[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 121 (Monday, August 22, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 22, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
   VIOLENT CRIME CONTROL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ACT OF 1994--CONFERENCE 
                                 REPORT

  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
proceed to the consideration of a report of the committee of conference 
on H.R. 3355.
  The report will be stated.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       The committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the 
     two Houses on the amendment of the House to the amendment of 
     the Senate to the bill (H.R. 3355) to amend the Omnibus Crime 
     Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to allow grants to 
     increase police presence, to expand and improve cooperative 
     efforts between law enforcement agencies and members of the 
     community to address crime and disorder problems, and 
     otherwise to enhance public safety, having met, after full 
     and free conference, have agreed to recommend and do 
     recommend to their respective Houses this report, signed by a 
     majority of the conferees.

  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senate will proceed to the 
consideration of the conference report.
  (The conference report is printed in the House proceedings of the 
Record of August 21, 1994.)
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Delaware [Mr. Biden].
  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, we are now, I assume, on the conference 
report on the crime bill. To put it another way, as I see it, we 
finally are one step, one last step, away from getting a significant 
crime bill to the President's desk.
  It seems that it is my responsibility, along with Senator Hatch and 
others, to report what changes that the House of Representatives made 
and we, the Senate conferees, concurred in as distinguished from what 
we passed in the crime bill back in November in this body by an 
overwhelming vote--I think only 2 people voting ``no''--from what we 
passed in the House-Senate conference a couple of weeks ago.
  Today, as we begin consideration of the crime bill that from my 
perspective has basically been 6 years in the making, the crime 
conference report is supported, even after its second incarnation 
coming out of the conference committee and being passed by the House 
over the weekend, by every law enforcement organization in the Nation:
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed at this place in the Record a 
listing of that support for the crime bill.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                       Support for the Crime Bill


                             police groups

       Fraternal Order of Police [FOP]
       National Association of Police Organizations [NAPO].
       International Brotherhood of Police Officers [IBPO].
       National Sheriffs' Association [NSA].
       International Association of Chiefs of Police [IACP].
       National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives 
     [NOBLE].
       National Trooper's Coalition.
       Major Cities Chiefs.
       International Union of Police Associations [IUPA].
       Police Foundation.
       Police Executive Research Forum [PERF].
       Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association [FLEOA].


                           prosecutor groups

       National District Attorneys Association.
       National Association of Attorneys General.


                     city and county organizations

       National Conference of Republican Mayors and Municipal 
     Elected Officials.
       National Conference of Democratic Mayors.
       United States Conference of Mayors.
       National League of Cities.
       National Association of Counties [NACO].


                      police officials/departments

       William Bratton, Commissioner, New York Police Department.
       Matt Rodriguez, Superintendent of Police, Chicago.
       Phil Keith, Chief of Police, Knoxville, Tennessee.
       Charlie Austin, Chief of Police Columbia, South Carolina.
       Joseph Croughwell, Chief of Police, Hartford, Connecticut.
       Prince George's County Police Department.


                                 mayors

       Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mayor of New York, New York.
       Richard J. Riordan, Mayor of Los Angeles, California.
       Richard M. Daley, Mayor of Chicago, Illinois.
       Kay Granger, Mayor of Fort Worth, Texas.
       Bob Lanier, Mayor of Houston, Texas.
       George O. Stewart, Mayor of Provo, Utah.
       Franklin T. Gerlach, Mayor of Portsmouth, Ohio.
       Warren H. Haggerty, Jr., Mayor of Reading, Pennsylvania.
       Raymond J, Parker, Jr., Mayor of Jeffersonville, Indiana.
       John W. Morrow, Jr., Mayor of Gainesville, Georgia.
       Paul Helmke, Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
       Jim Naugle, Mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
       Robert P. Morris, Mayor of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
       Norm Rice, Mayor of Seattle, Washington.
       Jerry Abramson, Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky.
       Michael White, Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio.
       Paul Soglin, Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin.
       Kurt Schmoke, Mayor of Baltimore, Maryland.
       Emanuel Cleaver, Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri.
       Dennis Archer, Mayor of Detroit, Michigan.
       Cardell Cooper, Mayor of East Orange.
       Rita Mullins, Mayor of Palatine.
       Mike Peters, Mayor of Hartford, Connecticut.
       Ed Rendell, Mayor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


            representatives of the national league of cities

       Sharpe James, Mayor of Newark.
       Tom Werth, Mayor of Rochester, Michigan.


                          other city officials

       Butch Montoya, Manager of Safety, Denver, Colorado.


        representatives of the national association of counties

       Neal Potter, County Executive, Montgomery County, Maryland.
       Doug Bovin, Commissioner, Delta County, Michigan.
       Randy Johnson, County Commissioner, Hennepin County, 
     Minnesota.
       Arthur Blackwell, Chairperson, Board of Commissioners, 
     Wayne County, Michigan.
       Mary Boyle, Commissioner, Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
       Julia Gouge, Carroll County, Maryland.
       Earline Parmon, County Commissioner, Forsyth County, North 
     Carolina.
       Prince Preyor, County Commissioner, Madison County, 
     Alabama.


                             victims groups

       National Organization for Victim Assistance [NOVA]


                    other organizations and entities

       Handgun Control, Inc.

  Mr. BIDEN. This bill is unique in two respects.
  First, unlike any other authorization bill, as no one knows better 
than the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, our Presiding 
Officer and President pro tempore of the Senate, this bill pays for 
what it promises right in the bill through the violent crime control 
trust fund, which i wish I could, as I have said before on the floor--I 
wish I could say I was smart enough to have thought of; that it was my 
idea. But, in fact, it was the brainchild of two leading Republicans 
and the leading Democrat, the Presiding Officer. The bottom line, to 
use that trite phrase, is it is a mechanism by which what is promised 
in this crime bill is paid for in a trust fund.
  The trust fund now holds $30.2 billion in savings related to the 
Federal Work Force Reduction Act over the next 6 years. Put in simple 
terms for those listening to this debate, as the Presiding Officer 
knows better than anyone, this President, President Clinton, has 
reduced the Federal work force to a level lower than any time since I 
have been a U.S. Senator--and that has been 22 years--and if I am not 
mistaken, and I will stand corrected if I am, I believe all the way 
back to the administration of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960's.
  In addition to that, he has suggested, and we have legislated in the 
Congress, that we will further reduce that work force by over almost a 
quarter of a million people over the next 6 years. That is in absolute 
numbers. They are the absolute total reduction.
  So what is happening here is we have asked the various committees 
with jurisdiction and the various offices at the executive and 
legislative level--the Office of Management and Budget, the 
Congressional Budget Office, and so forth--how much money is going to 
be available in savings from this cut in the work force, the Federal 
work force, over the next 6 years.
  I might add, we have exempted in that work force cut, Federal law 
enforcement officers as part of that. So we are not stealing from Peter 
to pay Paul. We are not suggesting that we are adding more police and 
we are adding more law enforcement and at the same time cutting Federal 
law enforcement. We are not doing that.
  So I know the Presiding Officer and my colleague from Utah, the 
ranking member of the committee, understand this full well. But 
sometimes our jargon here in the Senate is very confusing to people 
listening to debate.
  So to say it again, this bill pays for itself. It pays for what it 
promises, not by new taxes but by the reduction in the work force. They 
are tax dollars. We will hear people who still want to oppose this bill 
notwithstanding they got a bipartisan result out of the House on the 
weekend--I am confident we will hear Members come to the floor and say 
this is another Democratic big spending bill and it is going to raise 
your taxes.
  The Presiding Officer has the unfortunate distinction of almost every 
time I come to speak on this bill he is the Presiding Officer, and I 
have spoken on this bill a lot, as he will recall. He has heard me say 
time and again the legitimate argument to be made, by my friends on the 
Republican side who choose to make it, is that this crime bill will in 
fact not allow a further reduction in taxes. It will not increase 
taxes.
  There are two arguments we made here on the floor, as the Presiding 
Officer will remember. When the Presiding Officer and others came up 
with the idea of the trust fund, some stood up and said, ``Wait a 
minute, this saving which we all acknowledge is going to come from 
cutting the Federal work force, the number of bureaucrats, we should 
take those savings and reduce the deficit by that number. That is what 
we should do with it.'' That is a legitimate point. That is a 
reasonable argument. Notwithstanding the fact this President has 
presided over a reduction in the deficit--3 years in a row, the 
projected deficit being reduced beyond what anyone thought--it is not 
illogical, nor is it bad policy to argue we should reduce it even 
further and we should take the savings we get from cutting the Federal 
work force, the Federal bureaucrats, and reduce the deficit.
  In November of last year, the vast majority--I forget the exact vote, 
94 of us or 95 of us, Democrat and Republican--said no, we think the 
crime problem in America is so great, is so dire, is so serious that we 
have to put a plan in place that will last for 5 years so law 
enforcement officers can plan ahead, like we do with the Defense 
Department.
  We do not say to the Defense Department, we are going to build a 
plane this year, and maybe next year we will or will not. We, in 
effect, say, here is what we are going to commit to in the outyears so 
you know, you can plan.
  We basically said for the first time here for American law 
enforcement--by law enforcement I mean State judges, Federal judges, 
local prosecutors, State prosecutors, local law enforcement, FBI, Drug 
Enforcement Administration, prison officials, that is what I mean by 
the totality of law enforcement--we have said in this crime bill, we 
are not only going to appropriate for next year, we are going to make a 
promise; we are going to set up a trust fund. So we tell them, ``You 
can plan on x amount of dollars from the Federal Government to help you 
in the States to fight crime over the next 5 years,'' and we have now 
said 6, although we cannot bind the sixth year, as the Presiding 
Officer knows better than I do. But it is a commitment. It is a hard 
commitment for the 5 years.
  So if my friends argue against this bill and want to come back and 
argue that the trust fund should be going to reduce the deficit instead 
of fighting criminals, that is legitimate. That is a legitimate 
argument, and there are some policymakers who would argue that is the 
better thing to do, and I do not criticize anyone who says that.
  But I do take issue with anyone--you hear people I am sure either 
because they have not had time to think it through or for some other 
motivation, will come and say, ``This means $30 billion in new taxes, 
and it's a big spending program over 6 years''--they will not even say 
over 5 years, they will say $30 billion in new taxes. That is not 
correct. That is not, in my view, a legitimate argument. The first is, 
the second is not.
  So back to my main point. This bill pays for what it promises by 
trading Federal bureaucrats for cops, Federal bureaucrats for prison 
cells, Federal bureaucrats for State judges, Federal bureaucrats for 
State prosecutors. That is what this bill does in simple basic terms.
  As explained in detail by Chairman Sasser, the chairman of the Senate 
Budget Committee, the trust fund, and I quote, ``guarantees that the 
money will be available. It achieves real savings, locks them in and 
then provides for their use to fund the crime bill. It provides a real 
and enforceable method to pay for this important purpose.''
  I ask unanimous consent that the entire letter from the chairman of 
the Budget Committee be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the 
Record, as follows:

