to come at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning.
[00:33:47]  He said to me, Madam Speaker, that's how you talk to each other.
[00:33:52]  Madam Speaker, tomorrow morning will be too late.
[00:33:57]  I said, well, why am I calling you?
[00:34:01]  The impression that he gave me was that the White House was not ready to share this information with Congress.
[00:34:06]  That night we have a meeting, Nicole, with, I said, I'm going to call Ben, called Ben Bernanke.
[00:34:13]  He's going to come over at 5 o'clock.
[00:34:16]  He was the Fed chair.
[00:34:17]  He's the chairman of the Fed.
[00:34:19]  He comes, also, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Fed, but expert on the Great Depression.
[00:34:25]  Remember that when I go forward.
[00:34:26]  So then we have this meeting, and the White House said, who said she could have a meeting?
[00:34:34]  Tell them the Speaker of the House said she was going to have the meeting, and they could come if they would like, and that's what it's going to be.
[00:34:41]  So we made it seven so that we had Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate, and some of the leadership from the White House, whom I had invited earlier.
[00:34:53]  The Treasury Secretary, the Fed chairman is not from the White House.
[00:34:57]  So in any case, they come, and there we are.
[00:35:03]  What happened?
[00:35:03]  What is happening to the...
[00:35:06]  So the Secretary of the Treasury describes what is happening, that all these financial institutions are going down.
[00:35:14]  So I said, Mr. Chairman Bernanke, what do you think of this?
[00:35:22]  To which he says, if we do not act immediately, we will not have an economy by Monday.
[00:35:32]  An economy.
[00:35:33]  No commercial paper, no nothing.
[00:35:37]  We were stunned.
[00:35:39]  We were stunned.
[00:35:40]  How could we have gotten ourselves into this situation of this kind?
[00:35:44]  I know the Republicans basically don't want, in Congress anyway, they didn't want any supervision, regulation, or anything like that.
[00:35:53]  So then we have come to the next step, which is what Nicole asked about.
[00:35:57]  One thing and another, it was a mess.
[00:36:00]  It was a mess.
[00:36:02]  So when we finally have, and I can tell you more if you ask more, but I know you have other questions.
[00:36:06]  But anyway, we got to the vote.
[00:36:08]  We said, since we have the majority, we'll do 120 votes and you'll get 100 votes.
[00:36:15]  And that would have been commensurate with our numbers.
[00:36:18]  So I had my numbers, my name, so I always had my names.
[00:36:21]  I never lose a vote.
[00:36:22]  I have my names.
[00:36:23]  Said to the president, Mr. President, where are your names?
[00:36:26]  I don't have any names, but who would vote against this?
[00:36:29]  I said, well, you tell me how many votes you're going to have on the Republican side because we don't see it.
[00:36:36]  They've gone to the floor and said they don't believe in regulation, supervision, and when the walls came tumbling down, no intervention.
[00:36:47]  So we lost the vote.
[00:36:48]  They didn't have the vote.
[00:36:49]  The president said, I can't believe that people would vote against it.
[00:36:51]  First vote went down.
[00:36:53]  The first vote went down, and the market went down like 700 points.
[00:36:56]  For students who were not around, what we were told is that literally the economy and then the global economy was on the verge of collapse.
[00:37:05]  That's right.
[00:37:06]  That's right.
[00:37:07]  So in any event, this is, read my book, you'll see much more about it in the book, because it's a lot of back and forth and all the rest.
[00:37:17]  But then we finally, we just talked more Democrats into voting.
[00:37:21]  They didn't want to vote for it because here it was, their problem, their solution, and now we have to vote for it.
[00:37:30]  And they say this, when we were in that room in the speaker's conference room, who said she can have a meeting?
[00:37:39]  Anyway, they said, we have a solution.
[00:37:45]  We have a solution.
[00:37:46]  We call it the break-the-class solution.
[00:37:49]  I said, well, why haven't you used it yet?
[00:37:53]  Well, because now we want to use it.
[00:37:55]  And what we're going to do, in case you're very interested in this, is we're going to buy up all these, you'll love this acronym, this oxymoron, toxic assets of the banks.
[00:38:10]  And we're going to buy that.
[00:38:11]  And we said, well, we would rather have some way for you to not nationalize the bank, but buy into the banks so that the taxpayer is protected.
[00:38:26]  Don't put that in the bill.
[00:38:28]  We're never going to do that.
[00:38:30]  Never, never, never going to do that.
