Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Welcome to all of you, and a special welcome to all the Hoosiers who are here today. (Applause)

And a special welcome to this distinguished Hoosier sitting just beside me here. This is the next in our series of Sunday Forums, conversations taking place at the intersection of faith and public life. And today we have with us one of the most distinguished leaders of Congress of the last twenty, thirty, forty years or so here to have a conversation about faith and public life and the ways they intersect with each other.

Our guest today has spent 34 years in Congress representing Indiana. Lee Hamilton earned a reputation as a master negotiator and an expert on foreign affairs, but just as important was his reputation for caring about the practice of civility—an almost overlooked virtue nowadays. Since retiring in 1999 from Congress, Lee Hamilton has stayed busy running the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars here in Washington and serving as co-chair of the 9/11 commission on terrorist attacks and the Iraq Study Group. He has been keeping very busy, and he has time left over every now and then to talk about the intersection of faith and public life, and that’s why we have him here today. Lee, welcome to you.

Lee Hamilton: Very pleased to be here, Sam.

Lloyd: Let’s start off with the topic we had put out for today—what politicians and religious leaders need from each other. This has been a rough patch for the relationship between politicians and religious leaders. Maybe they don’t need anything from each other but a little peace and quiet. What is your take on what’s going on in the rather noisy relationship between the two lately?

Hamilton: Well, Sam, I’ve sat in on a lot of meetings where I, as a politician, have had a lot of advice from church people. Most of it well intended, but I’m not sure all of it was well intended, and I have often thought that maybe I ought to give a speech sometime on what a politician thinks of churchmen. And I really believe that people who are dedicated to their church can contribute a lot very constructively and very positively to the political life. I understand, as all of you do, that the Christian’s primary business is not politics. The Christian’s primary business—you could articulate this better than I—but it is to know and to make known the love of God through the person of Jesus Christ. And that is, if I’ve stated it correctly, the central mission of the Christian.

Although the Christian’s primary responsibility is not politics, I would be on the side of those who would contend that politics is their business. If the Lord is the Lord of all life, that certainly includes politics, and so I personally want to see the voice of the Christian, even though it’s at times a varied voice, in the political arena. And I think those of us who have been in politics, and those who are now in politics, can greatly benefit from that. Now, you suggest in your question that sometimes this gets a little out of hand, and it does. Many things get out of hand from time to time in America, but by and large, I think overall the contribution of the churches, of individual Christians, of congregations, have been very constructive and healthy in the political arena.

Lloyd: You say in some of your addresses and talks how important it is for religious leaders to know what their distinctive role is in relation to politics. That, in fact, the religious leadership vocation and the political vocation are different. One has a lot to do with compromise and making hard choices, and one is about trying to speak articulately about the vision God has for what the world should be like. How do they do that dance with each other?

Hamilton: Well, for a lot of Christians, I think the world of politics is too messy and maybe too unethical for them. I remember a conversation I had some years ago with a gentleman who concluded his remarks to me by saying, Congressman, I believe that hell is full of politicians. And if… there’s that attitude. The Christian is pure, seeks ideals; the politician deals in a very messy world, and the two don’t mix. I personally don’t agree with that point of view, but I’ve encountered it, as many of you have. I think the politician is the better if he or she is reminded regularly of the Christian point of view.

Lloyd: You’re making me think of a line. I think it comes from William Sloane Coffin, the famous chaplain at Yale and at Riverside Church, who said, it’s the vocation of the Christian or the minister to proclaim, let justice role down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, and it’s up to the politicians to figure out the irrigation. Is there something to that?

Hamilton: There is indeed. The great ideal, I guess, in political life is justice. The difference here is, religion is personal. Christianity deals with personal salvation. Christianity generally is not communal, it’s not community. You don’t seek to save the whole nation or a whole ethnic group. Politicians deal with the community, and the ideal for the politician is perhaps not love but justice, and justice is a very elusive goal.

Lloyd: I would push you a little bit on that. I do think Christians do need to have a vision of the common good, and something about the Kingdom of God is about the wholeness we’re all made for. But there is a difference, and Reinhold Nieburh was always clear about this, that love carried into the public realm is going to have to look a lot like justice.

