Sam Farr: “Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for scheduling and for bringing this bill to the floor. I am so proud that this bill…”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for scheduling and for bringing this bill to the floor. I am so proud that this bill is being brought to the floor by a Kennedy. President Kennedy appealed to the youth of this country with his inaugural address. I was a junior in college when he was sworn in, and that speech which has been repeated so much, of asking this country to think about what people in this country could do to help the country, rather than the government helping them, that call for action. Today, 7,209 volunteers are spread out in 65 different countries around the world. In President Kennedy's last State of the Union address, he said this: Nothing carries the spirit of American idealism and expresses our hopes better and more effectively to the far corners of the Earth than the Peace Corps. That is as true today as it was in the sixties, and what is so wonderful about this moment of sort of history and the folks that play in it is when I went into the Peace Corps in South America, the nickname, because the Kennedys were so popular, particularly in Colombia, the country that I went to, that we were called ``hijos de Kennedy,'' children of Kennedy. That is what the nickname for the Peace Corps was. And isn't it so wonderful that we had a child of a Kennedy--Joe Kennedy is now a Member of Congress--who is now able to carry this legislation. The torch is getting passed to a new generation.…”