[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 35 (Thursday, March 24, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: March 24, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
THE CLINTON YEARS, PART IV
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, about 35 Republicans were jammed in the
Cloakroom tonight watching Mr. Clinton's short press conference. It was
even shorter if you count only the time that he spoke. I do not think
it solved many things, but two things come to mind.
One was, he referred to himself and Mrs. Clinton as middle-class
folks or something like that. Pulling down over $200,000 a year between
them hardly qualifies them for middle-class status, particularly in the
second poorest State in the Union. In fact, they would be considered
the very rich under his tax plan.
I wanted to put into the Record an article by Lisa Shiffren that
appeared in the American Spectator a couple of months ago which exposes
the various funds that then-Governor Clinton was allowed to tap and
which allowed him to have a very comfortable life. These funds were out
of the control of the Arkansas Legislature. I think I will just submit
the front page so we do not get into any of these cost problems.
Mr. Speaker, when Mr. Leach, my colleague from Iowa and my classmate
from 1976, spoke on a point of personal privilege on the floor tonight,
I think his last sentence will ring through history. I know he is going
to add more to this and asked permission to do that at the end of
business today.
His last words were, ``Rather than high crimes and misdemeanors, the
issue today relates to high improprieties and breaches of the public
trust.''
Well, that is for openers. I hope people will treasure the
Congressional Record of today, because in it will be Mr. Leach's 20-
page statement that he has permission to augment.
Mr. Speaker, this whole Whitewater controversy is sinking into the
popular culture.
{time} 2130
The opening of the last two very popular youth culture shows,
Saturday Night Live, began with Whitewater. I have in front of me the
text from the night of March 12. It is so rough I cannot even put it in
the Record.
I think it was payback time for comedian actor Phil Hartman, because
the White House had blocked him from entertaining the Queen of England
at a command performance. They did not want him doing a parody of the
President of the United States. Can you imagine, if Mr. Reagan or Mr.
Bush had ever shut down an actor in England?
I will put in the Record the transcript of a song that opened
Saturday Night Live on 19 March. It is stunning to think that young
people are going to get their education on Whitewater more clearly from
comedians on a popular NBC comedy show than they will from the
President himself.
Mr. Speaker, the President was on ABC television last night and the
night before talking about his particular brand of Christianity. He was
asked by Peggy Wiemeyer, of ABC, about abortion.
He said, ``I think there are too many abortions in America,'' and yet
his policies are driving that number up. He said, ``I think there
should be more adoption in America.'' There are only 50,000, and we
know why. Then he says, ``I do not believe it is self-evident from the
Bible that abortion is murder.''
``As for homosexuality, well, the whole issue of homosexuality did
not make it into the Ten Commandments.''
Look up there, Mr. Speaker. Look at Moses looking down at you and
this Chamber. Did Mosaic law have to identify grand theft auto and
pick-pocketing for us to know it is wrong?
What Mr. Clinton ought to know is that any religion that respects
Mosaic law and the commandment, ``Thou shall not commit adultery,''
considers homosexuality and acts of sex outside of marriage sin.
Here is Clinton February 3, after he was lectured to by Mother Teresa
who begged him not to kill babies, to give them to her. He was at a
junior high school here in the District. In response to a child's
question, he says that ``Children are not prepared to take the
responsibility for children, having children. They are not even able to
take responsibility for themselves. This is not a sport,'' referring to
sex, ``this is a solemn responsibility. Look at it hard.'' Great words,
but I understand some of the kids chuckled.
That night on NBC Jay Leno said, ``If sex were a sport, Michael
Jackson and Mr. Clinton would obviously be up for gold medals.''
Mr. Speaker, but as bad as that is, Joycelyn Elders is probably going
to do more as Surgeon General to hurt the moral climate of our country
than any other appointment of Mr. Clinton's, and that is saying a
mouthful. I begin by urging everyone to look at the letter by James
Cardinal Hickey that I submitted during my one minute this morning on
the latest outrage by Dr. Elders.
Here is an article from the Wanderer, by a lady, Anne Stewart
Connell, that describes accurately how Dr. Elders actually have a
slave-master mentality. In her speech on February 25 to the Family
Planning and Reproductive Health Association, all a euphemism for
abortion, she blasted the medicaid system for its white male slave-
owner mentality. But Connell rightly points out, ``She has it all
wrong. It is she who demonstrated slave-owner mentality in her arrogant
and sarcastic words and actions.''
