David Price: “Thank you. And we do thank the chairman and the ranking member, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, for scheduling this resolution so…”

“Thank you. And we do thank the chairman and the ranking member, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, for scheduling this resolution so promptly, so that the House could act on this and our commission could get on with its work. I also want to acknowledge the previous speaker, Mr. Dreier, the previous chairman of the House Democracy Assistance Commission, who did a wonderful job in getting this commission launched in its first 2 years. As he said, we have operated every step of the way on an open and bipartisan basis; and so as we swap roles, with my assuming the chairmanship and his being the ranking member, I am very hopeful that this will be a seamless transition, and that this cooperative way of operating will continue. Indeed it should, as we work together in this body to take the message and the practice of democracy to our partner legislatures around the world. House Resolution 24 would reauthorize the work of the commission. This is a body that was inspired by the work of the Frost-Solomon Task Force back in the early 1990s. We worked then with states in Central and Eastern Europe as they were emerging from communism. Our commission has undertaken this same kind of work. We are building the institutional capacities of legislatures in emerging democracies.”