Mark Souder: “first I want to again thank the chairman for making my amendment in order. Let me give a very short history, and then I…”

“first I want to again thank the chairman for making my amendment in order. Let me give a very short history, and then I will elaborate a little further. After the Great Society was less than sensitive to many urban areas in the United States, empowerment movements developed in America, led actually by a leftist named Sal Olinsky, that said local people, when they are being displaced, ought to have more input into the decisions that are being made in their lives. This happened originally in Chicago and it is something that we are looking at doing in New Orleans in the name of empowerment. We saw, when the Republicans came to power in the 1980s and to the Presidency, President Reagan put Jack Kemp in charge of HUD, Housing and Urban Development, and we had tenant management and resident management moving to homeownership and we said, let the people make the decisions themselves. Sometimes it was messy. Sometimes we did not really like their decisions, just like sometimes we do not necessarily agree with the people who they elect to Congress; but we let the people make the decisions. Head Start, when it came in the 1970s as part of Richard Nixon's efforts to block grant, to give more local empowerment to react to the programs of the 1960s, the heart and soul of this program was to say, we are going to let the parents, in these preschool situations, in these low-income situations, we are going to let them make the decisions.…”