[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 118 (Friday, August 19, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 19, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             THE CRIME BILL

  Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, I want to talk about crime, and then I 
want to talk about health care.
  Let me try to go back and relate for a moment where we are on the 
whole crime issue, where we got off the track, and what I think we can 
do to fix it.
  But, in doing this, I want to alert the President and others to the 
fact that, whatever they do in the House, unless they fix the very real 
problems in this crime bill, they are heading toward another 
legislative train wreck in the Senate. So, given all the time and 
energy that they have put into the crime bill, I want to urge them to 
fix it properly the first time so that we can then adopt this crime 
bill in the Senate.
  What happened to our crime bill? When we voted on the final crime 
bill in the Senate, I think that only four Members of the Senate voted 
no, and a couple of them were strong opponents of the death penalty. 
So, for all practical purposes, we had a near unanimous vote for the 
strong crime bill that we were all proud of.
  But, as has happened for the last 6 years, we passed a good crime 
bill and the House passed a crime bill; we went to conference, and in 
conference, where we have domination by a very small number of people, 
all in the same party, the majority party, the crime bill was changed 
so much that it turned out not to be a crime bill that was similar to 
what we had all passed and what we had all rejoiced in.
  There are a lot of problems with the crime bill, but let me outline 
very specifically what is wrong with it and what is going to have to be 
fixed, and what we are going to do about it if it is not fixed.
  First of all, from the time the crime bill left the Senate until it 
came back, about $8 billion of new spending programs were added to it. 
Many people on my side of the aisle have called this spending pork 
barrel spending. Pork is in the eye of the beholder, I admit that.
  But what has happened is a bill that in the Senate was a get-tough 
crime bill that put police officers on the street, is now a bill that 
employs two social workers for every police officer it puts on the 
street.
  We have grants in the billions that will go to these privileged 
groups that will be chosen by people in the Clinton administration. 
Their directive in spending the money basically boils down to, when you 
cut through all the legalese, ``Spend the money however you want to 
spend it, and if by spending it you reduce the probability that you or 
anybody else will commit a crime, that is OK.''
  Now, the American people have reacted with some anger about what has 
happened to the bill which originally represented their legitimate 
agenda. My calls on the crime bill are running about 900 a day, that 
are actually getting through. It is very hard to get through on the 
telephone to my office because people are calling on crime and they are 
calling on health care. But of the calls that are getting through, they 
are running about 10 to 1 against the crime bill.
  One of the biggest complaints that people in my State have is: Why 
are we hiring two social workers for every police officer we are 
hiring, and why are we giving away all of this money when, the last 
time we looked, the Government was broke? It seems to me that that is a 
legitimate question that we ought to ask ourselves.
  I want that $8 billion out of this bill.
  Now, the President has proposed--and it is very interesting; it tells 
you something about our President's priorities. He has said,

       Well, look, let's compromise. Let's take $4 billion out, 
     but let's reduce it across the board. Let's cut the number of 
     police officers, let's cut the number of prisons we are 
     building, let's cut some of this social work spending, and 
     let's do it proportionately.

  My answer to that is no. In Texas, we would say it a little more 
emphatically, but I am in Washington today. My answer is no, I do not 
want to reduce police officers and I do not want to spend less on 
prisons, and neither do the American people, and it is their bill.
  We claimed we were building prisons and we were hiring police 
officers and we were getting tougher on criminals. Nowhere in all of 
this wonderful rhetoric, either by Members of the Congress or by the 
White House, do we have a reference to all of the social spending that 
has now been built into the bill.
  So I am not suddenly going to act as if all spending is equal. Social 
spending in a crime bill is not equal to building prisons. Social 
spending in a crime bill is not equal to hiring police officers. And I 
am not going to accept an across-the-board cut. I want to cut the 
social spending that was added to the bill.
  Second, the fate of the get tough provisions contained in the Senate 
bill is very interesting. I offered in the Senate for about the sixth 
year in a row, a provision that required 10 years in prison without 
parole for possessing a firearm during the commission of a violent 
crime or a drug felony; 20 years for discharging it; life in prison for 
killing somebody; and the death penalty in aggravated cases.
  It is hard to recall exactly, with all the votes on it over the 
years, but I think 92 Members of the Senate voted for that. But, guess 
what, when the bill got to conference, when a small number of Democrats 
made the final decision, miraculously for the sixth year in a row that 
provision disappeared. It just was left out of the bill somewhere.
  I had another provision which I have offered to every crime bill that 
we have had for 6 years in a row, to try to deal with the problem of 
children being used in drug felonies. As we all know, many drug 
hoodlums have discovered that our juvenile justice system is a joke. So 
in actually delivering drugs, where the drugs change hands, 
increasingly these people are using children to conduct the exchange so 
that if there is an arrest at the point of transfer, you have a child 
who is obviously a juvenile, they do not end up going to jail, and the 
drug hoodlum is protected.
  We also, obviously, have people who are out near our schools trying 
to sell drugs to our children. So for 6 years in a row I offered a 
provision that said: 10 years in prison without parole for selling 
drugs to a minor or using a minor in a drug conspiracy, and then life 
imprisonment on conviction of a second such offense.
  I offered that in the Senate. I have offered it every time we have 
debated crime for 6 years. And, guess what, it was adopted 
overwhelmingly in the Senate. This year I think it was adopted 
unanimously. We get to conference, they write a bill and, guess what, 
that provision gets left out of the crime bill.
  But let me tell my colleagues a provision that got put in the crime 
bill. From the day Bill Clinton became President, he and the Attorney 
General have had an agenda about minimum mandatory sentencing for drug 
felons, and that agenda has been they want to overturn mandatory 
minimum sentencing for drug felons. They do not go around talking about 
it, but they have consistently worked to do it. And, guess what, when 
this final crime bill was written in conference, it came out with a 
provision that not only overturns mandatory minimum sentencing for drug 
felons who are arrested and convicted in the future, but miraculously 
it goes back and does it retroactively.
  Let me read what the judicial impact statement, issued by the 
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, says about this new 
provision, new to the Senate--this new provision in the crime bill. 
They say:

