We know how many of you have been turned off by the ugly politics of the last decade, and how easy is to be distracted from what goes on here in Washington. But right now is the time when, more than ever, we need an informed and engaged citizenry as we confront critical issues of war and peace, the economy, and national security.

Let me talk first about national security.

We in the Democratic Party have been and are the strongest defenders of individual expression and the 1st Amendment. We believe that there is a wide gap between political speech and political action on one side, and terror and violence on the other. We have a judicial system to stand between them, and most important, to act as a check on the power of the Federal Administration, as the Founders intended.

And we cannot accept the notion that U.S. citizens or resident aliens arrested on U.S. soil can be treated outside that system.

Our troops faced enemy combatants in Afghanistan; including, sadly, a U.S. citizen. We are not asking for our legal procedures to apply on the battlefield. But the cities of the U.S. are not a battlefield, and while there may well be terrorists in our cities today, we will not accept the notion that we must deal with them extrajudicially when they are on U.S. soil.

I take this position first because the Federal Government cannot fight and defeat terrorism alone. It will take the combined efforts of local police and public safety officials, an active, informed, and alert citizenry along with the Federal security forces to win this fight, and the structures of justice are in place to use them today. It will also be critical that when we win this fight we survive as a nation founded on the public and just application of law and the notion that we have no sovereign who stands beyond the gaze of citizens and the laws that bind us all.

We will move to require that all U.S. Citizens and resident aliens suspected of terrorist activity or conspiracy be dealt with through the legal system, and to ensure that political speech and actions as opposed to terrorist conspiracy are fully protected.

We recognize that we face many threats from outside, and we believe that it is important to first combat the ones that are obvious and easy, as opposed to unlikely and hard. The interests that would injure us do not have ballistic missiles that can reach our cities. The threats we face will arrive by commercial airliner, container ship, and delivery truck.

We cannot afford to spend the billions of dollars it will cost to develop a relatively ineffective missile shield against a threat that does not today exist. Not when we are still too open and vulnerable to terrorist threats which remain all too easy to carry out.

To that end, we propose reallocating the bulk of the funds proposed for ballistic missile defense implementation, as opposed to research, to strengthening the technology and personnel who can secure our ports, airports and highways against terrorist attacks.

Our country has already been attacked with biological weapons – the anthrax-laced mail that was sent to this House two years ago – and we have discovered how fragile our public-health system has become through decades of bipartisan neglect. We are seeing increases in communicable diseases in almost all our major cities, and our ability to predict, track, and respond to those is a major defense against the most frightening type of terrorism.

We propose substantially increasing the budget for public health to create mechanisms to defend us against the possibility of both natural and man-made diseases.

The health of our economy is also our best defense, and touches all of us within the US and also people outside as it directly affects their economies and as it affects our ability and resources to act both militarily and charitably.

A healthy world economy is the ultimate cure for terrorism. Jobs, security, and a better standard of living will reduce the pool of unemployed, hopeless young men that feeds the terrorist stream.

A healthy U.S. economy is the answer to a number of our problems as well. We respect the President’s commitment to reducing the tax burden on individuals and businesses in the U.S., and want to work with him to help nurture the economy.

But we think he’s going about it wrong.

The biggest impacts on consumption will come from reducing the tax burden on the middle class. They pay Federal and State Income taxes, as well as sales, property, and a host of other taxes, and taxes saved translate directly into spending.

We want to retarget his changes in the tax rates downward.

The repeal of the estate tax was an expensive mistake. We want to undo it.

We support a reduction in corporate taxes as well, and would support his effort to eliminate taxes on dividends, as long as it was combined with a tax on ‘mailbox’ corporations that do business and are truly headquartered in the U.S., but maintain fictitious addresses in foreign tax havens.

We also want to examine the subsidies built into the tax codes for the largest corporations, and retarget those at the true engines of prosperity and job growth, the small and regional businesses that are the backbone of American wealth and well-being.

For too long, we have tolerated fiscal mismanagement at the state and local level, and compounded it with unfunded mandates. We need to sit down in an open dialog with state and local governments and look hard at the fiscal crisis that they are facing today. These are the services and jobs that directly face most of us, and we need to find ways to put them on a firmer financial footing.

We propose a national task force on local government finance, with a deadline of next year and the honest charter to find a way to keep the states and local cities from going bankrupt.

This Administration is missing the boat on issues affecting the environment. The American people have shown, over and over again that they expect us to be better stewards of the natural riches we have been blessed with.

To that end, we want to move to do several things.

We need to improve the efficiency with which we use energy. Our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil is limits our freedom to react to the threats and politics there.

The President’s proposal to experiment with hydrogen is a good one, but we believe that there are two things we can do to move our cars and trucks in the direction of greater efficiency.

Natural Gas is clean-burning, widely available, and can be blended with hydrogen as a first step toward a hydrogen-based energy economy. We propose to incentivize the automobile manufacturers, gas and oil companies, and consumers to build, fuel, and buy cars and trucks powered by natural gas. We in government need to lead the way. To that end, we will propose the entire Federal civilian vehicle fleet be transitioned to natural gas over the next five years, and that a series of tax and regulatory incentives be put in place to encourage the use of natural-gas powered vehicles.

We propose to end the subsidies to fuel-inefficient small trucks and SUV’s.

Look, we believe in free choice.

But the reality is that Chevy Suburbans and other similar vehicles are subsidized by regulatory loopholes which need to be closed. We use them like cars, let’s treat them like cars.

We believe that we have to continue the exploration and exploitation of domestic energy resources. We will look carefully at drilling in the ANWR. But let there be no mistake about it. Twenty years ago, this Congress approves the trans-Alaska pipeline, premised on the promise by the Administration and the oil companies that the oil that flowed through it would feed the energy needs of the U.S. It was less than ten years later that we were shipping that oil to Japan.

We won’t make the same mistake again. If we are going to drill in the ANWR, the energy extracted must be for our domestic use. Period.