[00:38:32]  We're going to do the toxic accent.
[00:38:34]  I said, well, I'm putting it in the bill.
[00:38:36]  I'm not insisting on it, and I'm not prescribing a percentage, but I'm putting in the authority, giving you the authority to do this to the administration.
[00:38:45]  So anyway, we passed the bill.
[00:38:48]  A couple weeks later, I called the Secretary and said, stock market went down 700 points.
[00:38:55]  I told the members if we didn't pass this bill, the market would go down.
[00:38:59]  Now we passed it and the market went down.
[00:39:01]  Well, the market does that.
[00:39:02]  Brilliant, okay.
[00:39:03]  So I said, by the way, I see Britain capitalize the banks.
[00:39:12]  And that's what they did that day.
[00:39:14]  The U.S. that they took that provision of the bill.
[00:39:17]  They never did do the toxic access.
[00:39:19]  They did it.
[00:39:20]  So it was a really bipartisan, shall we say?
[00:39:23]  Go ahead.
[00:39:24]  And the question here is: how did it stretch your political beliefs?
[00:39:27]  You know, the thing is, it wasn't, Nicole, it wasn't a stretch of beliefs.
[00:39:31]  It was really we had, and people were criticizing us.
[00:39:37]  You sold out on Main Street.
[00:39:39]  No, no, we didn't.
[00:39:39]  We had to save the economy.
[00:39:43]  And again, it was something that I wish the president had been more vocal about how it related to everyday people.
[00:39:52]  It was widely seen as a bailout of the banks.
[00:39:55]  It was widely seen as that.
[00:39:56]  And quite frankly, I think that's why we lost the election in the next year, because they didn't come up with their hundred votes.
[00:40:03]  It was supposed to be even, so it was bipartisan.
[00:40:07]  And then we have to bail out, you know, we have to save the economy so that there's an economy.
[00:40:12]  You think that got hung on Democrats?
[00:40:14]  Because there were plenty of Republicans who voted for it.
[00:40:16]  I remember Senator Bob Bennett of Utah, and he was haranged after he did that because he supported that.
[00:40:22]  And demonstrators would come to his campaign events, tarp, And he was defeated.
[00:40:27]  No, it was really a setback.
[00:40:30]  I want to move on to another question a couple of moments ago.
[00:40:32]  It wasn't a stretch, it was compromise, and compromise is not a bad word.
[00:40:38]  You know, if you have a task, you have to have a plan, and you have to act if you're going to be a leader, and that's what we had to do.
[00:40:49]  So, surprisingly, in my class, to me, a number of students commented on something that I know you don't love talking about, which is how you and your family have seen pretty good return on your investments since you've been in the House.
[00:41:05]  And here's a question that was addressed to you by one of the students.
[00:41:12]  Speaker Pelosi, do you support the Trust in Congress Act, the bipartisan bill from Representatives Spanberger and Roy that would ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks or require them to place their assets in a blind trust?
[00:41:24]  And if not, why not?
[00:41:26]  Well, I support, I think it's a new bill now because Spanberger is a new bill.
[00:41:32]  But we on the Democratic side have supported the bill, as you described, plus it should include the executive branch.
[00:41:41]  And that's one of the discussions that they're having now, because the executive branch is making out like a bandit.
[00:41:46]  But let me just, because you brought this up, in terms of this, I originally was reluctant to own it because I didn't think our members were breaking the law.
[00:41:57]  If they were, they would be prosecuted.
[00:42:00]  So because families had investments in the rest, it didn't seem to me to be wrong.
[00:42:05]  But if the public felt that way and the Congress wanted it, I was all for the bill.
[00:42:10]  But there was not a majority to pass it.
[00:42:12]  And that's why it was not brought up.
[00:42:14]  And I'm not going to name names of people who opposed it because I don't want them to have to hear from you.
[00:42:20]  But it was, that's what it was.
[00:42:21]  I said, look, if you want it, pass the bill.
[00:42:24]  The bill we had actually was stronger than the Spanberger Bill.
[00:42:27]  Do you think that members of Congress should put their, should be banned from trading stocks or put their assets in a blind trust?
[00:42:34]  Well, or something.
[00:42:35]  I don't know about the blind trust part.
[00:42:37]  Yeah, if that's the plan.
[00:42:39]  In other words, they shouldn't be.
[00:42:41]  The public does not want people buying stock.
[00:42:44]  If any of you have any gifts from your grandfather or this or that and you want to run for Congress from your grandparents, forget it.