                                                      U.S. Senate,


                                      Committee on the Budget,

                                    Washington, DC, June 16, 1994.
       Dear Conferee: In recent weeks, the crime trust fund in the 
     Senate crime bill has been attacked as more ``smoke-and-
     mirrors'' budgeting. As chairman of the Senate Budget 
     Committee, I've seen my share of budget gimmicks. I've also 
     watched a number of crime bills pass through this chamber 
     which promised plenty, but delivered little money to back 
     those promises.
       My examination of the Senate version of the Crime bill 
     reveals a fundamentally different approach from any previous 
     government commitment on crime. In the past, critics have 
     rightly pointed out that many of the programs authorized in 
     crime legislation never received the necessary funding to get 
     them off the ground.
       This bill creates a separate trust fund which guarantees 
     that the money will be available. Instead of merely promising 
     new programs, this bill delivers dollars to back its 
     commitments. It identifies a real source of funding, and it 
     sets aside that pool of money exclusively to pay for the 
     purposes authorized in the crime bill. This will work.
       First, the trust fund, as well as the Federal Workforce 
     Restructuring Act, achieves real, scorable reductions in 
     spending on the Federal workforce. These laws do this by 
     imposing enforceable caps on Federal full-time equivalent 
     positions.
       Next, the Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund language 
     reduces the caps on discretionary spending. This ensures that 
     the Congress cannot use these savings for any other purpose. 
     If any Senator sought to spend this money--to spend in excess 
     of the newly-lowered caps--for any purpose other than the 
     crime bill, then any other Senator could raise a point of 
     order that would take 60 votes to waive. Furthermore, if the 
     Senate waived the point of order or otherwise passed a law 
     that exceeded these newly lowered caps, then the law requires 
     the President to order across-the-board cuts to lower the 
     level of appropriated spending down to the level of the 
     newly-lowered caps. This is real enforcement.
       Finally, the crime bill creates the Violent Crime Reduction 
     Trust Fund itself, and deposits into that trust fund exactly 
     the amount of money by which the bill lowers the 
     appropriations caps. The bill then provides that Congress may 
     spend this amount of money on the purposes authorized in the 
     crime bill without triggering a point of order or across-the-
     board cuts.
       In sum, the Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund achieves 
     real savings, locks them in, and then provides for their use 
     to fund the crime bill. It provides a real and enforceable 
     method to pay for this important purpose. The Senate endorsed 
     the trust fund on a bi-partisan basis. It is not a gimmick. 
     It represents exactly the kind of honest budgeting which all 
     members of Congress can, and should, support.
           Sincerely,
                                                       Jim Sasser,
                                                         Chairman.

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, the second point I would like to make--and 
I am not suggesting the presence of my friend from Utah will be the 
reason for what I am about to say--the second point I would like to 
make before the hysteria begins on this debate--and there will be no 
hysteria from my friend from Utah; there never is, but there will be on 
this floor. We will hear some unusual assertions relative to this bill 
which bear little or no relationship to fact.
  Although I have been here a long time, not nearly as long as the 
Presiding Officer, but 22 years is a fair amount of time to be in one 
place, I have never had the experience I had this weekend, I might say, 
to my colleagues. And that is, I had the distinction and the honor of 
being the only U.S. Senator, for the most part, and then one of only 
two, Senator Hatch being the other, who was able to spend 3 days in a 
row, 4 days in a row until 5 o'clock in the morning on average with my 
Republican and Democratic House Members, with a group of the Republican 
leadership, the Democratic leadership and Republican freshmen, as well. 
It was a real eyeopener as to how the House works differently than the 
Senate works. Truly, it was an education.
  What I found over there is because everyone thinks they are an expert 
on crime, there was a lot of misinformation, unintentionally generated. 
First, quite frankly, I thought this was somewhat disingenuous in the 
meetings I was in. I would be in a meeting with three or four 
Republicans and five or six Democratic leaders, and they would turn to 
me: ``Joe, OK, what about this?'' And they would make assertions--and 
sometimes Democrats as well--make assertions that bore no relationship 
to what the bill actually did.
  At first I thought, wait a minute, people are misleading people. But 
I later found out--and I say this in all sincerity--that this is stuff 
that Senator Hatch and I and the Presiding Officer deal with every day 
and it is complicated legal and constitutional issues, is not 
understood by everyone. I say bluntly, I do not have nearly the 
expertise of the Presiding Officer and my friend from Utah on the 
health issue. My friend from Utah is the ranking member on the 
Judiciary Committee and was the ranking member on the Labor Committee. 
He knows the health care issue inside and out. When they start talking 
about HCFA's, PCVA's--all these acronyms--I have to literally go to the 
book.
  When you start talking about the fourth amendment, the sixth 
amendment, the second amendment, I do not have to go to the book 
because that is all I have primarily been doing for the last 20 years 
in this place.
  I want to make it clear when I say hysteria, you will hear people 
come to the floor in support and opposition to this bill who will say 
this bill does certain things that it does not do. Not because they are 
being in any way malevolent or misleading but because it is kind of 
complicated and particularly for some who are not lawyers. I know in 
the public at large, it is an asset not to be a lawyer. But it is a 
mild liability not to be a lawyer when you are understanding some of 
the arcane and complicated features of the criminal justice system.
  The second point I would like to make, as we engage in what hopefully 
will be a short debate, meaning we will be able to vote on this crime 
bill conference report tomorrow and we will not be obstructed by 
procedural roadblocks to keep from being able to vote on it--we could 
vote for this thing tonight at 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock. That is possible. 
I doubt whether that will occur, and I fear what may happen is we may 
have a protracted, fractious and mildly partisan debate that may take 
place as the last stop on the train before this significant bill gets 
to the President's desk.
  So my purpose here is to take a little bit of time before the white 
hot heat of the battle begins to lay out what I--challenge is the wrong 
word--I suggest to my colleagues is what is, in fact, in this bill. The 
first principle is this bill pays for what it promises.
  The second point I want to make is that the bill attacks crime on two 
fronts: Punishment and prevention. And for the first time since I have 
been responsible for authoring these primary bills on the Senate side, 
for the first time it does both at the same time, I say to the 
President of the Senate: Violent criminals, the premise of the bill, 
and it follows through on the premise, the violent criminals must be 
removed from our communities and put behind bars for longer periods of 
time.
  Last year in the States, there were a total of 30,000--not Federal 
Government--in the States, 30,000 violent criminals who were convicted 
by a jury or pled guilty, found guilty or pled guilty after all their 
constitutional rights were granted to them. There were 30,000 violent 
criminals convicted who never served 1 day in jail--not 1 day in jail. 
They were let free, and the reason for that was the States have no 
prison space, and roughly 37 States--it fluctuates, I say to the 
Presiding Officer--but I think it is 37--now it is 32 States are under 
Federal court orders or court orders by their own States relating to 
overcrowding.
  So we decided to go after violent criminals, and we did that by 
increasing penalties; we did that by putting more cops on the street. 
But one of the most important ways we did that was to provide the 
States the money to build new prison cells. So they do not go through 
what they go through in a city, which I love and know well, beyond my 
State, the city of Philadelphia. Every Friday, or almost every Friday--
I think it is every Friday--I am sure there are exceptions based on the 
holidays and the like, but every Friday the city judges who are in the 
court of general jurisdiction, that is, the court that tries felonies, 
get together in their conference room.

