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WASHINGTON D.C. — This week, Congressman French Hill (AR-02) spoke on the House floor to decry the partisanship that has taken hold of our nation and remind people of the great friendship between former Speaker of the House Nick Longworth and Minority Leader John Garner. 

Click on the picture above to watch video of Rep. Hill's speech on the House floor this past Wednesday.

Highlights of his prepared remarks are copied below:

"Mr. Speaker, I look forward with optimism to the 116th Congress. I refuse to be pulled down into the vortex of negativism and profanity that is engulfing our social media and cable television programming. Instead, I am grateful for the opportunity to work to pursue policies to improve our nation.

"Mr. Speaker I spent my first two terms in Congress building relationships with my colleagues in both the House and the Senate and in both political parties. I've done this based on the experiences that I had as a staffer in the 1980’s working for the U.S. Senate Banking Committee as well as my four years of service in the administration of Pres. George H.W. Bush. I value political leaders reasoning together to find common ground to tackle our nation’s policy challenges-large and small.

"In this context, I host periodic, bipartisan dinners, the Longworth-Garner Dinners, so named for Nick Longworth of Cincinnati, Ohio Speaker of the House from 1925 to his untimely death in 1931 and his good friend, Congressman Jack Garner from Uvalde, Texas, Minority Leader much of the time when his friend Nick was Speaker.

"These two men could not have been more different: Longworth was from a patrician family that settled in Cincinnati in the early 19th century and he was married to Teddy Roosevelt's oldest daughter, Alice.

“'Cactus' Jack Garner was a rough-and-tumble Texan who worked his way up as a small-town lawyer and county judge prior to becoming a very successful member of the U.S. House.

"For his part, on the untimely death of Longworth in 1931 Garner, who then became Speaker, said  'He was an aristocrat; I am a plebian. Perhaps our different rearing intensified our interest in each other. I have lost one of the best friends of a lifetime, the country a good citizen, and the Congress a most valuable legislator.'

"It was 'Cactus' Jack and Nick that cooked up the tradition that each afternoon, no matter how much fighting had taken place on the floor of the House, they retreated to room H-128 of the U.S. Capitol, nicknamed the Bureau of Education, to have a drink and 'strike a blow for liberty.'

"The purpose of our Longworth-Garner dinners is to get to know each other, to understand what our goals and objectives are and how we can work effectively together on the House Financial Services Committee.

"I will continue this tradition during the 116th Congress and I look forward to working hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder with my colleagues both in both parties and in both chambers to move our country forward and seek to achieve to better our nation through partnership."