       According to preliminary estimates developed by the Federal 
     Bureau of Prisons, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 Federal 
     prisoners could meet the eligibility requirements. This 
     provision could result in an influx of prisoner releases, 
     early, from prison.

  Madam President, how many Americans believe that in the name of 
passing a get tough crime bill that we are going to go back and 
retroactively let as many as 10,000 drug felons out of prison? My guess 
is that until this debate started on the conference report, if you had 
told any American that this crime bill the President is always talking 
about was going to let 10,000 drug felons, many of them in prison for 
selling drugs to children, back out on the streets, they would have 
said that is not possible. It ought not to be possible. But if this 
bill passes in its current form, not only will it be possible, it will 
have happened.
  Let me tell my colleagues what the U.S. Sentencing Commission says 
about this provision. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has looked at this 
provision and they say that, as of June 1, 1994, here are the people 
who would definitely be affected and who could possibly be affected, by 
their estimates, in terms of releasing people currently in the Federal 
penitentiary who are there for selling drugs. They say, ``definitely 
affected, 4,987.''
  They say that 55.6 percent of all drug felons in the Federal 
penitentiary will be definitely affected by this provision, which 
retroactively will go back and reduce their sentences and give them a 
chance to get out of Federal prison, that is 4,987. They say another 
2,057 could possibly be affected.
  The National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys--let me tell you 
what they say about this get tough crime bill, and particularly about 
mandatory minimum sentencing for drug felons. They say, in a letter 
dated August 17:

       The present crime bill contains a provision which not only 
     severely negates the benefits of mandatory minimums for a 
     certain class of offenses, but also would permit the filing 
     of 10,000 to 20,000 frivolous lawsuits which would cause 
     prosecutors to spend their time in needless litigation 
     instead of investigating and prosecuting criminals.

  Madam President, is this what we want to do in the name of a crime 
bill?
  Finally, one of our colleagues the other day quoted a letter from the 
Justice Department that said that they estimated only 100 to 400 
inmates would be immediately released by this provision. But they did 
not quote the next paragraph which says:

       Of course, it will take considerable time for motions to be 
     filed and considered by the courts, hearings to be held and 
     new sentences to be imposed. Therefore the impact of the 
     safety valve on this population [that is people who are in 
     prison for selling drugs] will take effect over several 
     months at a minimum.

  To finish up on crime and turn briefly to health care, when the crime 
bill comes to the Senate, after the House has decided what they are 
going to do, the crime bill will be subject to a point of order under 
section 306 of the Budget Act. And that point of order, when it is 
raised, will require that 60 Members of the Senate vote to waive that 
Budget Act point of order in order for the crime bill to be brought up 
to be passed.
  When that point of order is raised, if 60 Members of the Senate do 
not vote to waive it, the crime bill will at that moment be brought 
before the Senate, it will be amendable, and at that point we plan to 
offer an amendment to take out this ``get out of jail free'' provision 
that would release as many as 10,000 drug felons.
  We are going to remove, with an amendment, that $8 billion of pork. 
My message to the administration is this: Do not work out a deal in the 
House that is not going to get this bill passed in the Senate. Take out 
the $8 billion in pork, take out the get-out-of-jail provision, and let 
us pass this crime bill. If the bill comes over here with a get-out-of-
jail provision in it, if it comes over here with only a small across-
the-board cut having been made so that that bill will be cutting 
prisons and cutting police officers instead of cutting all the money 
out of the spending add-on that would put two social workers on the 
street for every police officer, we are going to raise the point of 
order, we are going to sustain the point of order and we are going to 
offer an amendment to put the money back for police officers and for 
prisons, and we are going to take it out of social programs.
  So my plea to the administration is, ``Look, don't do a job twice; do 
it right the first time and let us go ahead and pass this bill.''

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