The New Year Quote by Dick Thornburgh

Authority is doing the heavy lifting here, and Thornburgh knows it. He’s not arguing policy so much as constructing a ladder of legitimacy: Congress at the top, his own resume as the rung you’re supposed to step on. The sentence is engineered to make “permanent status resolution” sound like the only sober, adult option, while anything short of congressional approval reads as improvisation, even recklessness.

The key move is the phrase “made even more clear to me.” It frames his position as the product of hard-earned, institutional experience rather than partisan preference. That’s a classic political shield: if the conclusion is “clarity,” dissenters are cast as people who simply haven’t seen what he’s seen. Then comes the credential: former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. The UN reference is less about internationalism than about proximity to complex governance. It suggests he’s watched fragile arrangements collapse when authority is ambiguous, so he’s now insisting on a clean, domestic chain of command.

Context matters: Thornburgh was a Republican lawyer-politician steeped in process and formal legitimacy (governor, attorney general, crisis manager). This line fits that temperament. “Permanent” signals impatience with temporary fixes; “approved by Congress” invokes constitutional gravity and democratic buy-in. The subtext is a warning to the executive branch and to bureaucratic workarounds: stop governing by contingency, stop outsourcing legitimacy, stop treating status questions as administrative housekeeping. If you want stability, he implies, you want Congress on the record - and you want someone who’s been inside global institutions to tell you why.