[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 45 (Thursday, April 21, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 21, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
              THE VALIDITY OF THE WHITEWATER INVESTIGATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
February 11, 1994, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the minority leader's designee.
  Mr. DORNAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by setting the tone, 
and then turn it over to the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton].
  Madam Speaker, we have a press problem today. The dominant media 
culture, the liberal press, are beating their breasts saying, ``Have we 
gone too far with Whitewater?'' I, myself, think they have only 
scratched the surface, but they are saying, ``Are we crippling our 
Government? What are we doing?''
  I do not know if the Speaker saw the hour and a half show the other 
night, the expanded Nightline with Ted Koppel. Among the guests were 
Rush Limbaugh and James Carville. Listen to this, I have waited a 
couple of weeks since our break to put this in the Record. It comes 
courtesy of my good friend, Brent Bozell III, over at the Media 
Research Center.
  This quote is from a reporter in the Washington Post. Talk about a 
schizophrenic operation. I never heard of this gentleman. I look 
forward to having lunch with him some day. His name is Phil McCombs. He 
filed this story out of Coronado, CA, March 30, and thank God it went 
in the Style section and not on the front page.
  I would say to the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton], he is going 
to think I am making this up as I read these words:
  To watch this President connect with people emotionally is an awesome 
thing. It is a raw, needy, palpable, electrifying thing that happens. 
There is no smile on Clinton. It is as if he is soaking up the people 
like he is soaking up the Sun, with the warmth pouring deep and direct 
into his political soul and recharging him, refilling him somehow once 
again with his own humanity and some sense of his role in the destiny 
of his country.
  ``Then, the hunger slaked, the great beast of Need fed,'' and 
``Need'' is capitalized here, and I do not know why, ``the great beast 
of his Need fed once again, it seemed you could almost see the 
gratitude pouring off his brow like sweat as he made his way through 
the beach crowds.''

  The title, by the way, put on this by Mr. Brent Bozell, was ``Licking 
Up Clinton's Sweat.''
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. If the gentleman will yield, first of all, I 
will concede that President Clinton probably is one of the finest 
politicians on the stump I have ever seen. I say this with all due 
respect to President Reagan, and I think he is even more effective than 
President Reagan was, and Reagan was the best I had seen up to that 
time.
  Let me just tell my colleague, the gentleman from California, I am 
very concerned about the Whitewater investigation. A few months ago we 
were investigating Ron Brown, the head of the Department of Commerce, 
because allegations had been made by a man named Binh Ly that he took a 
$700,000 up-front payoff to normalize relations with Vietnam, and to 
lower the trade barriers with them, even though we were not going to 
get a full accounting of our POW-MIA's.
  The gentleman who made the accusation also said that the money was 
being transferred to Bank Indosuez in Singapore by the Vietnamese 
Government. The FBI gave Mr. Ly a 6-hour lie detector test. He passed 
it, the FBI verified a large sum of money was transferred to a bank in 
Singapore by the Vietnamese Government, and yet when the grand jury 
investigated this case down in Miami, the Justice Department, Janet 
Reno, I believe, and I do not know this for sure, but I believe at the 
request of the White House, sent one of her top aides down to conduct a 
grand jury investigation.
  Anybody that knows the prosecutorial process at a grand jury hearing 
knows the prosecutor can either get an indictment or not get an 
indictment.
  After they had a long grand jury investigation, they had not even 
called Mr. Binh Ly to testify. I called down and said:

       I don't want to interfere with the grand jury process, but 
     this is a man that I think ought to at least testify, because 
     he is the chief accuser.

  Two days before the end of the grand jury investigation, as I recall, 
they call Mr. Ly. Then they said they did not have enough evidence to 
indict. When the Congress of the United States was charged with the 
responsibility under the Constitution to investigate criminal 
wrongdoing or the allegations of criminal wrongdoing, asked for a 
hearing, they said, ``Hey, this has been resolved by the grand jury,'' 
and the whole thing was whitewashed. it just stopped.
  Now comes Whitewater. They would not allow us to have hearings on the 
Whitewater case. They said that we did not need to have them. They said 
this was just a wild goose chase, even though there had been 23 
investigations under Reagan and Bush. They did not think it was 
necessary under Brown, and they do not think it is necessary right now.