[00:42:52]  Forget about it.
[00:42:53]  All right.
[00:42:54]  Another question.
[00:42:55]  But yes, in your question, the most important thing for us to do, however it is, is to restore confidence in the system.
[00:43:05]  I saw the question earlier about how many people think that Social Security is going to be there when you're old enough to take advantage of it.
[00:43:14]  Social Security is an insurance program that people pay into.
[00:43:18]  One of the reasons that there's a word on campuses about this is about 50 years ago, 50 years ago, very wealthy families in America put money into foundations and entities that went around to preserve the free enterprise system, which we didn't think was in doubt, but they to preserve the free enterprise system.
[00:43:47]  And one of the things they went, which meant they didn't want inflation, it was really for the rich tax breaks for the rich is really what it was, but free enterprise system.
[00:43:58]  And what they told students for five, six decades is Social Security is not going to be there when you are old enough for it.
[00:44:08]  But this is an insurance pillar of economic security for America's families.
[00:44:14]  Think it'll be there for them?
[00:44:15]  Yes, it will be because we'll have to make it be there.
[00:44:18]  And we don't have it getting there by taking away some of its assets for how it is run to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

=== Restoring The American Dream (04:59) ===

[00:44:25]  This is the big division in the country.
[00:44:28]  And I don't think that all Republicans subscribe to it, but they do now.
[00:44:33]  But I do think that it has to be there.
[00:44:37]  We have to have an insurance where people pay in and they get the return on that when they are of the age of that, whatever it will be at that time, probably 65.
[00:44:50]  Another few minutes left.
[00:44:51]  Let me turn to another question, because while you're talking about whether Social Security is going to be there, here's a question from a student about the American Dream.
[00:45:02]  A Pew Research survey found that 51% of young adults aged 18 to 29 believe the American Dream was once possible, but it's not anymore.
[00:45:12]  If the American Dream no longer works as a promise to young people, what does America offer them as a reason to invest in this country?
[00:45:23]  Thank you so much for your question.
[00:45:25]  Well, we have to restore the American dream.
[00:45:30]  Quite frankly, we're at a place where we have had the elimination of the Department of Education.
[00:45:37]  We have had turning upside down how we help people pay for college loans and all the rest of that.
[00:45:45]  There are many reasons why cost of health care they're making more expensive.
[00:45:52]  Things that, again, going to that kitchen table make it harder for people to realize their dream.
[00:45:59]  We have to restore the American dream.
[00:46:01]  And I believe that it has to be done in a non-partisan way.
[00:46:06]  I don't want to say bipartisan, multi-partisan way.
[00:46:09]  How do we do that?
[00:46:10]  I want the Republicans to take back their party.
[00:46:13]  This is a grand old party.
[00:46:15]  It's done great things.
[00:46:16]  I've had these conversations with many Republicans.
[00:46:19]  This is not what it is now.
[00:46:21]  And this is something that is there, only tax cuts to the end.
[00:46:25]  No regulation for clean air, clean water, any of that for health things.
[00:46:31]  So we want to see a country that comes together to say we're preserving the planet for the future.
[00:46:37]  Let me give you a specific thing that you can address.
[00:46:41]  When I went around the room, several students said, I'll never be able to afford to buy a house.
[00:46:46]  That's it.
[00:46:46]  The most important thing.
[00:46:47]  You come from California.
[00:46:49]  There are some of the most from some of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.
[00:46:55]  Silicon Valley, a 1,700 square foot house, can cost $2 or $3 million.
[00:47:01]  That's right.
[00:47:01]  It's not possible for a teacher, a social worker, a professor for that matter, to buy something like that.
[00:47:08]  How do we restore the American dream when some of the most basic things, including a college education, by the way, seem to be out of reach?
[00:47:16]  Well, thank you for that question.
[00:47:19]  This is how I was raised in my family.
[00:47:21]  My father was mayor when I was in first grade, and when I went away to college, he was still mayor of Baltimore, so all that time.
[00:47:27]  And my mother took it as her mission to have affordable housing in the city of Baltimore.
[00:47:33]  Now, it's different from San Francisco in terms of cost of housing.
[00:47:36]  She said, how can we teach children love and respect if we do not enable them to have a secure, safe place for them to live?
[00:47:44]  So again, that's in my DNA.
[00:47:46]  So you go to California.
[00:47:48]  In my view, housing is a health issue.
[00:47:52]  It's not just housing, it's the psychology of housing for children to have that security and the rest.