  What happens, I say to the Presiding Officer, is that they are given 
a list by the city prison system and the county jail system, and it has 
the names of 20, 30, 50, 100 people on it. It says to the distinguished 
court sitting in private, you must release 10 of these people or 20 or 
30 or 50. You must release them. They have not served their time. They 
have not finished their sentence. They, in fact, should stay in jail, 
but because, judges, we convicted x number of people this week in the 
city court system and they have been sentenced to jail as felons this 
week, we do not have any place to put the new guys, so you have to let 
somebody out of jail who has not finished their term, who is a violent 
criminal, because we have to put a new violent criminal in jail. And it 
is better to let somebody out who has served at least a little bit of 
time than not to put someone in who has served no time.
  Now, it reminds me--and I said this last week and I was not being 
facetious--of the choice, Barabbas or Jesus, Barabbas or the Lord. Who 
do you let out? Well, they are letting a lot of ``Barabbi'' out, a lot 
of guys named Barabbas are being let out of jail, and they are going 
right back on the street and they are raping; they are murdering; they 
are killing.
  If you think that is hyperbole, if you think that is an exaggeration, 
pick up the newspaper in any town or city in which you live and there 
will not be a week that goes by you do not read the following: John Doe 
was arrested today for allegedly raping Mary Smith. John Doe, a 
convicted rapist, having served only 18 months of a 12-year sentence, 
was rearrested today. In every one of our States, every one of our 
cities of any consequence in size, every one of our newspapers in our 
States runs headlines like that every day of the week.
  Now, what we do here is we target violent criminals in one piece of 
this major legislation. The violent criminals are provided for in this 
bill in a number of ways. One, we toughen penalties. And, two, there is 
in this conference report that is coming over almost $3.7 billion more 
for prisons than we passed out of this body in November.
  In November, when we passed the Senate crime bill, that--get the 
exact number, please. Find out the exact number that voted for this 
bill. I know only two voted against it, but I do not recall how many 
were absent. Ninety-five Senators voted for the crime bill that we sent 
over to the House of Representatives that had only $6.5 billion and 
$500 million of that was for juveniles, which we want to deal with as 
well, who are hardened kids who should be in maximum security type 
places for juveniles.
  Now, the bill I am bringing back here, I say to the Chair and my 
colleagues, has $9.7 billion--$3 billion-plus more than we passed out 
of here. So we are bringing back a tougher bill than left here. And 95 
Members thought the one that left here was tough enough to vote for it.
  Now, that is the second way we deal with these violent criminals in 
this crime bill, because we provide the money for the States, I say to 
the Presiding Officer, to build 105,000 new prison cells and to 
maintain them, and to keep them open--105,000.
  Excuse me. Now it is up to 125,000 because we dropped the operating 
costs out of it in terms of what they could do. This changes every day. 
It gets tougher every day. But we have money for 125,000 State prison 
cells--not Federal prison cells, State.
  Excuse me for checking here. I just want to make sure I am accurate. 
It is 125,000 new prison cells that the States over the next 6 years 
will be able to build.
  That is a big deal, I say to my colleagues in the Senate, because 
what it does is those 30--if we had that money out there now and they 
were built, none of those States would have let out those 30,000 
prisoners. They would have kept those people who were in the prison 
cells longer than they now keep them.
  So we also target, though, in terms of punishment, nonviolent 
offenders, nonviolent offenders who still should be punished. They must 
be moved to more cost-effective, lower security systems--not for their 
sake because you want to be nice to them, but because of the taxpayers.
  It does not make any sense to put someone--as John Glenn has said 
repeatedly on this floor, if a Quonset hut was good enough for me as a 
marine, although I got a little round-shouldered sleeping up against 
that curved wall, if a Quonset hut was good enough for me, somebody who 
is a nonviolent offender, who we do not have to worry about breaking 
out, why should that person be in a cell with lighting that meets 
certain specs with the following, and so on. He said if a Quonset hut 
is good enough for a marine, it is good enough for a nonviolent 
offender. Flip up some barbed wire, put up a fence, provide a Quonset 
hut, make them work when they are in those boot camps. Good enough for 
him, good enough for our soldiers to go through that without the barbed 
wire, it is certainly secure enough and good enough; we should not have 
to provide any more for these offenders.
  So we put them in jail. That has a concomitant effect, and that is, 
it frees up even more space to keep hardened criminals. So if I take 
the nonviolent offender out of a cell that costs my State $30,000 a 
year to build, maintain, and run, and put him into a boot camp on a cot 
in a Quonset hut that is sanitary, clean, good health provided, meets 
the eighth amendment requirements for 40 percent less cost, it makes 
sense for us to do that.
  So we deal with nonviolent offenders by providing money for lower 
security prisons, money for boot camps to ensure that there are enough 
first-time, nonviolent offenders freeing up prison space for hard-core 
criminals.
  Today, right now, these offenders get off easy, I say to the 
Presiding Officer. The crime bill encourages States to mandate, when 
they have these people in prison, drug testing and treatment and strict 
supervision in the prison. We are not talking about saying, well, 
rather than put that first-time drugee who has been convicted of a 
felony in jail, ``Let's just put him in treatment,'' meaning he or she 
is out on the street, has all his or her freedom. That is not what we 
are saying.
  We are saying, instead of what you did last year--last year, after 
having served some or all of that sentence, prisoners in the State 
system--you see those movies like ``Cool Hand Luke'' where the fellow 
serves his time in jail, and as he walks out of the prison gates, with 
all the doors clanging behind him, he gets to the main gate and some 
hard-looking prison officer says, ``Here is your bus ticket,'' and they 
give him a bus ticket and meal money and send him home.
  Last year, when they gave a bus ticket and a meal to 200,000 of those 
people, they gave it to somebody who is still addicted to drugs as they 
walked out the door. I want everybody to understand what I just said; 
200,000 people, after having served this time in jail, walked out of 
jail addicted to drugs. They said, ``How could that be?'' Well, I am 
preaching to the choir. I see the Senators from Maryland and Utah are 
here. And the Senator from West Virginia, our Presiding Officer, knows 
that there are drugs in prisons. They continue to get drugs in prison. 
They get smuggled in. So that is why they are still addicted.
  I want to remind everybody what they already know. But it is worth 
reminding them; that is, that a cocaine addict, a drug addict, a heroin 
addict, a speed addict, an addict--and there are about 6 million of 
them in America--the average addict commits 154 crimes a year. I do not 
mean the average drug user, or addict. These are the folks that are, as 
they say in the jargon, ``strung out, hooked.'' They commit 154 crimes 
a year, most of them felonies.
  There is a real simple reason they do that. Their dads and moms do 
not own banks. They need money to buy these drugs. So they steal, they 
rob, and they do it usually while they are high on this stuff. When 
they are high on this stuff and they steal and they rob, sometimes they 
gratuitously shoot and kill people.
  So we let out of jail 200,000 people who are addicted to drugs.
  What are they going to do when they get out? They served their time. 
So you cannot say they did not serve their time. They served their 
time. But what do they do? By the time that bus gets them into the 
center of the city, they are getting their next hit. But this time they 
do not have any money. They do not have anything to trade off like they 
traded off in prison. They trade off meals, cigarettes, money from 
their friends on the outside. They trade off everything.
  What do they do? They find my wife or a school teacher coming out of 
the mini-mart, after teaching all day, going to get the groceries. They 
find her in a parking lot. They find me as I walk from here to the 
train station to commute home. They find the guy running the 7-Eleven 
Store, the mini-mart. They find the gas station operator. That is where 
they get the money.
  What we do in this bill, Mr. President? It is not brain surgery. This 
is not rocket science. We say we provide money to the States to 
encourage them to set up in the prison system--for their nonviolent 
folks, as well as their violent folks--drug treatment and testing to 
test these people randomly to find out whether they are using.
  Mr. President, at first--when I say at first--when this drug problem 
started in earnest 15 years ago, we thought without the body of 
scientific information we now have that the only way you treated an 
alcoholic, a drug abuser, or a polyabuser, was if they saw the Lord; 
they came and said, you know, ``I am down as far as I can go.'' That 
Frank Sinatra movie from years ago, ``The Man With The Golden Arm.'' It 
was not until they hit the bottom that they could be helped. That is 
factually not true. We have found there is no distinction between the 
help afforded someone who is forced into treatment and someone who 
voluntarily goes in; none. There is success in treatment programs which 
I will go into at a later date in this debate.
  But, to sum up, we provide many things for the nonviolent offender, 
one of which is boot camps, which are cheaper for the taxpayer. Another 
one is drug testing. We encourage the States--we do not give them all 
the money to do that, we do not have the money to do that, but we 
encourage them to go forward.
  The other thing we do is we provide $1 billion in here for drug 
courts over the next 6 years. Let me explain how the drug courts work. 
This is again how we deal with nonviolent offenders. There were 1.4 
million people last year who are drug users, convicted of violating the 
law. They are young, under the age of 28, first-time drug users, low-
level people.
  Of those 1.4 million, having pled guilty or convicted, there are the 
following alternatives: They plead guilty, and we put them in prison. 