  What do they do? The media and the leadership in this House, the 
Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate, kept finding 
more and more information about this. Finally the President and Mrs. 
Clinton said, ``OK, we will go along with a special counsel.'' They 
picked Mr. Fiske, who is a Republican, they say, who is supposed to be 
nonpartisan, clean as a hound's tooth. Then we find out Mr. Fiske 
worked with Mr. Nussbaum on several cases when they were in New York. 
Mr. Fiske recommended Bernie Nussbaum, the right-hand man of President 
Clinton, to be the assistant counsel during the Iran-Contra affair.
  Mr. Fiske--upon the recommendation of Mr. Fiske, Mr. Nussbaum and the 
White House looked with favor upon Louis Frie, who I think will do a 
good job as head of the FBI. Mr. Fiske's law firm represented the 
International Paper Co. that sold several hundred acres to Whitewater 
for $50,000.
  We would think that they would have picked somebody totally 
disassociated with the White House and with Whitewater and Mr. Nussbaum 
and everything but no, they picked Mr. Fiske. It appears as though, to 
the American people and to many Members of Congress, that there is a 
pattern that is evolving here. We saw a whitewash, I believe, of the 
Ron Brown affairs. Now we see what I believe may be a whitewash of 
Whitewater.
  The Congress of the United States has the responsibility under the 
Constitution to investigate these matters. Yet, Mr. Fiske says, ``We do 
not want you to interfere until we have conducted our investigation.'' 
They did that with Ron Brown, and because of that, we never had 
hearings in the House regarding the allegation that he took $700,000 in 
front money and millions more to follow, in order to normalize 
relations with Vietnam.
  What happened? They lowered the trade barriers with Vietnam. The 
embargo was ended. We are normalizing relations, and 2,300 POW-MIA's 
are still unaccounted for, and their families do not know about them, 
yet Mr. Brown was exonerated. We never had hearings.
  Now Mr. Fiske is going down that same road with Whitewater, and I 
fear that what is going to happen is, they are going to say there is 
nothing, no indication of wrongdoing, even though there is all kinds of 
questions that have been raised against Foster's death, other deaths 
that have been involved, the taxpayers' dollars, misuse of funds, 
misuse of political power. All those things should be investigated by 
Congress.
  If the President, like Mr. Brown, and if this administration has 
nothing to be concerned about, then let us have the hearings. Let us 
get it over with, and let us get the President back to the job of doing 
what he has to do to keep the country on the right track.
  I do not think anybody wants to impair the President or impugn the 
integrity of the Presidency itself, but we do have a responsibility to 
get these questions answered. It seems like to me we have been 
stonewalled under Brown, we have been stonewalled now under Mr. Fiske 
and Whitewater, and we do not want a whitewash of Whitewater.
  I think the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] for yielding to 
me.
  Mr. DORNAN. Madam Speaker, if the gentleman will wait, I am sorting 
some of my papers here and I want to recruit him to do a service for 
me.
  Here is the staff work on the crime bill, which I hope will comprise 
50 minutes of my special order. It was put together, I think, by either 
the staff of the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] or the gentleman 
from New York, ``Fighting Gerry Solomon,'' from beautiful upstate New 
York, the Lake George area.
  I would ask the gentleman if he would read these eight little-known 
facts about the crime bill. Some of them he may not know. As he reads 
the, give us the page please, where it appears in the crime bill. We 
know this audience is growing on C-SPAN past almost up to a million and 
a half people. They are going to think they are watching ``Saturday 
Night Live'', and the gentleman and I are doing a skit here, as they 
hear him reading these eight little-known facts about this bill.

                              {time}  1640

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. I will be happy to do that for my colleague. I 
must say I did not come down here for this, but I do think it has 
merit, and I will go into it with the gentleman.
  It is entitled, ``Eight Little Known Facts About the Crime Bill,'' 
the bill that passed the house today:

       No. 1. Encourages children to be out of their homes and on 
     the streets after midnight. Many Americans probably believe 
     children should be at home and in bed after midnight. This 
     bill would pay people to set up midnight sports programs that 
     keep kids out all night.--Page 138.
       No. 2. Contains ludicrous mandates in its prevention 
     programs. To establish a midnight sports league, the league 
     must have eight teams and each team must have ten players. 
     Presumably, a league with six teams and 12 players per team, 
     would be worthless in preventing crime.--Page 140.
       No. 3. Outlaws the use of religion in crime prevention 
     programs. Although $8 billion will go to fighting teenage 
     pregnancy, AIDS, drug use, and crime, the bill prohibits any 
     of this money from going to religious worship or 
     instruction.--Page 121.
       No. 4. Fights crime in odd ways, Part I. This bill will 
     ``fight crime'' by funding ``cultural programs, arts and 
     crafts, and health education and service programs, and dance 
     programs.''--Page 120.
       No. 5. Turns police departments into social service 
     agencies. The House crime bill will fund police departments 
     if they run ``after-school activity and neighborhood 
     recreation programs, and parent support groups that are led 
     jointly by child or family services.''--Page 134.
       No. 6. Fights crime in odd ways, Part II. The House crime 
     bill will spend millions of dollars to ``increase the self-
     esteem'' of young criminals and ``provide such youth with 
     Life skills,'' whatever that means.--Page 152.
       No. 7. Punishes successful values and rewards failed 
     values. Money to fund the social welfare programs in this 
     bill would come from working people with working-class 
     values. However, the money would go to neighborhoods or 
     communities with high levels of ``use or sale of illegal 
     drugs; high incidence of crimes committed by youths or young 
     adults; high rates of HIV or sexually transmitted disease; 
     and high rates of pregnancy or births among adolescents.''--
     Pages 140-141. It takes money from one segment and puts into 
     the other.
       No. 8. Fights crime in odd ways, Part III. Most Americans 
     think enforcing the law and locking up criminals is how you 
     fight crime. But, this crime bill calls for ``instituting a 
     collaborative structure that trains and coordinates the 
     efforts of teachers, administrators, social workers, guidance 
     counselors and school volunteers to provide concurrent social 
     services.''--Page 121.

  I know my colleague from California will elaborate further on these 
eight little vignettes. The thing that disturbs me a great deal about 
the bill was an editorial that we read, many of us, just before the 
vote today, and that was that many people were going to be released 
because there was a disproportionate number of people in one race or 
another that might be on death row.
  Madam Speaker, I believe, and I think my colleague, the gentleman 
from California believes that if a person commits murder, regardless of 
their race or their natural origin or their religion or whatever else, 
they should pay the same price for that crime as any other person who 
commits a crime, regardless of race.
  Mr. DORNAN. Exactly.
  MR. BURTON. We should not be letting people out on the streets 
because they are black, white, Italian, whatever they happen to be, and 
the bill does set some quotas and allow some people to get out simply 
because they are of a minority race. I think that is a mistake. If they 
commit murder, they should pay the price.
  Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. DORNAN. I thank the gentleman from Indiana. Enjoy those eight 
facts at your town hall meetings over the weekend.
  Madam Speaker, I just voted against the crime bill as did the 
gentleman because it left so much on the cutting room floor up in the 
Committee on Rules on the third floor on the east side of this 
building. The very best of our Republican amendments were not allowed 
to be debated. This cheapens our democratic system.
  Madam Speaker, I don't want to leave the impression there was nothing 
good in the bill. There were some good things. One of them I myself had 
brought to this House floor almost 6 years ago now, the police corps, 
which is exactly patterned after the Reserve Office Training Corps that 
we have had in our high schools and colleges for over half a century 
and from which we sent so many young males off into combat as ROTC 
graduates, second lieutenants, ensigns and Marine platoon leaders. 
Today we are sending young men and women off into our military services 
augmenting our great service academies like West Point, Annapolis and 
the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The police corps, will do 
the same for police departments. I am glad the police corps did get in.
  Here are some other good things that got in, and do not get excited 
over these across America and, Madam Speaker, because we do not know if 
they are going to survive the conference. The conference will start in 
a few weeks between the House and the Senate. The Senate bill was 
slightly better than ours, although a lot of liberal cant went into 
crippling parts of that bill. It had about $8 billion worth of hug-a-
thug, feel-good social programs that should all be over in the Health 
and Human services budget, not hidden in a crime bill. The liberals 
have made a habit of putting social spending programs in the defense 
bill and I am sick that they have now done it with crime.

