Politics & Power Quote by Lucille Roybal-Allard

“Mr. Speaker” cues the real audience: not just the presiding officer, but the cameras, the record, and every colleague who might be nudged into co-sponsorship. Roybal-Allard’s language is built to turn a behavior often treated as private mischief into a matter of state. “Complacent” is the quiet accusation. It implies that lawmakers, parents, and institutions have been willing to live with the costs of underage drinking because those costs are diffuse: ER visits, car crashes, assaults, academic fallout. No single villain, no single headline, so the problem slips into the background noise of American life.

Calling it a “national public health crisis” is strategic reframing. It pulls the issue out of the moralizing lane (“kids these days”) and into the policy lane where budgets, prevention programs, enforcement, and data-driven interventions live. That shift also builds a coalition: public health advocates, educators, law enforcement, and families can align without agreeing on culture-war explanations. The subtext is that shame and silence have protected the status quo; “out of the shadow” suggests underage drinking thrives in secrecy, in lax oversight, and in a kind of willful adult blindness.

The “bright light” metaphor does double duty. It’s moral illumination (stop looking away) and bureaucratic illumination (measure it, report it, fund it). As a long-serving House member known for health-focused legislation, Roybal-Allard is signaling seriousness: this isn’t a youth-scolding speech, it’s an attempt to elevate the issue high enough on the agenda that it competes with flashier crises. The rhetoric aims to convert concern into priority, and priority into appropriations.