Suraj Shah
University of Houston
Senate Campaign Launch
May 2nd, 2019
Shah's team booked the announcement at the Fertitta Center in the University of Houston, the day after his official announcement was released online. They had sent out an email to supporters to RSVP; attendance was naturally low for a Senate campaign rally, and even lower considering the short notice. Some devoted fans from his Houston district showed up, and a few volunteers and hired staffers handed out signs. The cameras were rolling for the livestream.
He was first introduced by his wife, Nandini, who raved on about his ability to bring people together and make concrete changes that improved people’s lives, whether it was by employing hundreds of people in Houston, Austin, and Dallas, or with his work to recover livelihoods of workers in the Baharia Department of Labor, or as a Congressmen who worked across the aisle to deliver results of constituents.
He took to the stage after her speech, walking on to Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”
Good afternoon, everybody! Thank you, Nandini, for that wonderful introduction. So many journeys for me and for my family began right here, and today we begin another one. I’m lucky in this journey, to have an incredible partner like Nandini.
This side of the city is very special to me. I wasn't born into a family of privilege; neither of my parents were a governor, a mayor, or anybody, really. A couple of blocks away from here, my dad opened his first motel. This was the result of years of late night shifts rebuilding our city's train tracks, working hard at odd jobs and making tough decisions. When my parents emigrated from India to Houston in the late 1960s in search of economic opportunity, we fit three generations of our family in a two-bedroom apartment over the bodega we were running. At the time, with a family living in poverty and scraping by to push his business up, I never imagined the success my father would find with Futura Hotels.
Life was tough but it was worth it. My dad got to realize his American Dream. And I want our Texans in 2019 to have the same opportunity.
Look, I’m running because Texans deserve a Senator who has the breadth of experience to serve all of our people. I’ve been a business leader in the private sector, I’ve worked in the executive branch, and I’ve served in the legislature. I’m not just a CEO. I’m not just a politician. I can bring both perspectives to the office.
In business, we don’t care much for what you say so much as what you do. We need results and we need them immediately. I’ve employed hundreds of hardworking Texans, and I’ve had to keep the business afloat for their sake just as much as mine. Being responsible for each other is a value I don’t ever forget.
In the 2008 Financial Crisis, things got hard. I know what it’s like to make payroll when times are tough. So when I see an empty storefront along the Houston streets, that’s not a political talking point to me. That’s personal.
There is a lot of talk right now about “Turning Texas Blue” versus “Keeping it Red.” There’s Democrats and Republicans repeating those cliches. I reject that rhetoric. Texans, we’re not at our best when we draw artificial lines in the sand and bicker over party lines. Texans have expressed our values and our patriotism the best when we stand by each other, regardless of ideology. In the Battle of Alamo, did we care if one was a Democrat or a Whig or a Federalist? No, of course not! Texans fought and died with each other, side by side, to defend each other and their home. These were legal residents, immigrants, and every one in between! They worked together to fight for a shared cause!
I have found most success myself when I leave our futile political differences at the front door, and actually work towards real results. When President Baharia needed someone with the experience of lifting up workers to revitalize employment during the Recession, he appointed me to the Employment and Training Administration to get the job done. In the Department of Labor, as a head of the ETA, I had to listen to unions and workers to understand their problems and aspirations in a time when most economic livelihoods had been knocked out. We had to rebuild our worker training and apprenticeship programs to reemploy people who were hurting during the Recession. I was at my best there when I stopped and listened instead of imposing my will.
You’re going to hear it repeatedly, perhaps from a fellow Democrat and definitely from the Republicans, about “liberal” ideals against "conservative" values. But since when were our Texan values not good enough? Here in Texas, we like to hear the other side out, work together, but never stop fighting for our interests and beliefs. As a Congressman, that’s what I’ve done. I worked with Republicans to lower interest rates for student borrowers. I still believe the federal government shouldn’t be profiting a cent off of student loans. That bill gave our young people as much immediate relief as possible at the time, and it only happened because I was willing to reach across the aisle to get real change done. Texan House members who were just about being a glitzy liberal icon and had national ambitions, they didn’t last long. I still serve the people of my district in the House.
I still think we can get big, bold changes passed in the Senate, but only the actual issues that matter to Texans. To me, everything is local. I have no national ambitions, no intention as of right now to make a presidential endorsement. Making life easier for young entrepreneurs, that matters to me. That means expanding tax credits specifically for young people with business ambitions.
Eliminating not just unemployment, but underemployment, matters to me. We need a national apprenticeship program to enhance the skills of our workers and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. We can go beyond apprenticeship and actually create jobs for the 8 million workers who can’t find one and the 5 million individuals who work part time but seek a full time job. We can create a good jobs program by establishing competitive state grants, provided by the Department of Labor, in order to create full time job opportunities. The federal funds could be used in local jobs guarantee programs in the public sector or by using the funds to incentivize private companies to employ workers.