  Madam Speaker, here are some good things we did fight to get in. 
These were all from yesterday, and a few good things today.
  Prevent prisoners from receiving Pell grants for college education. 
Some of them have not even passed their GED/high school equivalency 
test.
  Two. Require the Justice Department to pay for the imprisonment of 
illegal immigrants who commit felonies. How we can dump this on 
Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida; it is criminal 
what the Federal Government does to the border States when it mandates 
everything from school benefits, health benefits, and now the Federal 
Government's failure in keeping our borders secure. We should pick up 
that tab and feel the heat here at the Federal level.
  Madam Speaker, another good provision. Authorize the hiring of 6,000 
more Border Patrol agents. Of course getting the money for that is not 
going to be easy. Will it survive the Senate-House conference? I hope 
so.
  Here is one I think a lot of prison guards are really going to 
appreciate. Remove the weight training and similar expensive workout 
machines--some prisons have Nautilus equipment, state of the art--and 
prevent prisoners from engaging in activities to increase their 
fighting abilities. Guys actually get their black belt at our expense 
in prison so that when the rebellion comes in the prison, they are 
taking out guards using the martial arts that they learned at our 
expense with state-of-the-art equipment. If they want to exercise, let 
them jog out in the prison yard.
  Madam Speaker, here is another good provision. Give law enforcement 
officials and the courts access to the criminal histories in stalking 
cases and domestic violence cases. If you have got some drunk beating 
up his wife all the time and he has got a record as long as your arm 
for violence in the streets, fights in bars, assault with deadly 
weapons, the courts should know that so that the wife and children can 
be protected. And the same with some sick stalker. Many of these 
stalkers are deadly enough that they kill the victims that they are 
stalking.
  Madam Speaker, here is another good provision. Some killings have 
taken place across this country--I know one that happened 25 years 
ago--by people who would get personal information from the State by 
asking about a license number. It used to be in California, that for a 
quarter you could get the home address of anybody if you know their 
license numbers. This bill prohibits all the State motor vehicle 
departments from disclosing personal information about individuals. 
There were certain exceptions in there that were reasonable.
  We also limited Federal judges' ability to stick their nose into 
State prison systems and declare certain jails unconstitutionally 
overcrowded. This has wrecked havoc in Texas particularly, where the 
average sentence for murder, something like 8.1 years, and people have 
been getting out in three point something years because of this 
overcrowding problem.
  The biggest mistake made yesterday was passing the race bias test for 
death penalty. Nearly 4,000 death row convicts could use this provision 
passed yesterday to beat the death penalty. Again if it survives the 
Senate conference, hundreds could escape execution.

