But a lot of people laid down their seats in Congress so that police officers and kids wouldn’t have to lay down their lives under a hail of assault-weapon attacks, and I will not let that be repealed.  I will not let it be repealed.

I’d like to talk about a couple of other issues we have to deal with.  I want us to cut more spending, but I hope we won’t cut Government programs that help to prepare us for the new economy, promote responsibility and are organized from the grass roots up, not by Federal bureaucracy.

The very best example of this is the National Service Corps—­AmeriCorps.  It passed with strong bipartisan support and now there are 20,000 Americans —­more than ever served in one year in the Peace Corps—­working all over this country, helping person to person in local grass-roots volunteer groups, solving problems and in the process earning some money for their education.

This is citizenship at its best.  It’s good for the AmeriCorps members, but it’s good for the rest of us, too.  It’s the essence of the New Covenant and we shouldn’t stop it.

Illegal Immigration

All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.

The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants.  The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.  That’s why our Administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.  It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

The most important job of our Government in this new era is to empower the American people to succeed in the global economy.  America has always been a land of opportunity, a land where, if you work hard, you can get ahead.  We’ve become a great middle-class country; middle-class values sustain us.  We must expand that middle class and shrink the underclass even as we do everything we can to support the millions of Americans who are already successful in the new economy.

America is once again the world’s strongest economic power:  almost six million new jobs in the last two years, exports booming, inflation down, high-wage jobs are coming back.  A record number of American entrepreneurs are living the American dream.