Hamilton: Yes.

Lloyd: Love is so pure a concept that you have to figure out what that means amidst the tradeoffs and complexities of the social order. Well, tell me this. You speak so articulately and thoughtfully about faith and politics. In your own experience, have you seen models of people who put this well together? Were you shaped from the beginning by both the call of religion and the call of politics? How did you find yourself living in this dynamic tension in your own development?

Hamilton: Well, Sam, I think there is a tension in many ways that a politician encounters with his faith, with his Christian viewpoint… pops up repeatedly.

Lloyd: You’re the son of a minister, is that right?

Hamilton: Well, yeah, don’t press that too hard. I happen to be the son of a Methodist minister and, as some of you probably know, my brother Richard—Dick Hamilton—was a pastor for many years in Indiana. The problem with pointing that out is, everybody knows that I’m the black sheep of the family.

Lloyd: The only one going to hell, according to your commentator.

Hamilton: My future’s not all that bright at this point. But the tensions are obvious on so many different issues, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s take the issue of honesty. Most all of us would say you’ve got to be honest. Christians are honest people. Being honest on some very difficult issues is not easy to do. You may have a view on something, or you may know some information that leads you in a different direction, but it doesn’t seem to be the right time to impart that information to people. You may be speaking to a group that thinks one way and you think another way. You’ve got to be careful how honest you are with that group. You could alienate all of them and politicians don’t like to alienate people as a rule.

I’m not sure about preachers, but I know politicians don’t, and so this whole question of candor and honesty—there’s a tension. There’s a tension you mentioned a moment ago—the common good—there are many people who would argue that our system of government is not based on that at all, but it is based on the assertion of your interests—the special interests, as we’d say today. And from the accumulation, if you would, of special interests emerges the best public policy.

I agree with your point of view that I think it’s very important to have… to bring into that mix not just the special interests, but also people who have the point of view of the common good. So there’s a tension that can arise between people who assert the special interest and people who think about the common good.

One of the jobs of a member of Congress is to sit and listen to people all day long, lobbyists, maybe some of you, who come before a member of Congress and assert an interest. Maybe you’re a farmer, maybe you’re a business person, and you’re asserting your view with regard to agricultural policy or tax policy or regulatory policy. And I remember, I would meet sometimes with ten, fifteen of these groups a day. And I would sit and ask myself, doesn’t anybody ever talk up for the public interest, for the common good?

I think that’s one of the contributions a Christian can make to the policy process, and that is, they think about what’s good for all of us. But the tensions are clearly present, and they pop up in all sorts of ways, and as a politician you vote many, many times. Many of those issues have moral consequences, and there are many arguments about what the moral consequences are. The tensions are there.

Lloyd: For a while, while you were in Congress, you chaired—I’m blanking on the name of it—but the ethics committee for the House of Representatives, a sort of watchdog enterprise for what was happening among your colleagues. Were you… did you find yourself encouraged, discouraged about what you saw there? Certainly, in navigating, there’s a lot of talk these days about dealing with lobbyists and the powerful role they seem to play. What did you see in the process of trying to oversee what was happening there?

Hamilton: Well, the worst single job in the United States Congress is to be chairman of the ethics committee. It really is a difficult job, and the reason is obvious. You have a person before you who has been charged with some kind of ethical violation. The next day, you need that person’s vote, to simplify it. And that puts you in a difficult spot. But I don’t what to get too much into the Congress. I’m usually disappointed in the performance of the Congress on the ethics side, and I think basically the ethics process in the Congress has fundamentally collapsed.

Lloyd: Are lobbyists part of the problem or a necessary part of the process?

Hamilton: I don’t want to generalize. I think in general I probably have a higher opinion of lobbyists than many people out in front of us here. We have a lot of very good lobbyists in this city, good people, honest people, fight hard for their point of view, are strict with regard to their use of facts and are helpful to a member of Congress in many ways.

They’ve… there are a lot of excesses in that profession, and we hear a lot about them, and some few, of course, have gone to jail. But in general, my attitude toward lobbyists is, I understood that they came to see me to try to persuade me of their point of view. That’s perfectly okay. We all do that in various walks of life. It’s important for the member of Congress to know that, and to understand that they do have a special point of view; they are representing a special interest. Nothing wrong with that either.