                              {time}  1650

  The States started reinstituting capital punishment in 1976. Less 
than 205 criminals, and I think it is about 204 or 205, have been 
executed in only 22 States. The Federal Government has yet to execute 
anybody, although we do have six people on death row.
  I am not a fan of capital punishment. All of the Catholic bishops and 
all of the Episcopalian bishops, the majority of Rabbis, and a lot of 
other religious leaders in this country do not want capital punishment. 
Amnesty International speaks out regularly against capital punishment. 
Most European nations no longer have it. Most democracies and civilized 
nations no longer have it.
  Let me tell you something, when you are approaching an absolute state 
of anarchy, a State has a right to impose martial law as Abraham 
Lincoln did during the Civil War rebellion. In some areas of our 
country have reached a point that if the State does not say, ``You will 
pay for these heinous crimes with your life,'' we depress the whole 
range of punishments so severely down to the very bottom that grand 
theft auto is a literal slap on the wrist. No caning, just try not to 
steal so many cars. It does affect the whole criminal system.
  The Tory wit, John Sparrow, used to tell the story of the two 
castaways who wash up on the beach of an unknown country. The first 
thing they see is a corpse dangling at the end of a rope.
  One sailor says to the other, ``Well, at least it's a civilized 
country.''
  The point is, only a civilized country restrains crime by the formal 
process of legal execution. In an uncivilized country citizens rely 
upon private force to defend themselves against lawlessness and casual 
murders fostered by the absence of effective lawful punishment.
  I myself, if I could be convinced that we were building a series of 
prisons that truly were places where you would incarcerate only the 
most cruel, the most violent, the most vicious, and they would know 
when that door slammed that they were going to die there as an old man, 
and that they would not have conjugal visits, color pornography, color 
TV, MTV, every major sporting event coming into their cells, Nautilus 
weight equipment, three simple meals a day, no utensils, plastic spoon, 
and that is it, I would be willing to say, OK, if we will film what 
this is like, play it over our televisions regularly, public-service 
spots, let the youth of America that opt so easily for crime because 
now they know that crime does pay, I would be willing to say life is so 
sacred and ordained only by God that nobody should take a human life. 
Unfortunately, we aren't near that point.
  We have lost just in the last 10 years the societal attitude that a 
murder was the most horrendous abrogation of God's authority, whether 
of a tiny innocent little fetus baby in the womb, or, which the chief 
of police described to me here in the District of Columbia, of an 84-
year-old man walking down the street who was killed by three teenagers 
who were not on drugs and who then went home and took a nap. The late 
Isaac Fulwood told me they had no conscience. We have raised a 
generation of kids devoid of conscience. I watched five kids, none of 
them African-Americans by the way, at a California prison. They were 
discussing killing, and two or three of them said they did it to see 
what it was like to watch the life force slowly go out of a human 
being. We do not have an awe for murder any longer.
  I know that some people who are against capital punishment, like 
Amnesty International, think that it also cheapens life. I always make 
the case we are not dealing with Ireland, Norway, or Switzerland here 
small and sparsely populated. We are dealing with an anarchistic 
situation in many cities around this country. And I cannot tell the 
voters in my district, I cannot look a mother in the eyes whose child 
was kidnaped, tortured, and murdered in the most awful of 
circumstances, I cannot tell that mother that she is no longer going to 
be given the right to sleep well at night.
  One of the most stunning crime facts I ever came across was in People 
magazine, of all places. It was after Ted Bundy was executed. An 
official with the State of Florida called up a mother whose only 
daughter had been viciously murdered by Bundy. By the way, in his last 
interview with my friend, Dr. Jim Dobson, Bundy said that pornography, 
just simple ordinary run-of-the-mill woman-demeaning pornography of the 
1960's, is what started him on his path toward the ultimate brutality 
of torture, murder, torture, rape. Anyway, this mother, she picked up 
the phone and the Florida official said two words, ``It's over.'' She 
knew that Bundy had been killed. She said to the People magazine 
reporter that it was the first night in 14 years that she had slept for 
8 hours.
  How do we deny that? That is not vengeance. That is giving peace of 
mind to a victim, in this case a surviving parent who lost their only 
child. That is giving justice to the victims of crime. It is an answer 
I have never had anybody from Amnesty International or a well meaning 
liberal answer effectively to me about capital punishment.
  We succeeded in gutting it here today and yesterday.
  Now, just to go back to a couple of these eight little known facts 
about crime that Mr. Burton read, this one here about outlawing the use 
of religion in crime prevention.
  You know, we could have left this one out of the bill. And if 
somebody was abusing the separation of church and state in this country 
with Federal money and not keeping the church services separate from 
the other activities, then that could have been handled in that area by 
some court challenge. But to tell a nation of young people that they 
will hear nothing abut Moses, his full face looking down on this 
Chamber, the great lawgiver of the Hebrews, that they can learn nothing 
about Mosaic law, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt 
not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, that they cannot hear 
anything about Christianity, the combined Old Testament, the Judaism 
that created this civilization we call Western civilization, that we 
cannot teach people anything about right, wrong, absolute guilt, 
conscience, honoring your mother or your father, to try and strip all 
of that out of every program that goes out to young people, just to 
tell them to go play basketball at midnight; how demeaning, how 
absolutely ludicrous, and, again, a sign of cultural meltdown in our 
society.
  What I said in a 1-minute speech earlier on the day we began debating 
the crime bill this week, most historians consider a generation 30 
years. A generation ago was in the spring in 1964. As the Barry 
Goldwater campaign was ginning up, Nelson Rockefeller was making the 
rounds in my party. It was then that the Filthy Speech Movement, even 
got it down to an acronym, the FSM, the Filthy Speech Movement, at the 
mother of universities in the western United States, Cal Berkeley, that 
Filthy Speech Movement started. Participants screamed every vile Anglo-
Saxon word at the top of their voice and over bullhorns on the campus. 
That was the beginning of the roaring 1960's. Actually the 1960's were 
half over. I think if you look at an 11-year period from the spring of 
1964 to April 30 of 1975, when Vietnam collapsed, Saigon fell to the 
Communist invaders, the 11-year period was one of drug glorification. 
The glorifying homosexuality as equal to normal family life. It was the 
beginning of saying if it feels good, do it. We were told to make love, 
Free love, Easy love, Love with strangers, Love in orgies, Switch-
hitting, Wife-swapping. What they got was an AIDS epidemic that has 
killed 140,000. Within 2 years, death from AIDS will be five times the 
death toll in combat in Vietnam.
  Yes, a lot of it was energized by the liberals, no-win, no-victory-
allowed war in Vietnam. When that 11 years was up, we had a generation, 
the baby-boomer generation, that was spoiled with too many of this 
world's goods and too much misdirected love because their families came 
through the hell of the Depression and then World War II. That baby-
boomer generation that is now in its prime, pulling all the levers of 
power in some places including parts of this Congress and soon the 
Supreme Court, certainly over at the White House with its overabundance 
of flower children.

                              {time}  1700

  Do you want to hear a statistic that is absolutely incredible? Now 
listen to this: A boy born in 1974, at the end of what we call the 
sixties--that is, 1964 through 1975--a baby born in 1974, a boy--and 
this has nothing to do with ethnic heritage--stands a greater chance of 
being murdered than a soldier in World War II stood of being killed in 
combat.
  I mean, in my mind, I cannot accept that statistic. I was a young boy 
during World War II. It is incredible to think that any boy born more 
than 20 years ago now has a greater chance of being killed in this 
beautiful country of ours than he would have been if he were one of the 
14 million men and women in uniform in World War II stood of dying in 
combat.
  I do not want to bore you, Madam Speaker, and the 1.5 million folks 
watching, with the minutiae of the statistics, although that cruel word 
``minutiae'' should not be applied to the statistics such as these: 
2,000 women raped every week, 1 murder every 5 minutes, 1 rape every 10 
to 15 minutes, 1 burglary every 45 seconds, 1 robbery every 45 minutes.
  These are incredible. We hear them so much we are just numbed to all 
of these statistics.
  At recent homicide rates, about 1 of every 133 Americans will become 
a murder victim. For males of African-American descent, the proportion 
is estimated to be at, current rates, 1 in every 30.
  If you put these murders on a health chart, as they do at the Centers 
for Disease Control down in Atlanta or up the road here at Bethesda, 
MD, at the National Institutes of Health, this is one of America's 
greatest killers. In some areas it is the No. 1 killer of young 
African-American males.
  Now, on the south side of Chicago--I think that used to be a song 
title--on the south side of Chicago, 23 percent of students reported 
seeing a murder in their neighborhood--1 out of 4 kids, that is--34 
percent witnessed a stabbing. That is almost 3 out of 9; 39 percent had 
seen a shooting, or 4 out of every 10 watching this gang warfare 
gunfire taking place on our streets.
  Madam Speaker, I want to ask at this point to put in a few articles 
that I find are just outstanding. A lot of them, I must say, from the 
Wall Street Journal.
  Here is Amitai Etzion, ``How Our Towns Fight Crime.'' It shows that 
many times folks have to battle the criminals and the ACLU as well.