There are laws that say if you violate with even a small amount of 
drugs in States, and federally, you are eligible to go to prison. Or we 
could say we put you on probation, but you are under intense 
supervision. Or we can say you are on probation and we will see you 
later. If we do not arrest you again, you are OK. There are all kinds 
of things the States do. When I say ``we,'' the Federal Government gets 
these people, and they put them in jail. They get convicted at the 
Federal level. You go to jail, and you serve 85 percent of your time. 
But the States do not do it that way.
  So last year 1.4 million young, nonviolent, first-time drug users 
were convicted--not accused--convicted. Of that 1.4 million people, 
800,000 of them got some sort of test, treatment, imprisonment or 
probation. But for the 600,000 of them, every one is an accident 
waiting to happen; 600,000 of them got no supervision, no testing, no 
treatment, no jail. They were released.
  They are not all bad people. They are not all horrible people. Some 
of them are. The one kid who never tried anything in his life and is at 
a party, tries once, the cops come in, and nail them, and it is ``Oh, 
my God.''
  That happens. It really does. We know that from our life experiences. 
We know that from our children, from our children's friends, and our 
neighbors' children. It is sad. But it is true. But some of them have 
been users for a while, and just got caught this first time.
  So what happens when we let them out with no help, no supervision, no 
punishment? They go back in, and use it again. And in the process, they 
violate not only a law, but they violate somebody else's rights.
  So in this bill, we set up a thing called drug courts. The model, not 
precisely the same, is what happened in Dade County, FL. In Dade 
County, FL, where they have a gigantic problem because of the drug 
trade in southern Florida, and all of the South American drugs coming 
through there, like all the ports of entry, like New York and the 
Southwest, now the Northwest with heroin coming in through the triad 
from Hong Kong; they have a serious problem. They decided several years 
ago they were going to set up a new system because they realized that 
the portion of the 600,000 people they let out after being convicted, 
with no supervision, just ended right back again as second offenders. 
But in the meantime, maybe they broke somebody's leg, stole somebody's 
car, or maybe they committed a fatal act and killed somebody in the 
process.
  So what happened was they set up the following system. They said we 
are going to spend more money. If we divert this first-time offender in 
the main court system, into the drug court system--and, by the way, I 
need not tell the Presiding Officer, and I certainly do not have to 
tell the Senator from Maryland, being from a large city like Baltimore.
  One of the biggest complaints of the local judges is that their 
courts are clogged with drug cases. They do not get to the even more 
serious criminal cases. So everybody in the States has been saying, 
``Divert these people; do not let them off free like you are doing now. 
Almost half of them get off scot-free. Divert them into a separate 
court system.'' Well, Dade County came up and said, ``We will do 
that.'' So all these low-level nonviolent offenders got diverted into 
this drug court system.
  Here is the deal: They get convicted in that system if they meet the 
criteria of being low level, being young, being first-timers, and being 
nonviolent--that is the key, being nonviolent. What happens is they 
say, OK, we are not going to put you in jail, but here is the deal: 
First, you are now signing a piece of paper where you are subject to 
random testing. Any time your probation officer says, ``Come here, 
Charlie,'' you walk in and you take the urinalysis or the blood test, 
and if you flunk it, you go to jail.
  The second thing is, if you are in school, you have to stay in 
school. If you drop out of school, you go to jail. If you have a job 
and you lose your job, unless it is through no fault of your own and 
you seek another job with the help of the probation officer, you go to 
jail and you get put into a drug treatment program. If you do not stay 
in that program, you go to jail.
  You pick up 500,000--in terms of the money--of the 600,000 people 
that are out there. When we cut my drug court provision from $1.3 
billion to $1 billion, we lost the ability to pick up 100,000 of these 
kids. So now I cannot advertise to you that these drug courts get all 
600,000; they only get 500,000 of them. But it is a big deal. Keep in 
mind that nothing happens to them now--nothing.
  In the State of Florida, the numbers on recidivism dropped 
drastically. I think--and I will get the exact number for the Record--
roughly 43 percent of the people who were arrested for the first time 
in Dade County prior to this drug court being set up got rearrested; 
almost half. Since the drug courts were put in, 3 percent got 
rearrested. That is a big deal. That means 40 percent of these people 
were not committing crimes against all of us. But right now, 600,000 
walk the streets.
  Another thing we did to deal with nonviolent offenders in this bill, 
and people who are not offenders yet but we know they are going to 
become offenders--Mr. President, I know of no one more committed to the 
Constitution and its principles than the President pro tempore. He and 
I, and everybody on this floor, know that we cannot, even if we 
identify somebody we know is going to end up being in the criminal or 
drug stream, we cannot say: We are going to brand you and put you in 
jail.
  But the truth is, we all know enough about human nature, I will bet 
you--I do not know who knows much more about human nature than the 
distinguished junior Senator from Maryland--I will bet you I can take 
her into my wife's school, to the playground, and we can watch for a 
couple hours, and she can point and say: I will make you a bet that 
these are the kids that are going to get caught up; because we know 
they have no parents, or they have parents that are in trouble, or they 
are kids who are doing very poorly in school and they cannot read, and 
they have no self-esteem, or they live in neighborhoods or communities 
and hang with people in the drug stream or the crime stream. It does 
not take a brilliant person to figure that out.
  But you cannot go from there and say: We now convict you and put you 
over here. But we can say, from the term of art used ``at-risk 
children,'' we can pay more attention to them and guide them away from 
the drug stream and guide them away from the crime stream to a life of 
productivity. Again, this is not rocket science. Our mothers and 
fathers knew about this 50 years ago. But the way we deal with those 
at-risk kids is they need alternatives to drugs and violence. The bill 
offers tested programs, like Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, to give kids a 
safe place to go after school and a reason to say no to drugs and 
crime.
  Let me point out something. I am not just making up the Girls Clubs 
and Boys Clubs and saying things like, gosh, they are good things, like 
apple pie in America, and that is a good thing to do, and I have a 
progressive hope and a prayer that they work. I have evidence that they 
work. The statistics relative to Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, studied 
over the last decade, the past 10 years or so, Mr. President, are 
astounding. If you have, for example, a public housing project with the 
same demographic makeup as another public housing project--and I will 
submit for the Record these studies--if you have two housing projects 
of the same demographic makeup, the same amount of crime and problems, 
and you put a Boys Club or a Girls Club in the basement of this housing 
project, and none over here, guess what you see a year later? The 
incidents of drug use, arrests, and violent crime committed in the 
project that has a Boys Club and a Girls Club is--measurably, 
demonstrably, and able to be proved--less.
  My staff gives me these statistics, which I will read into the 
Record. A recent independent evaluation has reported that housing 
projects with clubs experience 13 percent fewer juvenile crimes, 22 
percent less drug activity, and 25 percent less crack use than do 
projects without the clubs.
  You say, well, that does not solve the problem, Mr. Biden. Let me ask 
you, how many cops do you have to hire to be in those projects to 
reduce juvenile crime by 13 percent, drug activity by over 20 percent, 
and cut by a quarter the use of crack in those projects? Again, not 
rocket science, not brain surgery; just what our moms and dads have 
told us from the time we were kids. I have said it before on the floor, 
and I will say it again. The expression my mom used, that I heard a 
thousand times, and maybe it is because she is Irish, and the Irish 
have a particular way of saying it, and maybe then in ethnic 
neighborhoods that are Polish, black, Jewish, or whatever, there is a 
different way of saying it, but she used to say: ``An idle mind is the 
devil's workshop.''
  How many parents decide when they are going to go someplace and leave 
their children in the custody of someone else, or when their children 
are home and in a tough situation where there are neighbor kids they do 
not want them playing with, how many parents decide they had better 
find another activity for their child? Why is this such a strange 
concept for some of my Republican friends to understand? A vast 
majority do understand it and agree with it. Senators Domenici, 
Danforth, and Durenberger, and a whole range of them, believe very 
strongly in some of these programs. But that is how we deal with 
nonviolent offenders.
  One of the things we would like to do is not only demonstrate what 
the key provisions of this conference report are--the community 
policing, the prison, and boot camps, the fact that we set up these 
drug courts for nonviolent offenders, the fact that we have youth 
violence initiatives in this, including a whole range of initiatives 
that have been proven they are not a hope and a prayer, that we have 
significant money for rural crime in here, all of which I will speak 
to, because the one thing I want to make sure everybody understands 
before this debate opens up is what is in this bill and what is not in 
this bill.
  Let me move back now if I may to explaining the major pieces of this 
bill.
  First, to reiterate, we pay for what we promise.
  Second, there is an entire mechanism in here whose focus from the 
beginning has been on violent criminals. We do that in a number of 
ways.
  One of which I will speak to that I have not yet is community 
policing. The so-called conference report, which I will refer to from 
now on as the crime bill, provides $8.8 billion--$8.8 billion--to put 