But it’s important for the member of Congress to know that, and to take it into account, and then to sit back after the lobbyist is gone and say to themselves, what’s good for the country? One test of legislation that I often tried to ask, apply, was—how does this piece of legislation impact the ordinary person in the country? That’s not an infallible test, but it’s not a bad one either, and does focus you, I think, on… this is a very big, very complicated country. I don’t think people sufficiently understand.

When I went to high school, we had 130 million people in the country. Today, I don’t know exactly what the figure is, but it’s over three hundred million. So, in my working lifetime, the population of the country has more than doubled, far more, and not only that, become hugely diverse. And making this country work, which is the principal function of the politician, is not as easy as it looks. It’s a hard job.

Lloyd: One of the things we hear a great deal about now is that Congress is broken, the sides are so polarized, there’s antagonism on every side, Congress fights over everything, doesn’t get much done. People even say we need to clean house and start over. My question is, number one, do you think Congress is more functional than that, and number two, what about this hostility between the parties, and the sense of polarization and bitterness and recrimination that has been so much a part of the politics over recent years?

Hamilton: I think the Congress today is an institution under a lot of stress. I don’t think it’s performing well. You cannot possibly argue today that the Congress of the United States is a coequal branch of government.

Lloyd: What does that mean?

Hamilton: Well, let’s be specific about it. Congress shall have the power to declare war. Does anybody believe that? We as a country have not believed it since World War II. That was put into the Constitution because the founding fathers believed that the gravest decision that a country makes is whether to send young men and women into battle, and that nobody, not even a president, is wise enough or smart enough to make that decision by himself. But, as a fact of the matter, presidents and presidents alone now make the decision as to whether you send American forces into hostilities.

Or take the question of the budget. You would say to me, well, Congress has the power of the purse, but be careful of that argument, because the president has now become the chief budget maker. The budget he sends to the Congress is, if you look over the past twenty or more years, 95 percent of that budget is approved by the Congress. So he in effect has become the chief budget maker, so I think that Congress has been too timid in the assertion of its constitutional right.

When you’re sworn in as a member of Congress you take an oath of office, and what is the oath office? The oath of office is to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. You don’t swear to uphold and defend the president of the United States, you don’t swear to uphold and defend your constituents, you don’t swear to uphold and defend your biggest campaign contributor. You swear to uphold the Constitution. What does that mean? Well, we wouldn’t agree entirely, but surely it means separation of powers.

Lloyd: It almost seems as if in the… what’s going on in Congress now, there’s more loyalty to party discipline than there is to the work of the Congress, working with each other, and so both parties seem to have their talking points and their agendas, but you still, maybe it’s nostalgic, but you hear the days of Everett Dirksen and the great congressional leaders, the Lee Hamiltons, around when people would still sit down after a day’s work and have a drink and have a talk and tell some stories and keep a relationship going. That would then bear fruit in how they did their work, and there seems to be none of that now.

Hamilton: Well, there’s far too little of it. It does take place, but not enough of it. I think what’s happened in American politics is the collapse of the center, and because of the way we put together congressional districts, because of the media, which always I think often exacerbates the issue. The role of the Congress, which is fundamentally a role of building consensus behind a solution to a problem.

If you ask me what is the greatest skill needed today in American politics, I’d say to you it’s the ability to build consensus. I can go into any audience and blow it apart with my rhetoric. What’s really hard to do is to go into any meeting or any… whether small or big, and bring people together. That’s what’s hard to do, and that is a skill that is needed in American politics today. I don’t care if you’re a conservative or a liberal or wherever you are. You need people who will try to make the country work, who can bring people together.

Let’s take the Congress itself, Sam, it’s very easy to go to any audience and make the Congress look bad and myself look good. That’s easy. I can do it in my sleep, and I probably have. How far down that road can you go eroding confidence in the Congress without losing representative democracy? Now, having said that, I see a lot of faults and problems in the Congress, and I think what you and I have to do is to make clear to members of Congress we don’t like this partisanship.