  I would like to put in an article by what I always refer to as my 
favorite Democrat in the whole world, Ben Wattenberg. Again, this is 
from the Wall Street Journal from back in December. He says the crime 
bill passed by the Senate, which was passed in November, would make the 
States do what they should be doing anyway and what the public 
overwhelmingly favors: Imprisoning violent offenders longer, much 
longer. Ben Wattenberg's column here, the ``Crime Solution--Lock'em 
Up,'' is full with more of these gee whiz, it can't be this bad, 
frightening statistics. I will put that in.
  Now here is a letter from my pal Grover Norquist, president of the 
Americans for Tax Reform. I will read the opening two paragraphs and 
the close. He wrote this to our good friend, Jack Brooks, chairman of 
the Committee on the Judiciary, who quarterbacked the crime bill over 
the last 2 weeks:

       Dear Mr. Brooks: We want to alert you to our opposition to 
     the House crime bill, H.R. 4092, as written. The group 
     represents taxpayers, and we cannot support a bill that asks 
     so much from taxpayers but gives back so little.

  Now, Madam Speaker and my fellow Americans, listen to this simple 
piece of logic. Grover Norquist says, ``We object,'' Americans for Tax 
Action, ``Taking money from working people,'' working Americans, 
``people who play by the rules and pull the wagon of business, 
industry, work at the State, and give that money to criminals. 
Specifically, your crime bill would spend almost $16 billion,'' it is 
up to $17 billion now, ``of Federal money, more than half of social 
welfare programs that lack any record of proven success. That 
wrongheaded approach is particularly evident in the billions you 
propose to spend on substance abuse programs. Many substance abuse 
programs--narco programs, drug programs--are nothing more than a place 
for addicts to remain comfortable for a few weeks until they decide 
when to go back on drugs. Since 1988 Congress has poured billions into 
those programs, and hard-core drug use has actually increased. These 
increases occurred after a decade-long decrease, 1978 to 1988--half of 
Carter's years and all of Reagan's years--which happened without the 
benefit of congressional programs.'' We should be analyzing what we did 
there.

  The rest of the so-called prevention programs are equally 
objectionable. Midnight basketball is the most obvious example. What is 
disturbing is an attitude that pervades the entire crime debate. That 
attitude, unless we bribe people to behave properly, particularly young 
people, they will become criminals. It reminds me of the early debates 
over welfare when supporters said welfare would prevent crime, when we 
all know that that idea actually backfired. I am afraid this one will 
too.
  Also, the bill continues a dangerous trend of giving Congress more 
responsibility for public safety issues instead of leaving those issues 
at the State and local level where they belong.
  The $8 billion that will go for police, prisons, and various law 
enforcement programs, once the Federal Government takes responsibility 
for funding these traditional State and local activities, Congress will 
inevitably raise taxes to handle these new, Federal mandates.
  If the limited impact of the past dozen or so crime bills is any 
indication, the crime problem will remain serious even with more 
Congressional intervention.
  Madam Speaker, I have been telling press people that I have talked to 
``Let's make a deal. Today is April 21, 1994.'' I will make a mark on 
my kitchen calendar under a little magnet on my refrigerator and tell 
my staff to put it in our computer for next year's calendar, ``Let's 
have a little coffee talk, a chat, on April 21, 1995.'' Let us look at 
what this bill has done for or maybe to America on April 21--that has a 
nice blackjack sound, 21--on April 21, 1996. Let's see if my prediction 
is correct that violent crime will still be on the increase because we 
have to live through a generation reaping the wild winds of what we 
sowed from 1964 in the spring to the fall of Saigon and even a few 
years thereafter, when we told a whole generation of young people that 
Bulldog Drummond and Gangbusters--the radio shows their parents 
listened to--were wrong. That crime does pay. I see my colleague from 
California from one of the most beautiful areas of the country, San 
Diego, has arrived. I will tell you what we can do to show people how 
good friends, I mean amigos, are tormented by this bill. I voted 
against it. You voted for it. I do not criticize your vote. I just read 
a lot of the good stuff that is in it that would be worthy of a yes 
vote. So I will ask Duncan Hunter of San Diego, what is his take and 
why did he vote for the bill?

  I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. HUNTER. I thank my friend for recognizing me. And we are best 
friends. I certainly appreciate everything that he does on the House 
floor, especially what he did with respect to Somalia, when he took 
about 48 hours out of his own list just in plane travel, flew to 
Somalia, came back after the tragedy last fall when our Rangers were 
ambushed, and he made a report not only to the Committee on Armed 
Services but to the full Congress. And he touched bases with, I 
believe, every family of the young people who were killed in that 
tragedy. His performance and his service to the House of 
Representatives is something that is really appreciated.
  Let us go to the crime bill for a second.
  Mr. DORNAN. Just one second. I got a letter last night from the 
Gutting family which lost a son in Somalia. The gentleman and I had a 
long cup of coffee downstairs with a sister of one of the young M.P.'s 
killed in that radio-detonated mine on August 8. Not even 1 year ago, 
just last August.

