Discover video-sourced quotes by politicians

Pete Buttigieg: “If you want to testify in Congress, you have to be invited…”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation"

Published January 28, 2026 | Video Starts at 35:15

Like, it won't surprise you that I'm saying this. Things like city government, you can show up and if something's going on that affects you, you can speak out. If you want to testify in Congress, you have to be invited or subpoenaed. If you want to speak in front of the elected officials making decisions in the South Bend Common Council, you show up on a Monday night. (35:15–35:21)

CLAIM

Asserts that testifying in Congress requires an invitation or subpoena.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

Discover more from

Pete Buttigieg

“The data centers are $10 billion projects.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:18-17:22
“At the time that the Security Council was set up, something like 90% of people in China were rural peasants.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 30:03-30:13
“Today, people living in China, for the most part, enjoy superior technology in transportation and certain other sectors to people living in…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 30:13-30:23
“South Bend was a billion dollar mandate from the EPA to change the way that the sewer system emptied into the river.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 43:58-44:05
“The interconnection between the life of the university and the city has become extraordinary.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 06:31-06:41
“The world [children are] coming into will obviously be so radically transformed.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 08:57-09:02
“We seem to have less access to the truth now than we did 20 years ago.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 10:27-10:33
“The most important questions about how AI will unfold...are fundamentally policy questions.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 10:38-10:46
“We have decisions to make, whether it's public policy about the economy and who gets to benefit from the enormous wealth that is being…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 10:48-10:59
“Educational institutions will of course have to develop policies that will support the building of tools that we need to do on our own.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 11:23-11:34
“There's no more reason to expect automatically that [AI] will make us worse at thinking than it is to assume that the advent of the…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 11:34-11:46
“We've had the benefit of about a 100 year period in which any question of fact could mostly be settled...if somebody...could produce a…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 12:24-12:37
“That's no longer available to us, or it's in the process of, we're in the process of losing it.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 12:48-12:54
“Few places are more vulnerable to it [AI], but I think also a few places have more value that they might be able to unlock from it than…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 13:35-13:46
“The GM facility alone, that's three or $4 billion.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:14-17:18
“I met with electrical worker apprentices in classes with more than 200 people at a time.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:25-17:30
“It used to be maybe a dozen union electrical workers in an apprentice class, if you were lucky.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:29-17:35
“We invested in this community both in ways that were very much associated with the administration, like EVs and newer clean tech industry.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 17:38-17:48
“That was ARPA dollars.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 18:12-18:14
“When I took office, our per capita income, I think, was 17,000 or $18,000 per person.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 19:27-19:33
“Unemployment was double digits.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 19:34-19:37
“Newsweek said we were one of America's 10 dying cities.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 19:36-19:40
“Universities are under attack not because they are liberal, but because they are independent.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 22:33-22:41
“The moment that we become the kind of country where your ability to get a job or your eligibility to get cancer research funding or your…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 22:57-23:26
“The example set by the Republican members of the State assembly is so powerful and important because they were pushed to do something that…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 24:53-25:08
“What every firm, every university and every politician has discovered if they tried to play the game of this administration in order to…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 26:13-26:32
“The rules-based international order has always been one in which the rules were bent.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 29:09-29:16
“We have some institutions that are designed to be robust enough that they last for centuries, like the US Constitution.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 29:35-29:43
“Most of the biggest changes, transformations, upheavals in human history were driven by young people.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 34:05-34:13
“If you want to speak in front of the elected officials making decisions in the South Bend Common Council, you show up on a Monday night.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 35:25-35:32
“When I see a five year old child used as bait in Texas in an immigration race, trade to get a hold of his parents who, from what I…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 37:43-37:59
“An American citizen is being dragged out on a cold Minnesota day in his underwear by troops.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 38:00-38:09
“Political Instagram or TikTok or whatever it's going to be, which by the way, has overtaken actual media journalism, is how a lot of people…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 41:11-41:21
“By doing [this], it could save hundreds of millions of dollars, which meant thousands of dollars per family in their water rates in a low…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 44:21-44:31
“We faced this here during the first Trump administration before it ever came to the level that we're dealing with right now.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 46:29-46:35
“Companies that were showing me their leadership two years ago in electric vehicles... building battery factories in Glendale, Kentucky and…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 52:49-53:04
“Now two years later, they're backtracking, some of them writing off billions of dollars of value that was effectively just wiped out by the…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 53:19-53:31
“Our administration... believed not only that there was an environmental benefit to electric vehicles, but that there was a strategic benefit…”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 53:29-53:29
“China make these huge investments in EVs... because they understand the strategic value of conquering the future of the auto industry.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 53:49-54:06
“If you're an automaker, you intend to do your product planning on about a four year cycle.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 54:29-54:34
“We're supposed to be a country that has less vulnerability to policy whiplash than other systems.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 54:44-54:53
“The filibuster... should be done away with.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 55:15-55:23
“Government in general at the federal level has become so unresponsive to people, to what people actually think, that you get these lurches.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 55:41-55:54
“The way we elect members of Congress is not set in the Constitution.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 57:27-57:30
“The electoral college is a problem.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 57:40-57:43
“I think a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics is appropriate.”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 58:53-58:57
“Most Americans want [a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics].”
Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation" | Uploaded January 28, 2026 | 58:57-58:59