Lloyd: Tell me about your experience on those two very important commissions, which were so striking, because they were both bipartisan commissions, where people of different political convictions came and worked closely together and produced a common result. It looks as if, at least in those contexts, bipartisanship was possible.

Hamilton: It’s possible. It takes a lot of work. I can remember driving across the 14th Street Bridge. My wife and I live in Virginia, and a couple of times, at three or four o’clock in the morning, and saying to myself, we’ll never agree: five Democrats, five Republicans, all of us partisans. How do you bring them together?

Well, I don’t have a magic formula for that, but I don’t know how you develop consensus or bring people together without talking and talking and talking and talking. You just have to work at it. You have to have people who are committed in the first place to try to find a solution, people who are willing to put aside their partisan instincts for the good of the country, if you would, and then you sit down and you ask yourself, okay this is my view, this is the other fellow’s view, these things are common, these things are different. How can I close the differences?

And sometimes you can’t. You can’t reach agreement on everything, then you have to decide how you deal with the things you can’t agree on. But it’s a process that takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, and it can be done and with people like Governor Kain and Secretary Baker. I was most fortunate to be able to work with two of these gentlemen, who, I think, had the right approach to trying to solve the problems of this country.

Lloyd: Well, there are just so many problems today that, to most eyes, it looks as if we need that kind of solution, whether it’s the energy crisis, the environment, whether it’s Social Security, the financial stability of the economy, that what we mostly see is the partisan battering on both sides. It almost looks as if there ought to be a commission, one by one, go figure it out and bring it back.

Hamilton: Well it is… I know that people don’t like it now… the flip side of this is important, and you must not expect politicians to agree with one another all the time. You run for Congress because you have deep feelings about the way that Congress… the country ought to be run, and those differences are very strong and very marked, and so you do have in the Congress, and you should have in the Congress a lot of clashes. Deep-seated clashes over fundamental issues of how you should govern this country, and you ought not to fall off your chair just because somebody disagrees with you strongly.

The problem is, you’ve got to get the frame of mind to try to work through the difference, and that doesn’t always exist. I know that Congress gets out of hand, and debate gets out of hand, but I think it is important to recognize that big issues are being discussed, we’ve got a lot of differences of opinion on these challenges in this country, and you’re going to have strongly expressed differences of opinion. But the partisanship has gotten out of hand, and we need to get back.

Sam, to give a personal example, many of these people will know I used to sit in on a lot of meetings when Tip O’Neill was speaker and Bob Michel was the minority leader, the Republican leader. Bob and Tip were very good friends. They were golfing buddies, and Tip would come in and he’d say, we’re going to bring this bill up on Tuesday, and I’ve got 190 votes and I need thirty or 40 Republican votes. Can I get ’em?

And Bob Michel would say, we don’t like that bill. Most of the Republicans are going to vote against it, but I’ll check and see how many are going to vote for you. And he’d run the counts, and he’d come back, and they’d have a very civil discussion. Never, ever a word of anger. Two technicians, if you would, trying to solve the problem. The debate would come up and Tip O’Neill would go into the well, and he’d give a ringing speech for the bill, and Bob Michel would go in the well, and he’d give a ringing speech against the bill. They all knew how it was going to come out. And at the end of the day they’d, as you say, have drink—a Methodist wouldn’t say that, of course.

Lloyd: We can say those things here.

Hamilton: You Episcopalians can say it. They’d have a drink and they’d go play golf. One of the problems among many is that the schedules of members of Congress have become so tight, they now spend so much time in their districts, that they really don’t get to know one another.

Lloyd: They go home Thursday evening often and back Sunday night or Monday.

Hamilton: Come back Monday… The scheduling is a real problem. The House comes in Monday evening, sometimes Tuesday evening, casts a few a votes of not great consequence, are in session Tuesday maybe, maybe just Wednesday and Thursday, they want to go home Thursday night. You can’t get to know one another well in that setting, and it’s hard to get mad at somebody if you know him well.

Lloyd: We want to give the audience a chance to ask some questions, so if we can bring out the microphones, while people are assembling, one more quick question. If you were to name the two or three issues that you think are most critical for our country’s future now, that the next president and Congress must address first, what would you name?