[00:48:00]  And in California, since you mentioned that, what we want to do there is one of the best ways to have people live in an affordable way in California is by having transportation, mass transit, whether it be high-speed rail or other mass transit.
[00:48:18]  You can be in Silicon Valley.
[00:48:19]  You can't possibly afford to live there unless you are blah, blah, blah.
[00:48:24]  So you live a half an hour away with mass transit, an hour and a half away if it's not mass transit.
[00:48:31]  So that's why we have a heavy investment in mass transit there so that people can live in Gilroy and they can work in San Francisco and live outside the city.
[00:48:43]  The spaces are just impossible.
[00:48:47]  My kids even say to me, we can't afford to live there.
[00:48:50]  So it is a difficult thing.
[00:48:53]  But transportation, if you live in LA and you can't, unless you live in Palmdere, Palmdale, you can work in LA and go home and have a lovely place on the weekend for your family to enjoy.
[00:49:06]  So there are things about housing in terms of lowering the cost and also interest rates and the rest, all kinds of reasons.
[00:49:15]  We have things in public policy that talk about how to assist families with their first mortgage.

=== Public Sentiment Drives Change (02:19) ===

[00:49:25]  And that is an important part of what Maxine Waters has been advocating.
[00:49:29]  Of course, for rentals, Section 8, all different other kinds of ways too.
[00:49:34]  But it has to be a priority in it.
[00:49:38]  So when we're talking about that kitchen table, we're talking about health, education, housing, all other kinds of things that affect people's daily lives.
[00:49:48]  And we know it full well in California, but people know it in Massachusetts.
[00:49:52]  There are many places where it is more of a problem than it is, say, in some places down south.
[00:50:01]  Down south, you have Section 8, you can live, boom.
[00:50:04]  Section 8 in San Francisco, not so much.
[00:50:07]  So it's a different thing.
[00:50:10]  But housing, housing, housing, so very important.
[00:50:14]  But there are a lot of things that we have to do that we can do in a bipartisan way.
[00:50:19]  We have a bill that has passed the Senate in a bipartisan way.
[00:50:22]  The president said he doesn't want to sign it.
[00:50:24]  So we'll see how that goes when we go to the next stages of it and send it to him.
[00:50:32]  He said it's not going to sign it because of one thing and another.
[00:50:36]  And that's really a problem because this is bipartisan.
[00:50:43]  Let me direct you to the last of the student questions here tonight.
[00:50:47]  It's kind of an interesting way to sort of sum up the mood, which is, I'd say, very concerned right now.
[00:50:55]  So one last question.
[00:50:56]  Oh, here.
[00:50:58]  This is beautiful.
[00:50:59]  Speaker Below.
[00:51:00]  In your nearly 40 years in Congress, this nation has witnessed moments of prosperity and hope and moments of darkness.
[00:51:07]  As you and many others describe it, this is a uniquely dangerous moment in our history.
[00:51:12]  So why should young people in this audience and across the country be hopeful right now?
[00:51:17]  Well, the future belongs to you.
[00:51:19]  And that's just it is the future belongs to you.
[00:51:22]  As I've said before, Lincoln said public sentiment is everything.
[00:51:26]  With it, you can accomplish almost anything.
[00:51:28]  Without it, practically nothing.
[00:51:30]  But for public sentiment to prevail, people have to know.
[00:51:35]  And really, nothing that we did, whether it was the Affordable Care Act, just for example, was inside maneuvering, but it was outside mobilization.

=== A Dangerous Yet Hopeful Future (01:14) ===

[00:51:44]  People weighing in.
[00:51:46]  So young people, it's your future.
[00:51:48]  You have to take responsibility for it as well.
[00:51:52]  And that is to say, these are the things that we insist upon.
[00:51:57]  Listening to young people, cost of housing, job security, all that, cost of health care, education, paying for student loans.
[00:52:05]  We hear all these things, gun violence, prevention, issues that relate to climate and the rest, listening to young people.
[00:52:12]  But you also have to make the public sentiment to insist that things go in that way.
[00:52:20]  Know your power in this.
[00:52:23]  Each of you, not any one of you, in the history of the world has been like you.
[00:52:29]  You have know your power, be ready to make the fight, and also remember that many of our founders of our country were very young when they established this great United States of America.
[00:52:43]  It is worth saving.
[00:52:46]  We must honor the vision of our founders, the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform to keep us free, and the aspirations of our children, the aspirations of our children.
[00:52:58]  So again, know your role.