100,000 new police officers on the streets and in our neighborhoods in 
community policing efforts.
  Now I keep hearing Charlton Heston. I really loved Charlton Heston in 
``The Ten Commandments'' and I liked the way he rode a chariot. I wish 
I were as handsome and articulate and had that voice that he has. I 
wish I had his money. I wish I had a lot of things he has.
  But I wish he had the facts. It would be nice if he had the facts.
  Now I know the NRA is paying for these ads. I am told the NRA is 
paying for the ads he has been doing. It is kind of interesting. The 
NRA, to the best of my knowledge, has not spent a penny for an ad on 
television to talk about guns. All of a sudden, they have become the 
pork chop watchers; they are the antiporkers, which is a nice thing. I 
am glad to know we have another group out there making sure we do not 
waste money. I think that is neat. And it is awfully generous of them, 
if that is their concern, to spend their hard-collected dollars from 
their membership.
  But, funny thing. They never mention guns. Now maybe they do and 
maybe I have missed the commercials.
  But Charlton Heston gets on and he talks. And my wife said to me--I 
got home the other night, I say to my friend from Utah--and she said, 
``Joe, you've been telling me now for a year that that bill you wrote 
had money for 100,000 police officers.'' This is literally true. ``I 
have told everybody I teach with that that is the case. And I saw 
Charlton Heston last night''--I thought, like, you know, he stopped at 
the house or something: ``I saw Charlton Heston.''
  ``I saw Charlton Heston last night and he said there are only 22,000 
cops in there. Joe, I thought you told me there were 100,000.''
  Well, you know, I guess it goes to the question of Charlton Heston's 
impact even on my family.
  But let us talk about what it does. Charlton Heston says the crime 
conference report will fund only 22,000, not 100,000, new police 
officers. That is a quote. He gets on TV and he looks into the camera 
and he says, ``Only 22,000, not 100,000.''
  Let us talk about the facts. The conference report does buy 100,000 
new police officers. It provides $8.8 billion in total funding to 
implement community policing programs. This includes $7.5 billion to 
cover $75,000 per officer for 100,000 new cops.
  Now I guess the way he comes up with the 22,000 is he says, ``OK, how 
many cops could you buy with $8.8 billion if the States did not do 
anything?'' I assume that is how he comes up with the number. I assume 
also that he says that the cops cost a lot more money than $75,000.
  He says they cost $70,000 a year. I do not know how many of you hire 
your cops back home for $70,000 a year. I guess he is just used to 
being in Hollywood, where they pay a lot of money for those things. I 
saw ``Beverly Hills Cop.'' Maybe those guys in those fancy police 
stations get paid 70,000 bucks a year.
  Charlton Heston, I guess, is used to getting $70,000, I assume, for 
being seen drinking a Coca-Cola from the Coca-Cola Bottling Co.
  But, for most of us, $70,000 a year is a lot money. And for a guy a 
couple of years ago who was picked as the poorest man in the U.S. 
Congress--yours truly--$70,000 is a lot of money for me. But I guess 
for Moses--I mean Charlton Heston, it is not a lot of money, so he 
thinks every cop costs 70,000 bucks. He also thinks, I guess--and I 
believe he thinks he is telling the truth; but the NRA is giving him 
the facts, which should be a tipoff--he says, I assume--I have not 
spoken to him--I assume when he says 22,000 cops, he says ``OK, $70,000 
a year per police officer, and the States do not have to do anything.''
  Now he is also a big States rights guy, you know--we do not tell 
States what to do. The NRA and he would be the first ones to say, ``We 
do not want a Federal police force.''
  What we do here, just so nobody misunderstands, and what we have been 
doing, we say to the police officers, and to the cities, and to the 
States, what we have been saying for the last several years. We say, 
``Look, you want help hiring local police officers? Here is the deal. 
We will provide some extra money. We will kick in this amount if you 
kick in this amount to hire.''
  Not an irrational concept, you know. We had $150 million available to 
us over the last few years and we said to the States, ``Do you want to 
get a piece of this? Do you want to get a piece of this $150 million 
for police officers?'' They said, ``Yeah.'' We said, ``What you have 
got to do is, for every dollar you get, you have to kick in a dollar to 
hire new police.''
  Cities and States lined up. We did not have enough money to go around 
by a long shot. This is the same principle here. We say, ``Look, we 
have got $8.8 billion and it is here in a pot. You do not have to ask 
for any of this $8.8 billion, but if you do, you do have to kick in 
your piece to hire your cops.''
  These are not Federal cops. These are people who will be wearing a 
Wilmington, DE, blue police uniform; these will be people wearing the 
two-tone brown uniform of the New Castle County Police Department; 
these are people who will be wearing the blue and gray uniform for the 
Delaware State Police. They will answer to the Governor, the mayor, the 
county executive, not to Joe Biden, not to the FBI, not to the 
President.
  So let me tell the NRA, there are 100,000 police.
  The fact of the matter is, that $75,000 we put up and we say you put 
up $75,000 and that will fund for the next 6 years, for the entirety of 
that time; those cops for the next 3 years, you get them and you 
increase them.
  So, it is true. We are not funding 100,000 new cops for every single 
solitary person.
  This is a highly unusual thing to suggest, Mr. President--but I do 
want to finish this statement and, to be very blunt about it, there is 
a very important phone call that I have been asked to take. And in a 
moment, if that person is still on the phone, I am going to suggest the 
absence of a quorum.
  So what we do to pay for these police is, we pay for 100,000 of them 
and we pay for them by providing $75,000 per police officer, not every 
year but for the totality of the time that this bill is in place.
  Mr. President, I would like to ask my friend, although it is totally 
within my right to ask for a call of the quorum, whether or not he 
would mind if I suggested the absence of a quorum for 3 minutes to take 
a phone call and then come back and complete my statement?
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Reid). The absence of a quorum having been 
suggested, the clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Delaware.
  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, let me thank again my friend from Utah for 
being so gracious. The phone call was from the President. He wanted to 
know where Orrin Hatch was on this bill, and I told him he is right 
with us all the way, Mr. President, and not to worry.
  No. It was the President. I apologize. He was asking me something 
about this, and I appreciate the graciousness of my friend from Utah in 
allowing me to take the call.
  So the community policing I was talking about a moment ago does, in 
fact, provide for 100,000 community police. In all of the United States 
there are only 540,000 or thereabouts police officers--in all the 
United States of America, not counting Federal law enforcement 
officers--all State and local law enforcement officers, there are only 
a little over half a million of them. And we are going to add 100,000 
new local police officers. That is going to increase by 20 percent all 
of the police in the United States of America. So, theoretically, in 
every community out there, for every five cops you have you are going 
to get one more. It is a big deal. It is a big, big deal.
  But there is another thing even more important than that. Not only do 
you get more police, but in order to get any of these new police, you 
have to have community policing in your neighborhood. Right now 
policemen--in their defense, because they are shorthanded in most 
places--have had to move to higher technology and squad cars in order 
to cover the same amount of territory. When my dad was growing up in 
Wilmington, DE, there was a cop who walked the beat. There was a guy 
like in the old movies, the Mickey Rooney movies, you know, where there 
is a cop walking along, flipping his baton and saying, Hi, Charlie, and 
stepping into the local corner grocery store to get his coffee and so 
on. That is community policing.
  Guess what. It works. It builds confidence between the people in the 
community and the police, which is particularly necessary in the high-
crime neighborhoods, in the neighborhoods where we have a high 
concentration of minority population who are distrustful of the police 
if all they see is the person in the squad car going around. But it is 
more expensive. It is more time consuming, but it works.
  In Houston, TX, where they initiated community policing, the crime 
rate dropped--I believe it was 17 percent. I was going to say 19. My 
staff just corrected me--17 percent.
  A 17-percent drop in the crime rate when they took people out of 
their cars and put them on the beat and they walked the street.
  There are only a few things we know for sure. We know if you put a 
police officer on this street corner, and no police officer on this 
street corner, and there is a crime going to occur, it is much more 
likely that that crime will be committed on the corner where there is 
no police officer. It sounds simple. We know crime often occurs when 
there is no policeman, and when it occurs where there is a policeman, 
an arrest usually occurs.
  So how do we deal with violent criminals? By putting police officers 
on the street. So what this 100,000 police will do is not only take the 
100,000 police, add 100,000, increase the total number of police in 
America almost 20 percent--I think it is 19 percent--but it does one 
other thing. It leverages those so we end up with almost 650,000 police 
officers on the street. They are not there now.
  You say, ``Well, Biden, we can put those 540,000 on the street 
without any of this stuff.'' You are right. But you know why it does 
not happen? It does not happen for a simple reason: The police do not 
like this kind of approach without more help.
  Let me tell you, in some sections of my State and neighboring States, 
if I am a police officer, I can ride through in a squad car or I can 
walk through. I know what I want to do, I want to ride through, I do 
not want to walk through, and you cannot blame me.
  So when the mayor says, ``Chief, I've got a great idea. Let's shift 
to community policing,'' the police go, ``Whoa, wait a minute, wait a 
minute.'' And there is a resistance, with good reason, because they say 
there are not enough of them to walk on the street, there are not 
enough of them to provide protection for each other.