Hamilton: Well, in the foreign policy area, I think the dominant concern of American foreign policy should be nuclear nonproliferation, just because of the horrific consequences of a nuclear weapon going of in a crowded area.

In the domestic side, I would think health care would be right at the top of the list, of course, along with the economy. Those would be the three big ones. I’m afraid on the foreign policy side when the next president comes in, the agenda is going to be the Middle East, the Middle East, the Middle East, just because it appears to me now that Iraq and Afghanistan and the peace process will really not have advanced very far in the next few months, and so some very, very difficult problems are going to be in front of the next president.

Lloyd: Let’s go to our first question.

Question 1: Thank you, Congressman Hamilton. If every state sent two representatives like you and Senator Lugar on foreign policy, I think we’d have a much more productive consensus foreign policy. My questions are these. First of all, would you agree that citizen is the most important title we have under the Constitution, and that the citizens are responsible for the politics as much as the politicians? Second, I don’t recall, I think it was NPR, you told the story of a citizen in Swiss County, Indiana, who had a better insight into, I believe it was the Irish peace process, than anybody you had heard in Washington, and if you could blink those two. Third, I’ve been amazed at the warra—

Lloyd: You only get one, please! Let’s stop right there please! Thank you. Question.

Hamilton: Well, I certainly agree, that statement you made comes from Justice Brandeis, who said that the highest title you could have is citizen, and said it a little better than that but the thought comes from Justice Brandeis.

Secondly, I think that if I understood the point correctly, you mentioned Switzerland County, didn’t you? The core of representative democracy is the relationship between the elected official and the voter, and that is a fascinating relationship, has a lot of implications to it. Oftentimes the representative educates, but I’ve found, and I think your question suggests, that just as often, the citizen educates the representative.

And it is very strange you mentioned Switzerland County, because I had a marvelous example of this in Switzerland County. I appeared one night at a concrete block 4-H building. You city slickers wouldn’t know what that’s all about but, a 4-H building in a rural area of Indiana, this is during the time when we were considering the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties, which I personally favored, and, but they were not popular in the country. I went to Switzerland County—excuse me for taking so long—and I was just excoriated for supporting these treaties. I literally thought they were going to run me out of town on a rail.

A citizen in Switzerland County spoke up and gave the most eloquent defense of the Panama Canal Treaties that I every heard, from the president or anybody else, and I said, where in the world did you learn about the Panama Canal Treaties like that? And this young lady said to me, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama. She saved my neck that night, I’m reasonably sure.

Lloyd: Thank you. Next question.

Question 2: Yeah, I have a question for you. I just wonder, to help this problem here, so we can get back to defending the Constitution, if it would be possible, or what your thoughts are on having, like, term limits for Congress, like eight years, to get rid of the running for re-office every time, more than they are concerned for our Constitution.

Hamilton: Oh, my. Term limits.

Lloyd: Someone who served thirty years, what’s your view on term limits?

Hamilton: I’m afraid I’m not exactly an unbiased witness here. I was 34 years in the Congress. Look, I understand, first of all, the frustration that people have with members of Congress. We have term limits for president now. I personally don’t agree with that. I’d like to repeal that amendment of the Constitution, but we have a term limit for the president.

Many states—California, I know, has term limits, and many others have adopted them. And that arises out of this frustration that has some merit to it, but let me tell you the problem with it. The problem is that, if you take power away from me as a long-term member of the Congress, power in our system does not evaporate, it flows and it flows… If you take it away from the legislator, who after all is an elected representative, it flows to the bureaucracy, and I don’t think that’s altogether a good result, so I’m not a strong proponent of term limits, although I certainly appreciate the frustration that leads people to conclude that that’s the way to go. Maybe the states will give us a little more experience with this, as some of the states adopt it, so we can make a better judgment about it.

Lloyd: Question.

Question 3: Good morning. I’m a visitor from Edinburgh in Scotland, and we love and appreciate America, and the most powerful nation in the world, but you do have more weapons of mass destruction than the entire world put together. And I’m just wondering if that makes the world a safer place or a more dangerous place? It is easy to win a war, but to get the hearts and minds and win the peace is a very difficult process.