                              {time}  1710

  And with that M.P. Keith, was another M.P., Gutting. He was also 
killed, and the family wrote me. They thanked me for the flag that me 
and my little grandkids, Kevin and Colin, flew over the Capitol on 
Thanksgiving. A little aside here. I mentioned Kevin and Colin's help 
on the floor and their little sister, Erin, asked, ``When are you going 
to talk about me, Poppy?'' Well, when she comes here and flies flags 
with me on the roof of the Capitol here for all these good GI's. This 
family, the Gutting family, told me that they are going to fly the flag 
we sent them on every one of their son's birthdays, Christmas, Easter, 
Memorial Day, and every August 8, the day he died, giving his life to 
try and feed starving women and children.
  I ask my colleague, ``Duncan, do you know what's happening today as 
we speak?''
  Seven U.N. people have been killed in Mogdishu. The anti-Aided forces 
have just captured the Sundanese Ambassador. That's Ali Madi, the 
grandson of the Madi in the great Charleton Heston film, ``Khartoum.''
  Mr. HUNTER. That's the guy that killed Charleton Heston.
  Mr. DORNAN. That is right, Chinese Gordon.
  Mr. HUNTER. Yeah.
  Mr. DORNAN. The Madis' grandson is now in a pitched battle with our 
new pal, the killer Aidid, whose forces, as my colleague knows, blew 
away 18 of the best young soldiers, Rangers, Delta guys this country 
ever produced, and killed another one, Matt Rearson, three nights later 
with a mortar. Aidid is now closing in on the U.s. Embassy grounds, and 
on the university, and on the base I told the gentleman we named after 
him, Hunter base. It is surrounded. They are tearing up the spaghetti 
factory, the cigarette factory, all of the places where our guys 
guarded, took wounds, took bullets, gave their lives.
  I meet with two Marines. One still has the bullet in his wrist; the 
other one, it went through his arm, lodged in his clavicle. They are 
all healthy now. One of them is married. I met him at El Toro last 
week.
  How can I ease their pain, the way we were forced to pull out of 
there because of the terrible foreign policy? Clinton put those Rangers 
and Delta guys in there on a public phone at a golf course at Martha's 
Vineyard back in August and then did not give them the wherewithal, the 
armor, to prevail, and I say to my colleagues:

       Duncan, as we speak, as Aidid is closing in on the airport, 
     mortar fire is hitting the airport today, what do these 
     families think? What does the family think if they happen to 
     hear that Bob Dornan is speaking about them on the House 
     floor, and a neighbor calls them?

  One of the people from Somalia came by to see me today. He is known 
by his face to a lot of Americans. He gave me his blue beret. He gave 
me his patch that he wore on a lot of TV shows. And I looked at this 
and thought of the Belgian soldiers in Rwanda with their big combat 
knives cutting their blue berets in half because they were disgusted 
that they were pulled out of Rwanda, allowing women and children, seven 
Jesuit priests to be slaughtered there. There were three white Belgian 
priests who were holed up in a kitchen, and, when they came out, here 
is all their friends and 20 women that were on a retreat to hear about 
Jesus were found slaughtered all over their compound in Kengali.
  I say to my colleague, the snipers are at it again in Sarajevo. They 
are in the hills are targeting U.N. people. This blue beret makes you 
ground zero for a sniper's rifle. If you're wearing your little U.N. 
patch, the snipers will try to put the bullet right through the North 
Pole, so it goes into your brain and you die quickly.
  This has turned into an absolute horror in the very week of the 51st 
anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto and of the Armenian genocide which 
started 79 years ago on Sunday. This is a very rough world, but I 
digress. I am here to speak about war in the United States with thugs 
who have no conscience.
  Mr. HUNTER. Let me answer my friend's question about the crime bill.
  I voted for the crime bill, and I think it was a close decision. I 
think it was for a lot of conservatives and a lot of Republicans, a 
number of Democrats.
  Mr. DORNAN. I have no quarrel with voting for it.
  Mr. HUNTER. But I voted for it--I think there was one measure that we 
did pass that had some value, and I know the gentleman helped on this, 
he voted for it, and that was the amendment that we sponsored to 
add 6,000 Border Patrol agents, and let me just take a minute to 
explain that.

  Mr. DORNAN. Just mention that; please do.
  Mr. HUNTER. We right now have 4,100 Border Patrol agents nationwide. 
The Border Patrol is the only agency that is charged with protecting 
our border, and presently, as the gentleman knows, we have a flood of 
smuggling of both illegal aliens and narcotics across the southwest 
border of the United States. Over half the smuggling nationwide takes 
place in what I call the 15-mile smugglers corridor between San Diego, 
CA, and Tijuana, Mexico. Through that corridor goes now almost half of 
the cocaine and the illegal aliens who are smuggled into the United 
States.
  Now against this army of invaders, of illegal aliens, narcotics, 
criminal aliens, we have a very thin line of Border Patrol men at any 
given time on the entire California-Mexican border. We have less than 
50 Border Patrol men, and that is a 150-mile border. What the House did 
was more than double the size of the U.S. Border Patrol, take it from 
4,100 agents to well over 10,000 agents, if the President and if the 
Democrat-dominated Senate and House Appropriations Committees hold fast 
to that number that was overwhelmingly passed by the House of 
Representatives.
  Now let me tell my colleague why we need 10,000, Bob. Right now we 
have roughly 12 smugglers corridors in the Southwest.
  Mr. DORNAN. Does the gentleman say we need 10,000 men and women in 
the Border Patrol--not administration though, working the border, 
minimum?
  Mr. HUNTER. Yes.
  Mr. DORNAN. And what do we have now?
  Mr. HUNTER. We have got 4,100, and let me tell my colleague why we 
need them.
  Every place where we have a large urban area on both sides of the 
border; for example, Tijuana, Mexico to San Diego, CA, where we have 
two big urban populations together, that is where a smuggling corridor 
exists, and that is where the smugglers can work most effectively 
because of the logistical base, because near a city they have freeways 
and other traffic arteries that come down on the American side, so, if 
they get across the border, they can get in a van, they can get on 
Highway 5 and they are out of there. They can go to Portland, OR, they 
can go to L.A., wherever they want to whether they have got cocaine or 
illegal aliens. They have that traffic capability.