Mr. Speaker, I will include this article for the Record. It may move
people to subscribe to The Wanderer, which I think is the clearest-
thinking Christian publication today.
The final thing I would like to put in is the latest press release
from the General Counsel of the Plaintiffs, the Association of American
Physicians and Surgeons, and the American Council for Health Care
Reform, and the National Legal and Policy Center.
Today they filed a motion for summary judgment and permanent
injunction against, get this mouthful, Mr. Speaker, the
Interdepartmental Working Group of the President's Task Force on
National Health Care and its 15 cluster groups, 43 working groups, and
4 subgroups. They are taking on Ira Magaziner, another Rhodie who
actually got his degree, whereas Clinton did not, who is running this
health care task force with Mrs. Clinton. The AAPS said that he
testified under oath that those 511 people that were on that Health
Care Council, that long mouthful I just said, were composed entirely of
Federal Government employees.
Not true, not by a long shot. It looks like there is a huge conflict
of interest here, and the judges on this case are going to eventually
demand the release of all of these documents. I think the press
conferences to come in the future are going to be more and more
fascinating. I fear a Presidential meltdown, I had great respect for
Jimmy Carter and enjoyed every invitation to the White House, and went
there about 7 to 10 times when he was President. I look forward to
going there to visit with the 43rd presidency, a former colleague and a
great guy, Al Gore.
(Articles referred to follow:)
On March 23, 1994, the Plaintiffs, *Association of American
Physicians and Surgeons, *American Council for Health Care
Reform and the *National Legal & Policy Center: filed a
``Motion for Summary Judgment and Permanent Injunction''
asking that the *Interdepartmental Working Group of the
President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform and its
15 Cluster Groups, 43 Working Groups and 4 Subgroups be
declared Advisory Committees for purposes of the Federal
Advisory Committee Act on the grounds that the
*Interdepartmental Working Group and its Cluster Groups,
Working Groups and Subgroups were not composed ``wholly of
full-time officers or employers of the federal government''
and that they were established on January 25, 1993 by the
President and utilized by him for purposes of developing and
making recommendations on national health care reform, to
wit, the *Health Security Act of 1993. The injunction would
force the disclosure of all records of the Task Force and its
Cluster Groups, Working Groups and Subgroups.
Accompanying the ``Motion for Summary Judgment and
Permanent Injunction'' were nearly 2,000 documents produced
by the White House which reveal startling information. The
documents illustrate that *Ira Magaziner's Interdeparmental
Working Group and all 15 Cluster Groups, 43 Working Groups
and 4 Subgroups were not, as Magaziner testified under oath,
composed entirely of federal government employees, but,
rather, consisted, in every instance, of large numbers of
persons with vested private interests who have the world to
gain by the enactment of the Health Security Act of 1993,
which they developed and recommended. In over half of the
Cluster Groups, Working Groups and Subgroups, the leaders
were private individuals from health care interests who would
be key players in the Clinton Plan if enacted.
Private interests such as United Health Care Corporation,
Chicago Health Maintenance Organization, Aetna, Travelers,
Liberty Mutual Insurance, Wausau Insurance Company, National
Capitol Preferred Providers Organization (Hartford Insurance
Company), Harvard Community Health Plan, Kaiser Permanente,
U.S. Health Care, EDS Health Care, PCS Health Systems, First
Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Alliant Health
Systems--all managed care companies--were represented in the
Interdepartmental Working Group. Other potential contractors
such as Rand Corporation, Alpha Center, Urban Institute,
Telesis, MCI Communication, Coopers & Lybrand, Price
Waterhouse and the Principal Financial Group served on the
Task Force. The list of special interests--all seeking
special roles in the proposed health care plan as
contractors, alliances, administrators and medical auditors--
is enormous.
Moreover, of the many members of the Interdepartmental
Working Group and its Cluster Groups, Working Groups and
Subgroups who were listed as ``special government employees''
by the White House, only a small number (35) filed conflict
of interest forms and of those, many of the forms were
filed late and others were backdated and possibly forged.