Hamilton: I understand there are a number of people in the audience from Scotland, and we’re delighted to have you here. I didn’t expect a Scot to ask such a tough question. However, you’re right, of course, and I said a moment ago that the number one issue for me, what should be the dominant issue in American foreign policy, would be, how do you stop the spread of nuclear weapons?

We have now an erosion of the nonproliferation regime that has really served us pretty well over the past several decades, but you also now have a number of countries that are thinking about developing nuclear power, and many of them will. You point out that the United States has this vast quantity of weapons, and we do, and Russia does too. We’re the two countries that have most of the weapons, and I am of the school of thought that the United States should take the lead, with Russia, in trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons we have in our arsenal.

There’s no reason for all of these weapons that we have, and it would be a wonderful sign for the world if we would, the two of us, agree for a reduction, and many of you in this audience will remember an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago by George Schultz and Henry Kissinger and Bill Perry and Sam Nunn—two Republicans, two Democrats—who called for the abolition of nuclear weapons as a goal. I support that goal. I don’t suggest it’s easy to reach it. And I know there are a lot of problems with it, but this has to be given a much, much higher priority on the agenda, not only of the United States but of the world.

Question 4: You began your discussion by discussing the involvement of Christianity in politics and the relationship between the two. We have a group Christians in the U.S., about the million or so, fundamentalists I’m referring to, who advocate certain foreign policy that favors a country in the Middle East, with the objective of basically incinerating the world. And I’m wondering if you think that that’s a healthy involvement of Christianity in politics, and if you would, I would like to do your own personal views on this subject.

Hamilton: The question I think relates to Israel, and the support of, didn’t take me too long to figure that out, and it’s a very formidable problem for us, as your question suggests. I think it’s part and parcel of the American politics that there will be, in both the executive branch and the legislative branch, very strong support for the state of Israel. And I think there are good reasons for that, which we probably don’t need to go into in this audience, but it is also true that the United States has had a very difficult time over a period of years bringing the Israelis together with Palestinians or much of the Arab world.

I think it’s terribly important that the United States continue that effort, even though success comes an inch at a time and not yard by yard, because I do not believe that the parties themselves will ever reach agreement. I think the United States has to be a catalyst, if you would, to bring them together.

The other thing I would say about it is that the solution to the problem has very wide support with regard to Jerusalem, with regard to the borders, with regard to the refugees, the right of return, and the problem is not really envisioning a solution which I think a very large part of the world would agree upon, but it’s how you get there. How do parties get there? And we’ve been struggling with that for decades. No easy solution there, but I think we have to keep them at the table, because the alternative is violence, and in the Middle East if you don’t move forward, you move backwards.

Question 5: Hello, Mr. Hamilton. I used to see you when I was doing security at the Ronald Reagan building. But to get to the point, I’m very pleased that you bring up the issue of nuclear weapon nonproliferation, because I grew up next to Lawrence Livermore, and I started my engineering career at the Hanford nuclear reservation, where I was exposed for nine months. My question comes around the fact of, where is the divorce inside both politics and religion, where the notion of being a servant, where we take care of what the Lord has given to us? It seems to have been evaporated, and now all of a sudden, everybody seems to think that the Messiah would return in a pleasant mood if we use a nuclear weapon.

Hamilton: Sam, did you hear all of that, the idea of the servant attitude?

Question 5: Exactly, the servant attitude…

Hamilton: Right.

Lloyd: Given the reality of our nuclear power, I think the question was about vision of how power gets used. We have the immense power. Where is the servant ministry? It sounds like our power is being used in a very top-down way. Am I getting that close?

Question 5: Very uncontrolled.

Lloyd: Very uncontrolled. Is there a Christian ethos to be held alongside the nuclear question in any way?

Hamilton: There surely is. I think it connects to what I said a moment ago, about our position as a country should be to do everything we can to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, and to make sure that those countries that have these nuclear weapons secure them and handle them responsibly.

I took the question a little differently, Sam, and maybe I didn’t hear it all that well. It’s a little hard in here for me to hear. And that is what is it that drives the politician, and a lot of people, I think, are very skeptical about politicians and think, well, it’s all just a big PR game, or it’s all a matter of ego, or it’s a matter of trying to accumulate wealth or whatever.