  They also have what I call a Grand Central Station effect. That is 
they have this huge congestion of people in these big urban areas, and 
a smuggled person or a smuggler can get lost in the crowd once he is 
across the border. At that point it is very difficult to sort these 
people out of the large populace.
  So, the smugglers have a difficult time smuggling across barren 
desert. They need cities to smuggle in so, when the people early on 
whom we said we could control the border, and the critics said, ``Well, 
you can't link arms on the 2,000-mile border between the United States 
and Mexico,'' the answer is: ``You don't have to link arms, and you 
don't have to control. You don't have to have people back to back in 
the desert. In the desert it's very difficult for smugglers to operate. 
They stand out like a sore thumb. They have no logistical base to 
operate out of. They have no freeway artery serving the area where they 
can get people across, get them into vans, get them out of there. And 
also the Border Patrol has a great sensor operation where they can tell 
where people are coming across, and so it's difficult to operate in the 
desert.''
  Plus, as the gentleman knows, in my desert north of Mexico it is 120 
degrees in the summertime, and we find a number of people who are 
absolutely dehydrated.
  Mr. DORNAN. This is the Hunter Valley just north of the border, used 
to be called the Cochilla Valley.
  Mr. HUNTER. It is a little south of the Cochilla Valley.
  So, the point is all we have to do is control these corridors where 
we have urban populations. We have got 12 of those in the Southwest, 
all the way from San Diego, Tijuana, Calexico, Mexicali, and all the 
way to Brownsville, TX, and Matamoros, TX, at the Gulf of Mexico. Those 
smugglers corridors range from 5 to 25 miles wide. Together they total 
about 165 miles. So, if we have Border Patrol men at a density of about 
two Border Patrol men every 200 yards, two of them together every 200 
yards in these smugglers corridors, three shifts a day for 24 hours a 
day coverage, that amounts to about 8,000 Border patrol men needed to 
plug up these smugglers corridors.

                              {time}  1720

  I might add that that density is just about what we are using at El 
Paso, where we have successfully kept that blockade up. Incidentally, 
when we closed down the border at El Paso to illegal entry, auto thefts 
dropped by 50 percent in one night. So we need 8,000 people for that.
  You also need to have a reaction force, because the smugglers 
understood early on that if they could overwhelm the border at a given 
place with 200 or 300 hundred people trying to gain illegal entry, and 
you only had four or five Border Patrol men on the other side, you 
could get in that way with so-called banzai attacks from the border.
  Mr. DORNAN. I watched banzai attacks from the air one night in an A-6 
helicopter. Every bush becomes alive after midnight.
  Mr. HUNTER. So that is why you need to have a reaction force. You 
need at least 1,000 people for reaction forces, for reserve forces, 
that can move quickly to one pressure point or another. So you take the 
thousand people in the smugglers' corridors, 8,000 Border Patrol men, 
take 1,000 Border Patrol men for reaction forces in these various 
sectors. That leaves you 1,000 people for headquarters personnel and to 
serve the rest of the entire border, which includes Canada. We still 
need some Border Patrol men on Canada, though not nearly as many. That 
is 10,000 Border Patrol men.
  Bill Clinton said last July after we passed an amendment that forced 
6,000 Border Patrol men down his throat, after he cut the budget, that 
he was going to control the border. That was either a political 
statement that was meant to meet the rising number of Americans that 
are now concerned about illegal immigration, or whether it was a 
statement of a real intention to actually do something about 
controlling the border we will soon discover, because President Clinton 
controls with his party the House of Representatives and the U.S. 
Senate.
  And if he will support this 6,000 additional Border Patrol agents, 
bringing our total force to 10,000, we will be able for the first time 
to actually control our borders.
  Let me tell you what that does.
  Mr. DORNAN. One fiscal note here. Those patrol men and women will be 
paid for by the crime dollars saved starting within 1 year.
  Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely, because we are paying more than $1 billion a 
year in incarceration costs just for criminal aliens.
  Mr. DORNAN. And forget the other losses from crime, the lost hours, 
the hospital bills, the arrest problems, the police problems up the 
line in the cities and counties north like my county. It saves money 
immediately.
  Mr. HUNTER. It sure does. In fact, in San Diego County we have 
discovered that 10 percent of our violent felonies are perpetrated by 
criminal aliens. In the Federal system, Bob, 25 percent of the inmates 
of our penitentiaries are illegal aliens.
  We have done studies in which we took people after they had served 
their time in the United States, violent felons, sent them back, 
deported them all the way to Mexico City, deep in Mexico, and kept tabs 
on them. Within a few weeks, many of them were coming right back into 
the border areas of the United States.
  So no matter how you view the border in terms of whether we should 
have a border that allows people to come across to work or whatever, 
there is no substitute for a border that is enforceable with respect to 
crime.
  You have got to be able to keep criminal aliens from coming into this 
country at will. The only force that can do that is a border patrol. 
For the first time we are starting to put some real numbers on the 
border patrol.
  Mr. DORNAN. When people argue a kind of knee-jerk liberal argument 
that this is unfair to Mexicans who want to come over to work, they 
haven't thought it through. It is just the opposite. Every person that 
we want to be a guest in our country, that we need their help, we want 
to be friends. We want them to work here. Their life is made miserable 
because when they are here, they are the victims of crime by the 
illegals who come from their own country of birth.
  I rode all night in a police car within the last 2 weeks in Santa 
Ana. I learned about gangs I had not heard of, illegal immigrant gangs 
called lopos, which were formed to defend themselves against other 
gangs in beautiful Santa Ana, CA. I saw crack houses with 10 or 15 
people outside running around. They all run inside, like the opposite 
of what you see when you attack a place and people flee. They were all 
going inside. The police did not hassle them. They could not. Although 
the reporter from the L.A. Times riding with me tried to do a good 
story, she made out like we were not seeing any crime at all, like we 
were seeing a quiet night.
  There has been a post-earthquake kind of depression of crime, like 
people are thinking about God, the big one coming, greater, 
transcendent, metaphysical things in life.
  The next night I rolled in a car where a man appeared to be dying in 
a van where a bullet went through one side and out the other. He 
probably lost a third of his blood. I called later, they said he would 
live. That was a quiet night. That, and three helicopters whizzing 
around with lights.
  We have enough of a nightmare problem with crime that we do not need 
crime imported from other countries, we don't need people coming here 
illegally to rip off what they think is the good life in America.
  Look at the article that Jay Pierson, one of our good, hard-working 
staffers, just gave me. It is a Charles Colson article from 
Christianity Today. Pardon the reference to a great magazine.
  Charles Colson spent his time in prison paying his debt to society 
for being one of the transgressors in the whole Watergate scandal and 
mess. He found the Lord again in prison.
  Look at what he says here. ``Begging for Tyranny,'' that our approach 
with the weak crime bill is leading us to another step beyond the 
anarchy we are approaching now, to an absolute tyranny, in trying to 
recapture our American life and retake our streets.
  He says in the opening paragraph here, America already has the 
highest rate of violent crime in the world, rising 560 percent in what 
I have been teaching people is a generation, in 30 years. But in recent 
months, it has actually exploded. Everyday's headlines report new 
outbreaks. I am curious to see what he includes.
  Three Dartmouth, MA schoolboys surround a classmate, stab him to 
death, and then laugh and trade high fives as he is dying.
  An Oakland teenager chases a woman down the street brandishing a 
knife while onlookers chant ``kill her, kill her.'' A Long Island man 
starts shooting randomly on a commuter train.
  By the way, one of these Farrakhan extremists said this guy, I know 
his name, unfortunately, because it is one of my grandkids' names, 
Colin, Colin Ferguson, is a hero. A hero for shooting people to death.