Small businesses, especially in Texas, are facing a labor shortage. Around the country, over 7 million available jobs are unoccupied in part due to a dearth of qualified workers. A bill that I introduced last year in the House, the JOBS Act, would close this “skills-gap” by expanding Pell Grant eligibility to cover high-quality and rigorous short-term job training programs so workers can afford the skills training and credentials that are in high-demand in today’s job market.
These are smart ideas that suit the needs of Texans. They’re not fashionable ideas of the day, they don’t garner much attention nationwide amongst the political pundits on MSNBC and CNN. But they deal with the kitchen-table issues that the small business owners of Texas are thinking about, they're tackling the problems that the 1 million unemployed Texans have to deal with everyday.
We are living in a time when our leaders do not reflect the old-fashioned family values of Texas. Instead of building a nation that our children can be proud of, our former Texas Senators did the exact opposite. They enabled an agenda that separates babies from their mothers, and put them into cages - in our backyard! They turned a blind eye while 25,000 Texans live out on the streets, without access to affordable housing. These leaders turned their backs on us while Texas leads the country in our uninsured population.
What did they do to enforce the values we derive from faith? Baby Jesus, he was a refugee! But our leaders, they were not guided by religion. Instead, they threw 5,400 migrant children into government detention centers at the border.
Did Jesus ignore the poor, the sick, the elderly? Of course not, he healed them! Yet, our former leaders tried to cut Medicaid and SNAP, they tried to rip 20 million people off of their health insurance by repealing the Affordable Care Act, and their allies still hope to make cuts to Social Security.
If we are guided by our faith, whether you're a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, or anybody else, we would recognize that these actions are betrayals of our universal values.
We wouldn't ignore the poor - we would assist them. We need to expand SNAP benefits, expand the Child Tax Credit, reform the Earned Income Tax Credit. These are hand-ups, not handouts!
We wouldn't punish the uninsured - we would cover them! We need to take immediate steps to lower premiums and cover more people. What we find over and over again is that the people who are most likely to be paying higher premiums are people over 50. We have a situation where people are losing jobs, and finding it hard to find affordable health insurance. There are professions with mandatory retirement in their 50s. Some of those have good retirement insurance, and others don’t. We need to garner bipartisan support to pass a Medicare at 55 bill, which would lower the age for Medicare eligibility to folks in their 50's and would give them access to more affordable, quality health care coverage. By putting the elderly in a separate risk pool, insurance companies could lower premiums for everybody else. After taking immediate steps like this, we would be on a glide path to a Medicare-like public option for everybody to opt-into.
We wouldn't screw over the elderly - we'll take their issues seriously. I will push to increase Social Security benefits and make the program solvent into the next century. We can accomplish this with bipartisan action to lift the Social Security taxable maximum to $400,000, and I'll push to set the new minimum benefit at 25% of the poverty line, with new cost of living standards that are tied to the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly. This has the potential to be bipartisan if someone in the Senate has the will to act. If we fail to act on Social Security, it will be depleted by 2035 and we will all be accountable to our constituents.
Friends, when I was a kid I believed in the American Dream. It allowed my family to go from penniless immigrants to leaders in business. It allowed me to get a college education. And I got to work as an advisor to President Baharia, I got to lead a program in the Department of Labor, and now I am a U.S. Congressman. This is what upward mobility looks like.
My family’s story wouldn’t be possible without a country that challenged itself to live up to the promise of America. That was the point of the American Dream: It wasn’t supposed to be just a dream. America was the place where dreams could become real. But right now, that isn’t working. Today we’re falling backwards instead of moving forward. And the opportunities that made America, America are reaching fewer and fewer people.
It's time to be the state of family values again. That means eliminating child poverty, establishing universal pre-k, guaranteeing paid family leave, and increasing child care subsidies. This is what our identity as Texans call for. This is what our universal values from faith tell us.
You give me your support, and I give you my word: I will spend every day working hard to make sure you can get a good job, find a decent place to live, have good health care when you get sick and that your children and grandchildren can reach their dreams, no matter who you are or where you come from.
They say everything's bigger in Texas. We have bigger hearts. Bigger hopes. Bigger dreams. Now's not the time to run away from our morals - but towards them.
And I would be humbled to have you join us in this fight. I'm Suraj Shah, and I'm running for Senate. We would be very grateful if you visited our site, surajforsenate.com, and either make a donation or sign up to volunteer. Only together can Texas reclaim the Senate with a leader who fights for all of us.
