Gregorio Sablan: “I have no further speakers, and I do urge my colleagues to please support H.R. 2617. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the…”

Renewing the financial provisions of the Compact is essential to our nation's security posture in the Indo-Pacific region.

There is no easy way that our nation will be able to maintain our influence in what is becoming an increasingly strategic, important, and contested area of the world without continuing our partnership with the COFA nations.

Today is, indeed, a very important day, historic in some ways, because it marks the beginning of what I hope and I believe will be a successful bipartisan effort to renew the financial provisions of the Compacts of Free Association.

Thus, we come here under Chairman Westerman's leadership to regroup and confront together the PRC's threat to the freedom of the blue continent that stretches across the Indo-Pacific region.