But let me tell you the best description I know of the political game. And the best description I know is that political game is really fundamentally all about is a search for a remedy. With all of the spin and with all of the noise of American politics, with all of your disappointments in politicians, underlying at all, on Capitol Hill and in the White House, are men and women, most of them, are people of goodwill and are good people, struggling with immensely difficult problems, and what they’re fundamentally doing is searching for a remedy to a problem, whether its nuclear weapons or health care or education or Social Security, or whatever.

Now, you may not like the way they’re doing it, or you may like it, but that’s what’s going on, and I think it misses the point if you think of politics as a pursuit of ego. Are there a lot of egos on Capitol Hill? You bet there are. Do you have to deal with them? You bet you do. Are there a lot of people in politics today because they want power? That’s the name of the game, power. That’s true too. But the right way to approach politics, it seems to me, and I think it’s true for most politicians, is, they really want to try to find a remedy to a problem. And it’s not always fully understood, I guess.

Lloyd: We have time for two brief questions. Must be brief.

Question 6: I was in the Middle East in 2003, and I was spit on and harangued, and I put up with that as a Christian based on my faith, but as an American I’m here to ask you, with your Iraq study group, have you come up with any exit plan for an immoral invasion of another country?

Hamilton: Do we have any plans?

Lloyd: Have you as a result of the Iraq study group come up plan to deal with this immoral invasion of another country?

Hamilton: Well, the Iraq study group is out of business, and I can’t speak for them at this point. I can only give you my personal views, and my personal views, I think, are in line with what we recommended some months ago.

I think the goal of American policy in Iraq today should be a responsible exit from that country. A lot of emphasis on the word responsible, because we’ve had quite an impact on the country. I was reading about the negotiations that are now going on in the status of forces agreement this morning in the paper. I believe we should be negotiating with Iraq now, not on permanent bases in Iraq, but on a responsible withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. And if I am to believe what the prime minister of Iraq said in the paper, he agrees with that. So now is the time to begin slowly, steadily, carefully, surely, we come out. Now we’ve got a lot of people over there, 140-50,000 military people, comparable number of civilians.

We have built whole cities in Iraq, and it’s going to be very difficult to get them out. Two other things, very quickly. I think we have to put much, much more emphasis than we have on training Iraqi forces, and we have to inaugurate, energize a diplomatic offensive in the region, neighbors, but also worldwide, to help with the stability of Iraq. It’s a very complex matter to take up the last few minutes here but that’s a quick response.

Question 6: Thank you. God bless you. Thank you.

Lloyd: Very, very brief question.

Question 7: Okay, Mr. Hamilton, I come from the part of Kentucky that calls itself Kentuckiana, and I want to say that, the while you were in Congress and since, I have been very proud of that symbolic affiliation. You mentioned earlier the ethical collapse of Congress. I wondered if you could elaborate a bit on what you meant by that.

Hamilton: The fundamental rule of ethics for the Congress is a very simple one. It is that you, as a member of Congress, should act in such a way as always to reflect credit on the Congress. Now, there are a lot of rules that have flowed from that, but that’s the fundamental rule. Where the Congress has come today in its ethics process is that you don’t take up an ethics case unless they’ve been charged or convicted with a felony.

Surely the ethical standard of the United States Congress ought to be more or higher than whether or not you committed a felony. So I want to see the Congress getting serious about the ethics process, and when you have reports of financial shenanigans or private activity that does not reflect credit on the institution, that’s the standard, and you should put those members on the spot about their conduct. As it is today, you have to have a conviction, almost, before they throw you out, and I think the ethics process has fundamentally collapsed in the Congress, not to its credit.

Lloyd: We have to stop the conversation right there, I’m afraid. Next week we will wrap up our in inaugural season of the Sunday Forum with Sister Joan Chittister, one of the strongest Roman Catholic leaders in our country today, a great leader in social justice.

We hope you’ll stay for the service that will take place here at 11:15 today. In the meantime, coffee is available at the west end of the Cathedral and to the left, and Congressman and Mrs. Hamilton will be back there to greet you. Service starts shortly. Please join me in thanking Congressman Hamilton. (Applause)