  Now, the mayor will say, ``OK, tell you what, chief, the choice is 
yours. You can get another''--in my State of Delaware--``you can get 
another 1,000 or more cops, 1,250 cops,'' and we only have in the whole 
State of Delaware 1,700 police officers. ``You can get another 1,200 
police,'' or, in the city of Wilmington, you can get another 150 
police, or whatever, ``but here is the deal. You have to take your 
existing 350 and move them into community policing.'' Now the chief has 
something to go back to his men and women with.
  He says, ``Hey, we've got to go to community policing, but I tell you 
what, instead of riding in a squad car by yourself, you are going to be 
walking on a beat with a partner.'' Then it is OK. So we can leverage. 
We can leverage the number of police officers who are in community 
policing, and that will affect violent crime in the United States of 
America.
  I went through the statistics, and I will not do it again, about the 
number of violent criminals we let out of jail, but the 105,000 new 
prison cells will keep in jail.
  I also want to point out that there is flexibility built into the 
community policing for local police departments who can use some of 
this money, not only to hire new police officers, but also to allow 
them to buy higher technology equipment.
  For example, there is a system we have federally that has all the 
fingerprints in the United States of America. If they take the criminal 
records of people who are convicted criminals and/or people who are 
escapees, or people who are on the lam, as they say, if we give the 
States the money and help them, they take all their records and they 
send them down to Washington, DC. Then there is a little machine we can 
give to the police officers. They usually put them in squad cars, but 
they can also hook them on their belt. When you arrest John Jones for a 
traffic violation, for loitering, or something else, all you have to do 
is have John Jones stick his thumb in this little machine and it will 
pop up on the screen whether John Jones is a convicted felon that you 
are looking for. That is a pretty big deal. Technology is available. We 
provide for the ability of the major cities and the small cities and 
towns to get this kind of equipment in order to deal with tracking 
down, apprehending and dealing with violent criminals.
  I have spoken about the drug courts and I have spoken about the youth 
violence, how we deal with violent offenders. I will speak at a later 
date about what are significant prevention programs that are left.
  I might point out to my Republican colleagues, we took out most of 
the prevention money. I forget how much exactly we had in the crime 
bill as it left the U.S. Senate when we sent it over there. We had 
roughly $4.3 billion in prevention money. The old conference report 
increased that, according to my Republican friends, to something 
around--they argue that it was up to $7.4 billion. So what the House 
leadership, with the Republican minority, did, in my presence, over the 
last 2 days, is they cut the prevention money from $7.4 billion in that 
conference report to $6 billion, or to put it another way, they cut 
$1.3 billion out of what they call pork.
  What is left? What is left is about $1.7 billion more than we passed 
here. But what is in there is everything that my Republican friends, 
like Senators Domenici and Danforth and Durenberger and others, along 
with Democrats, wanted in this bill. We preserved that. But I will come 
back and talk about that during this debate.
  The other thing that is preserved in this conference report is 
something that is near and dear to the heart of my friend from Utah and 
for me; and that is the rural crime provisions.
  Rural crime is on the rise, and it is on the rise at a faster rate in 
rural America than in any other part of America. According to the most 
recent report from the FBI, violent assaults rose 30 times faster in 
rural America than in our 25 largest cities in America. And the number 
of rapes rose more than 9 percent in the rural counties in America 
while decreasing by nearly 4 percent in urban America.
  So there was a 13-point shift--more rapes by 9 percent in rural 
America, fewer rapes in urban America. And as I said, in terms of 
violent assaults in rural America, it rose 30 times faster than in 
urban America.
  Drugs are also an increasing menace in rural States. The number of 
arrests for drug abuse violations in rural America jumped almost 23 
percent in 1992.
  To meet that challenge, the crime bill provides almost a quarter of a 
billion dollars--$245 million--in drug crime fighting money to help 
States and localities hire police--different than the hiring under the 
community policing--to hire police specifically to fight drug-related 
crime in rural America.
  Half of this money will be divided among the 19 rural States, and the 
remaining half, I say to the chagrin of my friend from Massachusetts, 
this is one time where the rural States did very well. The rural States 
get half of this money, the 19 most rural States in America. The other 
half goes to the rural communities in the other States. But it all goes 
to rural America, something that my friend from Utah has fought hard 
for, along with the Senator from Delaware.
  Now, we also establish rural drug enforcement task forces in every 
Federal judicial district encompassing significant rural lands.
  Put another way, every place where we have a Federal presence in the 
State that is overwhelmingly rural, we set up the task forces, which 
the Senator from Massachusetts thought about 20 years ago here and set 
up those task forces that the last Justice Department tried to do away 
with.
  But we do that in rural America now because in rural States like 
mine, where the largest city has 85,000 people in it, the next largest 
is about 28,000 people, in rural States like mine, what happens is the 
drug traffic from Washington, DC, moves over to Sussex County in 
Delaware, and the drug trafficking from New York City and Baltimore 
moves over there because they are saturated in those metropolitan 
areas.
  Now, they have small police forces. They are not trained in nor have 
the technology of the DEA, the Federal drug enforcement agency, and the 
FBI. So we provide money here for those 1-, 2-, 3-, and 5-person law 
enforcement agencies in towns of 2-, 5-, 10-, 15-, 20,000 people. And 
we provide the money for them to set up these task forces so they get 
the help--run by the local people. It is a big deal.
  In addition to all of this local help for rural areas and community 
policing, we put in here $1 billion for the Byrne grants, which my 
staff did not even list here as a major portion of this--$1 billion. I 
challenge any one of my colleagues to go home and ask their local 
police what is the single, most significant thing the Federal 
Government has done for them so far. Do you know what they will tell 
you? They will tell you the Byrne grants, named after a police officer 
who was killed.
  These grants are to provide $1 billion to the States to set up drug 
enforcement mechanisms that work very well in the large cities and 
small cities, rural and urban America. So we put $1 billion in there.
  I see my friend from Pennsylvania, who endorsed this bill. He is one 
of the guys who, because he was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia, 
PA, as the DA, knows more about this than 95 percent of us. This is a 
big deal, this additional $1 billion. It is money to go to local law 
enforcement.
  The bill also directs the Director of the Federal Law Enforcement 
Training Center in Glynnco, GA, to develop special courses specifically 
devoted to training rural, State and local law enforcement officers in 
the investigation of drug trafficking and related crimes.
  I do not know how many people listening to this on C-SPAN or hearing 
it in the gallery visiting from their various States, I do not know how 
many of them fail to understand--I think all do--if they come from a 
small town, you cannot expect the small town law enforcement officer to 
know all the ins and outs of the drug trade. It changes every day. We 
have an entire Federal agency called the Drug Enforcement 
Administration that has trouble keeping up.
  And so what we ask in this bill, the Senator from Massachusetts and 
myself, is to make sure they train local people down in the most 
advanced training center in the world.
  I might add, by the way, Russia is asking us to train their law 
enforcement officers. Everybody is asking us to train their law 
enforcement officers. The Germans, the Italians are trying to get us to 
help train their drug enforcement officers to deal with the drug trade 
and Mafia and all the rest.
  How do we expect the two- and three-person police force to do that? 
So we put in here, what the Senator from Massachusetts asked for, to 
make sure we get the local people trained with our experts down in 
Glynnco, GA, the same place that the Russians are asking us to train 
their people, the same place that the Italians are asking their people 
to be trained, the same place that every law enforcement agency in the 
world wants to go. We set it up and say you have to train our folks. 
Again, that is a big deal.
  Now, I will make two more points. Then I will yield. The patience of 
my friend from Utah is almost unlimited but I may be getting to the 
point of limiting it. One is that we add in here, to the chagrin of 
some of my colleagues, the death penalty.
  I happen to support the death penalty. I respect people who view the 
death penalty as being a violation of the eighth amendment, or even 
more basically the average American who does think the death penalty is 
wrong, as just simply being immoral. I respect that. There are decent, 
honorable Republicans and Democrats, people of all faiths, who think 
