On the recordJanuary 17, 2018
I thank the gentleman so much for having us here tonight. Based upon what he was just talking about, I am going to talk about my father first. I am a first-generation American. My father was brought to the United States by his mother when he was 4 years old. His father was already here. He came from Italy. His father was already here working. He had joined the U.S. Army during World War I and got his citizenship because of that, and my father was naturalized as a citizen because of that. He was the first one in the neighborhood to go to college, and he then fought in World War II and got the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters as a navigator on a B-24. He came back after the war, and he went to Harvard Law School on the GI Bill. Imagine that, an Italian immigrant going to Harvard Law School on the GI Bill in the 1940s. He was discriminated against as an Italian American at the time--the gentleman was just talking about that--and he couldn't get a job at a big law firm. So he went back to our hometown of Glen Cove, Long Island. He teamed up with another Italian guy. He started a law practice. He ended up running for city court judge, and he became the youngest judge in the history of New York State, at 28 years old. My father really lived a great American success story. He was a man who would proudly say ``what a country'' all the time. My father died 2 weeks before my election in 2016. As I went through his papers, I saw his yearbook from St.…