  How can anybody watch ``20-20'' or ``Prime Time'' or one of those 
shows I saw this week, and actually two of the networks did it, where 
they stayed with the victims on the Long Island commuter. It is 
unbelievable what is happening.
  Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield, that is one reason I came 
down here. I am glad you are talking about this article, ``Begging for 
Tyranny,'' by Charles Colson.
  This article talks about character, about standards, and about 
morals. It says,

       Modern thinkers have rejected the very idea of moral 
     objectivity. Darwin, who reduced morals to an extension of 
     animal instincts; Freud, who regarded repression of impulses 
     as the source of neurosis; Marx, who disdained morality as an 
     expression of self-interest.

  I think there is a lot of truth to that description of where 
societies have tended to go with respect to morals. And in this House 
of Representatives, we represent, I think to some degree, the best and 
the worst of trends in our Nation, of conflicting pressures and 
directions.
  One thing we do in the House of Representatives is chase trends. When 
it becomes trendy to do something, immediately you have got 150, 250 
votes for something that maybe 15 or 20 years ago would have been 
totally prohibited and would have been prohibited not just by law, but 
by the conscience of the people who are in the House of 
Representatives.
  We have other people in the House that have another current, and that 
is a current that works to preserve character.
  I just want to say about the gentleman who is standing and addressing 
the House right now, Robert K. Dornan, you have been a force for 
preserving character, the American character, the moral character; 
doing what is virtuous, doing what you think is right and what has been 
regarded as right in this Judeo-Christian value system that we have 
developed over the last 200 years.
  I applaud you for what you have done. I think you are one of the most 
valuable Members of the House of Representatives. I hope you stay 
around here to continue to try to preserve what is right with this 
country. While these winds of change that are coming out of the mass 
media are an onslaught for the rest of us, and move others around like 
straws in the wind, you have been a rock and you have been an anchor, 
and we appreciate you.

                              {time}  1730

  Mr. DORNAN. Let me say, I am sure, I am convinced, I am not always 
right, in my approach or my style or even my priorities or when I 
choose to emphasize what issue. I do know right from wrong. My parents 
have done that for me. My schoolteachers reinforced that. The Air Force 
reinforced my teachers and my parents.
  Mr. HUNTER. I know your children and your grandchildren, and you are 
one of the best grandfathers and best fathers I have ever seen. 
Everything you do on the floor of the House of Representatives, I know 
you do every day hoping that you will have some small effect on 
preserving a way of life for those children and those grandchildren.
  Mr. DORNAN. I am going for the Olympic gold as grandfather.
  Mr. HUNTER. How many do you have?
  Mr. DORNAN. Nine. I just spent some time with that Liam out there in 
California. That Erin that I mentioned, she is going to be the first 
lady President, because she was born on the 200th anniversary of this 
House, the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency. I am 
never going to let little Erin forget that.
  Madam Speaker, I have an article by one of my favorites, Paul 
Johnson, a great English writer and philosopher. Paul Johnson wrote 
that great book ``Modern Times.'' When people say, how can I catch up 
on the history of the last half century, I say read ``Modern Times.''
  I say read his book ``Intellectuals'', in which he mentions the Marx 
and the Freud and all the fraudulent anti-Judeo-Christian garbage that 
has been fed our self-indulgent society.
  His title is ``Crime: The People Want Revenge.''
  Revenge is not very Judeo-Christian, but he grabs your eye with that.

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