you never have a right to take a life--the State has no right to take a 
life. Put the person in jail forever with no probation, no parole, but 
do not take their life.
  I wish I could say I felt that strongly about that and found a moral 
objection to it. I cannot in good faith say that. So when I wrote this 
original bill, I added back into the Federal statutes over 50 death 
penalties--50 circumstances in which, if a person is convicted of a 
crime at a Federal level, they are eligible for the death penalty.
  Now, I say very forthrightly to the half dozen of my colleagues who 
oppose the death penalty--and it is probably a larger number than 
that--I say to them they should not be misled. There is money in here 
for the death penalty. In addition, the bill authorizes over 70 
increased penalties--70, seven zero--70 increased penalties in new 
offenses covering violent crimes, drug trafficking, and gun crimes. 
These include, for example, increased penalties for drug dealing in 
drug-free school zones, for the use of semiautomatic weapons in 
committing a Federal crime, for drunks driving where you have a child 
in the car.
  Many of you know children, and when you were children you would be 
put in the position where your favorite uncle comes over and goes to 
the picnic, is drunk, and then says to you, ``Come on. We're going 
home.'' You look at your uncle, and you know you should not get in the 
car, but you get in the car because you are trained not to disobey your 
father, your mother, your uncle, your aunt.
  Children get killed in that circumstance. We cannot expect them to 
monitor the behavior of their families, monitor the behavior of adults, 
but we can expect, if my bill passes, that if a drunk driving accident 
occurs and you have a child in the car, you are going to be in deep 
trouble, and we double the penalties for that. I realize that is not a 
big thing to most people, but it is a big thing to me.
  We increase penalties from that all the way to mandatory requirements 
for a jail sentence if you commit a crime with a gun. And not 
unimportantly in my view--and this is a big issue with Charlton Heston 
and a lot of other people--we ban assault weapons. For the first time 
we ban assault weapons.
  I do not know many deer that need to be taken down with an AK-47, nor 
do I know any hunter being able to fire an AK-47 with any degree of 
accuracy. They are not designed to be accurate. They are designed to 
kill. They are designed to kill human beings. Human beings.
  I asked the leading medical doctors in America testifying before my 
committee, who run the major trauma centers in America, why is it that 
last year when I wrote a report saying we would have more murders than 
any time in our history, why did I turn out to be right? Why were there 
over 23,700 or 23,800 murders in America? Is it because more people are 
being shot?
  One brilliant doctor, heading a major trauma center in one of our 
four largest trauma hospitals in America, a woman doctor said: 
``Senator, I have headed this trauma center for a number of years. We 
have become so sophisticated we have removed a bullet, a .22 caliber 
bullet from the brain of a person and they lived, and lived a healthy 
life. We have removed low caliber bullets from people's hearts, from 
parts of people's bodies which would ordinarily kill them. We have 
become very sophisticated. But, Senator, when you fire a .45 caliber 
bullet or a 9 millimeter bullet into someone's body and it goes to 
their lung, it does not lodge in their lung. It blows their lung out of 
their body, out of their body.''
  Those of you who do not know much about guns--and I do not pretend to 
be an expert--if I took a .22 caliber pistol, with the reporter 
standing before me, and I fired into his shoulder, he would recoil like 
that.
  If I took a 9 millimeter gun and fired it into him, it would knock 
him, lift him up, and move him over that table and bang his head into 
the marble. He has just moved. I have no intention of doing that to 
him; I want to make it clear.
  But all kidding aside, this doctor stood up behind the witness 
chairs--the Presiding Officer knows how we do that; a table just like 
that one in front of me here--stood up and said, ``Senator, let me tell 
you, it used to be that we would see single-shot wounds when they had 
an emergency and they were taken into the emergency room. Now, Senator, 
the bullet wounds start--'' she bent down and said, ``They start at the 
ankle and end at the neck.''
  My friend from the State of Nevada, the Presiding Officer, knows 
about guns; he knows why that is: Because they are high-caliber weapons 
that are semiautomatic, and when you pull the trigger, they go like 
that, unless you are very well schooled in the use of them. So you have 
these kinds of wounds.
  We held that hearing and pointed that out. She said, ``The reason 
more people are dying--and it is why it is murder and not assault with 
a deadly weapon; they are murdered, they die--is we cannot repair them. 
When they are shot with a low-caliber bullet, we can repair them. When 
they are shot with a high-caliber bullet, it takes away vital organs 
and they die. When they are shot once, we have a chance. When they are 
shot five times in one incident, we tend to not be able to help them 
live.''
  Then, not too long ago, one of the magazine programs, ``20-20'' or 
``60 Minutes'' did a program where they pointed out--and we 
acknowledged; we showed it--I believe a decade ago, maybe a little 
longer, the average number of bullet wounds of a person taken into an 
emergency ward was 1.1; by and large, single-shot wounds. Now, that 
average is something like 2.4 or 2.6. I ask that the Record be kept 
open for me to be able to give the exact number.
  But the point is, it is a reflection of these guns that are of higher 
caliber, meaning bigger pieces of lead, bigger pieces of bullets, with 
greater force, and designed when they go into your body to do things 
differently than ordinary bullets. Instead of going into your body in a 
straight line and going straight out, they are designed, when they go 
into your body, to tumble, to spin around, to rip your insides up and 
out. What do you need that for, as a sports person? You do not.
  So what we have done is outlawed some of these military-style assault 
weapons.
  The last point of a major piece that is in this bill that I would 
like to speak to is the thing I must admit is the nearest and dearest 
to my heart, and the thing I have worked on harder--this is parochial, 
I acknowledge--than anything I have ever worked on in 22 years; that 
is, the Violence Against Women Act.
  Mr. President, this is a comprehensive approach to fighting all forms 
of violence against women, combining a broad array of needed reforms to 
change both our laws and our attitudes. They include the following:
  Funding for local law enforcement to set up special units focused on 
aggressive prosecution of sexual assault and family violence. Let me 
give you a little insight.
  They did a study in Washington, DC, which is not very different than 
any other study in America, than any city they have picked. They asked: 
``How many times, when a police officer showed up on the scene who was 
called to an emergency where a woman was being beaten by her boyfriend, 
her live-in, her acquaintance, or her husband, was the boyfriend, the 
acquaintance, the live-in, the husband arrested, even where the woman 
was bleeding?'' The woman was bleeding. They get called, and the woman 
is bleeding. They show up on the scene, and the man is there, and the 
woman is bleeding, or the man is taken off and the woman is bleeding. 
In 85 percent of the cases, no arrest was made.
  Did you hear what I just said? Eighty-five percent of the time, a 
woman is more in jeopardy in her home, more in jeopardy in her bed with 
her husband or her boyfriend, a woman is more in jeopardy with the man 
that she loves than any other place in America. Let me explain 
something to you. You say, ``Well, obviously the reason these police 
did not make an arrest is the woman would not swear out a complaint.''
  Let me tell you something. If Chris, my expert on criminal law, 
sitting next to me, and I get into a fight outside on the Capitol 
steps, or downtown in Washington, and we are fistfighting on a corner 
and he is beating me up or I am beating him up--it would be more likely 
he would be beating me up, because he is younger and stronger--if he is 
beating me up and a police officer comes up, the police officer is not 
going to turn to him or to me and say, ``Do you wish to swear out a 
warrant for the arrest of this person?'' They are going to arrest us 
both on what they call information. Somebody committed a crime.
  So they immediately arrest both of us and put us in a paddy wagon. If 
I am standing there and somebody calls, and I am bleeding, standing on 
the corner, and he is standing next to me, the cop does not come up to 
me and say, ``Sir, do you want to swear out a warrant for his arrest?'' 
They put us in a paddy wagon.
  On the other hand, the person who handles the remainder of the 
criminal justice agenda for me, Demetra, sitting here, who is about to 
give birth to a child--say I am her boyfriend and I slap her, even in 
her pregnant state. What happens in your home States when the cop comes 
up and sees that? Does he automatically arrest me? What does he do? The 
first thing he does is, he says, ``Do you want to swear out a warrant 
against him?'' What do most women say? They say no. Why? I am 6 feet 1, 
190 pounds, and not a bad athlete. She is 6 inches shorter than I am, 
and 100 pounds lighter than I am. She knows when she looks at me and 
looks at the cop and says, ``Yes, I am going to swear out a warrant for 
his arrest,'' that I am going to get out of jail and then I am really 
going to be mad.
  For you men listening who do not appreciate that, let me ask how many 
