Whereas, every year on April 23, the people of Turkey and Turkish Americans celebrate Turkish National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, commemorating the day when the Turkish Grand National Assembly was founded; Whereas, on April 23, 1920, the Turkish Grand National Assembly was formally established, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary leader of modern Turkey, became its first President and led the Turkish national independence movement; Whereas the opening of the Turkish Grand National Assembly served, both symbolically and functionally, to ensure that sovereignty was taken from religious rule and the sultan and given to the people; Whereas Anatolia, home of the Republic of Turkey, has been a cradle of civilizations for millennia; Whereas James Madison and the Founding Fathers of America took inspiration from Patara, Turkey, the city state of the Lycian Confederation, in drafting the Constitution of the United States; Whereas Turkey and the United States resumed diplomatic ties, severed by the Ottoman Empire, in February 1927, under the respective leaderships of Presidents Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Calvin Coolidge; Whereas Ataturk said, in an interview with an American journalist in 1922, that [t]he American ideal is our ideal. As you had a declaration of independence, we also have our national pact. Both of these documents are of the same nature; like you, we also wanted independence. Turkey and America are democratic societies. … Lincoln and Washington [b]oth worked for the advancement, elevation and prosperity of America. … This high service is the service which a person assumes without thinking of himself. ; Whereas Ataturk also said now we Turks alone control our own homeland, we are the masters of our own house , and declared that sovereignty belongs to the people without any conditions or restrictions