War & Peace Quote by Solomon Ortiz

Ceremonial language like this is Congress at its most self-aware: a stage where routine phrases do real political work. Ortiz opens with the formal throat-clearing of the House ("Mr. Speaker, I rise today"), but the point isn’t mere etiquette. It’s an assertion of legitimacy. By placing the Peace Corps inside the official record, he’s treating it not as a nostalgic volunteer program but as a national institution worthy of commemoration alongside budgets and wars.

The date-stamp matters. March 1, 2006 lands in the thick of the post-9/11 decade, when American power was being argued over in two registers at once: hard security abroad and moral credibility abroad. Invoking the Peace Corps at 45 is a quiet corrective to the era’s dominant imagery of America in the world. It frames service, language-learning, and cultural immersion as strategic assets, not soft hobbies. The subtext: if the country wants influence, it can’t rely only on force or trade; it needs human relationships built patiently, often far from cameras.

There’s also a domestic political cue embedded in the plainness. Anniversary recognitions are bipartisan by design, a safe way to signal values - civic duty, optimism, cross-cultural respect - without lighting a partisan fuse. Ortiz isn’t trying to win an argument; he’s trying to stabilize a story about who Americans are when they show up overseas. In 2006, that was not a small ask.