Of those special government employees who had serious
conflicts of interest--and there were a sizable number--
none had complied with the Ethics in Government Act by
obtaining waivers. Of significant importance is that even
the President and the First Lady, prior to the time their
assets were placed in a blind trust, had invested in at
least one managed care company--United Health Care
Corporation--whose vice president served on the
Interdepartmental Working Group and many Cluster Groups,
Working Groups and Subgroups.
Probably the most serious problem raised by the Task Force
and its Interdepartmental Working Groups and its Cluster
Groups, Working Groups and Subgroups is the role of multi-
billion dollar tax exempt foundations who were instrumental
in staffing and decision-making. The Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, with $4 billion in assets, along with the Henry
J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Urban Institute planned
and staffed much of the Task Force. As they have done in many
states such as Arkansas, Washington, Kentucky, Minnesota and
Florida, these large, tax-exempt foundations developed the
format for the Task Force structure and asked their own
people, including many grant recipients, to sit on the Task
Force and develop the Clinton Managed Care Plan.
In addition, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation had paid
``Fellows'' sitting on the staffs of Sens. Kennedy,
Rockefeller, Wofford, Bumpers and Bradley who were passed off
to the Court by the White House as ``Congressional Staff'',
but who were wholly privately paid by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation. Ira Magaziner, of course, knew who these people
were as did Judith Feder, an official in the Department of
Health and Human Services, who was also on the Task Force and
who, herself, is a Robert Wood Johnson grant investigator.
The insinuation of these multibillion dollar, private, tax-
exempt foundations into the legislative and executive
branches of government, behind closed doors, in order to make
policy and legislation to benefit themselves and those they
seek to promote is frightening in the extreme.
Clearly, the Interdepartmental Working Group of the
President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform is not
only fraught with conflict-of-interest problems, but
represents an effort to utterly co-opt representative
government.
____
Dr. Elders: Slave-Master Mentality
(By Anne Stewart Connell)
The surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, in a speech to
the annual meeting of the National Family Planning and
Reproductive Health Association on Feb. 25th, blasted the
Medicaid system for its ``white male slave owner mentality.''
Elders has it all wrong. It is she who demonstrated slave
owner mentality in her arrogant and sarcastic words and
actions.
Elders castigated ``white male slave owner'' Medicaid
because ``it fails to provide services to poor women to
prevent unwanted pregnancies, and this failure contributes to
poverty, ignorance, and enslavement.'' She complained that if
we really want to do something about illegitimate births and
unwanted births, Medicaid should support family planning at
the same level as prenatal care. * * * The Medicaid system
must have been developed by a male slave owner. It pays for
you to be pregnant and have a baby, but it won't pay for much
family planning.''
What does slave master Elders mean by this? It's a known
fact that anybody who qualifies as being poor can get birth
control counseling and supplies from Planned Parenthood for
next to nothing. And when Elders was director of the Arkansas
Health Department, she attacked the ``deadly disease'' of
teenage pregnancy by establishing school-based clinics that
provided ``counseling'' and contraceptives to teenagers.
Result? Under Elders' tenure, the overall teen pregnancy rate
rose 12% in the counties with school-based clinics! What the
power-driven social engineers in Planned Parenthood and the
Clinton administration simply don't ``get'' is that trying to
impose their antilife values on women, young or not young, is
rejected as slave-master whipping.
Elders also stated at this meeting, ``We always talked
about the separation of church and state, I want to forget
about the separation. Let's try to integrate church and state
so we can come together and begin to do things that make a
difference to people in our community.'' That's a very
interesting slave-master comment. What she is really saying
is that she wants churches to preach her antilife gospel;
support her immoral sanctions of abortion and contraception;
and declare her to be the ``pope of infertility.''
This bigoted woman whom Clinton elevated to the position of
surgeon general was exposed in The Wall Street Journal on
July 22nd by Blant Hurt's commentary. Hurt, a Little Rock
businessman and a columnist for Arkansas Business, spoke from
firsthand experience. Elders triple-dipped salaries. in
addition to her ``two state salaries adding up to $103,297,
she was receiving $550 a day as a consultant to Donna
Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services!''
A person with the sleazy record of Dr. Elders is hardly in
a position to preach. But preach she does, and now she asks
the churches to sanction her slave-master beliefs and
attitudes. A message is in need of deliverance to Dr. Elders:
Just because you are black and a woman does not relieve you
of the judgment that you have a slave-master mentality. You
do, Dr. Elders, and it is totally unacceptable.
