[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 111 (Thursday, August 11, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 11, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
     URGING BIPARTISAN COLLABORATION ON THE HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Horn] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HORN. Mr. Speaker, we saw a dramatic event in the modern life of 
the House just a few minutes ago: A rule was turned down. It was not 
supported by a majority of the majority in this Chamber. That rule was 
turned down because it reflects one of the problems that a number of us 
have been talking about over the last week and a half, since we heard 
of the schedule that was set for consideration of the health care 
legislation.
  Mr. Speaker, the various bills that relate to health care are among 
the most important that the 103d Congress will consider. Indeed, you 
could say, since it involves 14 percent of the American economy, it is 
the most important piece of legislation that the House of 
Representatives will have acted upon in a generation.
  Many of us believe, and have long believed, that it is essential to 
have proper coverage for American citizens in terms of health 
insurance. Reasonable people can disagree on the way that goal is to be 
achieved.
  Mr. Speaker, the shocking thing I have found in being a Member of 
this Chamber for a year and a half is that there has been very little 
bipartisan collaboration between the leadership of the majority party 
and the rest of us. However, there are two bipartisan bills which a lot 
of us support, the so-called Cooper-Grandy bill, and the Rowland-
Bilirakis bill.

                              {time}  1730

  Hopefully they will not be preempted by the Committee on Rules which 
was overruled today, because many of us are unhappy with the 
authoritarian way legislation is considered in this House. Try to find 
out what the Committee on Rules said or was going to say, try to find 
the conference report as was well-described to the House this 
afternoon. The conference finished in late July. The first time we saw 
a printed report of the conference on the Republican side was at 3:20 
p.m. this afternoon, August 11.
  There is something wrong with a system where we constantly waive the 
mandate of the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act which said reports 
ought to be available for 3 days prior to consideration in the House. 
Hopefully on health care, the current schedule will also be overthrown 
by the leadership that established it. Hopefully some of the people 
listening to the House proceedings will have written, phoned, faxed the 
leadership of this Chamber to say, we think our Representatives have a 
right to study the thousands of pages that are not yet printed, except 
in the Congressional Record, but in a formal bill sense, we think they 
have a right to analyze it and discuss it, but more important, to go 
home, to talk to the constituency that sent them here and hear from the 
people in your district as to the impact of this legislation before we 
have a vote in this Chamber. To have a vote on health care next week 
when nobody has read these bills but perhaps the author is an absolute 
insult to this institution. I would think that the degradation that has 
been brought to this institution by the type of arbitrary conduct we 
have seen in closed rules, few chances to amend, few chances to have 
amendments considered on the floor, I think back to the campaign 
finance reform effort. There was the Democratic bill, and there was the 
Republican bill. The bill that should have been considered was the 
bipartisan bill headed by the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Synar] and 
the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Livingston] on our side, We had 5 or 
10 bipartisan coauthors. Yet that bill, which would have passed this 
house, never was brought to the floor. The reason it was never brought 
to the floor was that it could pass this House.
  As one friend of mine in the Democratic leadership said to me last 
year when I had a proposal to the Committee on Rules, ``Steve, you know 
we can't clear that. If we sent it to the floor, it would pass.''
  Well, the last I knew, not just from grammer school civics but from 
high school civics and political science I was that the people's house 
was the place that ideas should be considered and should be voted up or 
down. We do not have the freedom to debate as they do in the Senate. We 
do not have the freedom to tie and place in knots as they do in the 
other body, but we do have the freedom to vote if only we can get the 
legislation before us. This is why we see over 25 discharge petitions. 
Thanks to the courageous leadership of the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. 
Inhofe], we have freed up the discharge petition process.
  Mr. Speaker, we came as a class of reformers, Republicans and 
Democrats. I have not heard much from the Democratic side on some of 
these key reforms, but certainly the aroused Republican freshmen, upset 
about this schedule on health care and wanting to meet with our 
constituents, we hope the leadership will take the turndown of the rule 
on the crime bill, and I might say I support the crime bill but I voted 
against the rule simply because of the arbitrary actions being 
increasingly taken in this Chamber. The sooner the Democrats join the 
Republicans in wanting to liberalize the process of this Chamber, the 
better off this Nation will be.

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