Illinois State Republican Party Dinner
Remarks by
Congressman Henry J. Hyde


Thank you for honoring me here tonight. It is good to be among friends – friends and comrades who have shared the sweetness of victory and the challenge of defeat over many, many years.

Later this year, after thirty-two years of service in the U.S. House of Representatives and eight years in the Illinois House, I shall leave public office. My neighbors and friends could have done me no greater honor than to ask me to represent them in the Illinois state legislature and the U.S. Congress and I hope that, in rendering that service over the past forty years, I have been able to repay my friends and neighbors for their support. And I hope that I have been able to discharge at least some of the debt I owe the United States of America, the land of the free to which I pledge my undying allegiance.   

When I entered the state legislature, America was coming apart at the seams, and some wondered whether the authority of government at any level – local, state, federal – could be sustained. When I entered the Congress, the country was wrestling with the domestic and international effects of a failed presidency.   Now, things look very different. European communism collapsed in 1989. The United States is now the sole global superpower, with tremendous responsibilities for shaping the course of twenty-first century history. But, unlike forty years ago, in this year of grace, 2006, we can feel the winds of freedom blowing throughout the planet. And even as we face a new and grave challenge to freedom and world order in Islamic radicalism, I sense in the American people a calm determination to meet this challenge, however long it takes, and to assure the victory of liberty, decency, tolerance, and civility in the world. I sense that same determination in the remarkable young men and women of our armed forces, many of whom will, I hope, give their lives to the public service in the future.

These past forty years have also seen an unimaginable transformation of America. We have made the transition from the industrial age economy to the information age economy – and in the process, we have created greater prosperity, more widely distributed, than ever before in our history. We have made genuine progress in building a society of liberty and justice for all, born and unborn. And if we face new challenges – the challenge of biotechnology, the challenge of energy independence, the challenge of reforming our schools, the challenge of resisting the degradation of our culture – then we should be strengthened by the knowledge that we face those challenges with a confidence in freedom and the politics of freedom that was hard to come by, forty years ago.

I have seen a lot in those forty years: I’ve watched legislative fastballs and political curveballs; I’ve been lifted up by nobility and I’ve been worn down, at times, by baseness; I’ve celebrated victories and mourned defeats. Throughout all of it, however, I have never ceased to believe that politics is a noble vocation. Because, in America, a political vocation is a calling to participate in self-governance, which is the public expression of God’s gift of freedom to men and women.

Two hundred thirty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, men and women of every race, creed, and economic class in America are still prepared to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of freedom. America has not exhausted itself over almost two and a half centuries; America is constantly renewing itself whenever it returns to the convictions of the Founding: that we are all created equal; that we are endowed with certain rights, not by government, but by God; that chief among those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that government exists to secure those rights and their flourishing. Forty years of legislative experience has not tarnished those ideals in my mind’s eye; forty years of experience in the rough and tumble of politics have persuaded me that those ideals remain as true as when they were first inscribed on parchment. And they are true because the ideals of America reflect moral truths written on the human heart by God himself.

Have there been discouragements over these past four decades? Of course. No political party is immune from the slings and arrows of fortune; but our party, the Republican Party, has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for rejuvenation since the mid-1960s, when it was thought that we might well go the way of the Whigs into permanent oblivion. Some oblivion! Yet, for all that we take justified pride in our success, Republicans must never forget that, like Lincoln, it is our task to give America a new birth of freedom – and to do so in ways that honor the vocation of politics.

There are still a few miles to go before I take leave of the public arena, and I ask your help and prayers that I might walk them well. For the moment, though, may I leave you with this thought: that, as citizens of the United States, we are trustees of a precious legacy – a legacy of freedom that has lifted America to new heights of responsibility in the world. We live our trusteeship in different ways, which is how it should be in the free society. I thank you for having allowed me to exercise my trusteeship in public service, and I pray that, in the years and decades ahead, those who follow this particular path will also find it a path of honor.

Thank you.

H