____
Bill and Hillary at the Trough
Ever wonder why President Bill and First Lady Hillary seem
so genuinely to believe that all money earned in the 1980s
was somehow illegitimate and undeserved? Or why, after a
decade-long national experiment, they seem completely
indifferent to the effects of tax rates on people's
willingness to work? Or to the relation between incentives
and productivity in general? Or, most dismaying, why they
seem not to believe that most people who do well work very
hard for their money?
When Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the
Supreme Court, he said: ``I believe the measure of a person's
values can best be measured by examining the life the person
lives.'' In that spirit, Bill and Hillary's financial life,
as reflected in a decade's worth of tax returns, sheds light
on their values, and the experience that shaped their
economic worldviews.
subsidies for personal expenses
Remember Bill Clinton's much-touted ``lowest-in-the-
nation'' $35,000 governor's salary? That was merely his cash
compensation--mad money. For the decade he was governor, all
Clinton's personal living expenses (including food, shelter,
transportation, and entertainment), along with security,
housekeeping, administration, utilities, etc., were paid out
of various state funds. Including those expenses, the care
and feeding of their humble governor cost taxpayers in the
nation's second-poorest state more than three-quarters of a
million dollars a year according to the Arkansas state
auditor, Julia Hughes Jones. And it left Hillary's annual
$150,000 or so free.
Two particular funds raise interesting legal questions. One
was a yearly $51,000 food allotment, intended for both state
functions and private meals, as well as incidental mansion
expenses and anything else the governor might wish to spend
it on. Unlike most expense funds, but like income, that
stipend was not subject to oversight by the state
legislature. (According to a former senior official in the
Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, ``One rule of
thumb used to determine what is income is unrestricted
discretion,'') While governor, America's First Appetite
annoyed the legislature by requesting a significantly larger
``food allowance'' during a late-1980s period of belt-
tightening. According to former IRS Commissioner Donald
Alexander, who has reviewed the returns, the $51,000 fund
``probably constitutes a failure to report income.''
____
Rockers to Explain Whitewater on Saturday Night Live
Back in 1978, the Clinton's bought some land to sell
vacation homes. 230 acres to be exact.
They borrowed $203 thousand with their friends the
MacDougals and formed the Whitewater Development Corporation.
That's a fact.
In 1980 MacDougal buys the Madison Bank and Trust.
He lends his partner Hillary 30 grand to build a model
house on a Whitewater lot. He loans her the money to get
around laws which prevent him from loaning money to himself
or his own company.
That's the plot.
It's very complicated. It's hard to understand.
We'll try to walk you through it, come on and take my hand.
In 1984 Whitewater helps Bill pay back a $20 thousand
personal loan to Cherry Valley Bank, and the Clintons claim
the payment as an interest deduction on their tax return.
That's an illegal deduction, but the Clinton's blame their
accountants for the mistake.
This is an intriguing turn.
MacDougal pays back Clinton's loan and hires Hillary and
her law firm to represent his bank. Then she helps Whitewater
buy a new place of land with an illegal $300 thousand loan.
MacDougal says he shipped the Clinton's all the files to
the Governor's Mansion and the Clinton's say they never got
them. These guys should talk on the phone.
It's very tough to figure, where it all went wrong.
But draw your own conclusions, from listening to our song.
Madison Bank goes under, with $60 million missing.
MacDougal is arrested and in a conflict of interest,
Hillary's law firm is hired for a suit against the bank that
it used to represent.
MacDougal is acquitted, but claims the Clinton's lost much
less than the $68 thousand they claim.
In 1992 Clinton ran for President.
It's really quite a puzzle, who did what to who.
But we gotta get a handle, it's up to me and you.
In 1993 Vince Foster, the Clinton's friend and attorney who
worked at the same firm as Hillary, filed long overdue taxes
for Whitewater which contradicted most of the established
financial numbers.
After his suicide, important papers were removed from his
office. White House staffers met with the Treasury Department
and then Janet Reno named a special prosecutor and the House
began deciding whether to hold hearings and what kind to
hold.
So finally the President had to bring Lloyd Cutler, an old
Democratic hand, to restore some order to his administration.
We don't have all the answers, perhaps we never will. The
only ones who'll ever know are Hillary and Bill and MacDougal
and his wife and Webster Hubbell and Margaret Williams and
Vince Foster.
____________________