of you when you were kids and you are in the schoolyard and the bully 
was beating you up--you are down on the ground; he is beating you up, 
and you have a clear shot at his nose. How many of you hit him? Not 
many of you. Why did you not? You knew that if you hit him in the nose, 
that would really make him mad.
  Do you think I am kidding? Ask yourself, you men, ask yourself how 
the psyche works and how yours works the next time you say, ``Why will 
she not swear out a warrant?'' I will ask you, how many of you hit the 
bully? Not many, I know.
  It is about time attitudes change. This bill, this Violence Against 
Women Act, goes a long way toward changing it. Guess what? If a cop 
shows up and does not arrest, they lose Federal funds. There has to be 
a presumption, not a conviction, of arrest because we want to put the 
woman in the position where she is able to look at that bully, that 
thug, who hit her, and say, ``I did not do it. I did not swear out the 
warrant. There is nothing I can do about it.'' It will give her some 
cover. It is human nature. All these laws affect human nature. And I 
want to affect that small portion of the male population whose human 
nature is sick in the way in which they deal with the women they 
allegedly love.
  We also provide in this legislation funding for battered women's 
shelters and for victims' services. Do you know why the vast majority 
of the children that are on the street and that are homeless with their 
mothers are there? Because they get beat up at home; because their 
mothers get beaten in front of their children, and the mother has no 
place to go. So her last resort is the street.
  Do you know we have three times as many animal shelters in America as 
we have shelters for battered women? My lost dog has a better 
opportunity to be sheltered until I can find her than my daughter, were 
she married to someone who beat her--God forbid, the son-of-a-gun who 
beats my daughter.
  It makes me angry. But for the first time we do something about this. 
We provide money for these shelters for women, so they have a clean, 
healthy place to go. Women stay in that environment where they are 
beaten because they have no financial resources to move. We take 
practical steps like funding more lights and security cameras at bus 
stops and adjacent parking lots, in parks, and in subway stations, to 
increase the safety for women who are in the workplace.
  I do not believe any of my colleagues here would disagree with this, 
but some letters I get from constituents around the country say this to 
me: Well, the women should not be out working.
  One of the reasons why we need this additional security lighting is 
that lights are a phenomenal disinfectant, I say to the Presiding 
Officer. When they put electric lamps instead of gas lamps in London, 
the crime rate dropped by almost 30 percent, because people do not 
commit crimes under glaring lights for fear of being seen--unless they 
are on dope or on speed.
  Many of you know women who now have jobs just like men where they are 
required to work until 12 a.m. or 1 o'clock in the morning. How many 
women reporters who have covered this have the same deadline the male 
reporters do and have to walk to that parking lot in the center city, 
not at 5 in the afternoon when thousands of people are going there, but 
at 1 o'clock in the morning when no one else is going there? How many 
women who clean these offices along with the men have to leave that 
office building at 1 a.m. in the morning and stand at the bus stop to 
catch the last bus? Women are in the workplace. And women are now in 
circumstances where they are exposed because of the physical 
vulnerability--nothing else--to predators.
  There are identifiable high crime rates. How many of you people would 
tell your daughter who is 20 years old working for a company that it is 
all right to walk into a parking lot late at night? I recently visited 
someone in the hospital, a family member, up in Philadelphia. It is one 
of the great hospitals, the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. 
What do they have? When you are leaving at 11 o'clock when they close 
down the visiting hours, you go to the parking lot, and the University 
of Pennsylvania hospital has armed guards that will take you to your 
car.
  We should help. If you are a woman and you have been put in that 
circumstance because of the nature of the work force changes, we should 
make those high-crime areas safer, and the best way to do that is by 
light.
  Most important, the Violence Against Women Act creates, for the first 
time, a civil rights remedy for victims of crimes motivated by gender 
bias. By the way, we found that lawyers rape, doctors rape, businessmen 
rape, just like thugs rape, like anybody rapes. This idea that only 
poor folks rape is malarkey. So I wanted to do something to empower 
women like they have never been empowered before. Five-hundred or a 
thousand years ago, or 800 years ago, in our English prudential system, 
the way it used to work is that if you committed a wrong against me, I 
would go and hire the sheriff and the sheriff would go arrest you. I 
would then have you taken before a judge, and if the judge found you 
guilty, I would pay for your imprisonment. I, the victim, controlled 
the agenda. Out of a need to deal with equity and allow poor people the 
same rights, we started--and to make the case 100 years ago, even 300 
years ago, it used to be when you read the docket, it would say the 
case of Biden versus Smith, not the State of Delaware versus Smith. 
Biden versus Smith. The victim. At least I was empowered.
  In order to change things, we had the State step in and take the part 
of the victim. But in the process, something got lost. Victims were 
disenfranchised. How many of you know somebody who was a victim, who 
got a phone call from the prosecutor saying, you know, we decided to 
reduce the charges against Charlie, and instead of hold him for 
robbery, we have decided to reduce the charge to whatever, a lesser 
charge, or we decided we are not going to go forward with the 
prosecution. You are the victim and you are sitting out there, and you 
do not have anything. You have no say.
  Women in America particularly have no say. But one thing I did in 
this bill, which a lot of people did not like, is created a civil 
rights cause of action. If a woman can prove the crime of violence 
committed against her was strictly because of her gender--and that is a 
high hurdle to cross--then not only does she have the right to be in a 
situation where the State goes after the person on a criminal charge, 
but she can say: By the way, Jack, I am suing you and I am taking you 
into Federal court. And after they lock you up in jail for the crime 
you committed against me, I am going to get a judgment against you, and 
I take your Mercedes, I take your house, I take your car, I take your 
bank account. I am going to penalize you just like if there was an 
automobile accident where you caused me injury. I am going to be 
empowered to take you to court, to take your property if I can that you 
did this bad thing to me. It will empower women more than anything that 
has happened in the recent past where they have been victimized.
  One other thing we do in here that is not in the violence against 
women legislation--speaking of victims. Right now, if you are a victim 
of a crime--like my mother who is on Social Security, who is in her 
seventies and looks like she is in her fifties. Say she is shopping and 
comes out, and someone grabs her purse and, in the process, knocks her 
down and she breaks her hip or leg and has hospital bills and is laid 
up; he takes her money, and what happens? You find the guy or woman who 
did it, you take him to trial, you prove beyond a reasonable doubt he 
did it, you put him in jail and fine him.
  Where does the fine go? The fine goes to the State. What is the 
rationale for that? It is to cover the cost of the State entering into 
and taking on the responsibility to incarcerate this person. Logical 
notion. But what happens to my mom? My mom is out $50 or $500. My mom 
is out the medical cost and the bills.
  So we have written into this conference report something different 
than was in the original bill. Now there is a penalty and provision 
that the person who is the victim must be compensated by the defendant 
as a nondischargeable debt. We also increase the victim's fund. Senator 
Thurmond and I, along with many others, years ago passed a provision 
setting up a fund, some of which comes from forfeiture money, where the 
State can compensate out of this fund a victim who has lost something 
of monetary value. So we are, for the first time, really turning our 
attention to the victim. And we can never make them whole. But there 
are two parts to this equation. One is get the bad guy and punish the 
bad guy. The second is take the victim and try to restore them. The 
victim has been the forgotten person.
  (Mr. AKAKA assumed the chair.)
  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, we also provided here for the victim 
through the help of the Senator from Utah. Actually it may have been 
his idea. We provide that when you show up at trial--the judge is about 
to sentence John Doe for the crime against my mother. Up to now my mom 
does not get to go in court and stand before the judge and say, 
``Judge, let me remind you what this guy did to me.'' My mom does not 
get to say a word. But under this bill, my mom gets to show up, and my 
mom gets to stand there and say, ``Judge, before you sentence this man, 
let me remind you what happened to me.'' Or the family of a murder 
victim is able to come in and say, ``Judge, let me remind you what is 
at stake here, what happened to my family.''
  This is the most victim-friendly bill we ever passed. It is about 
time.
  Now, there were two things that I heard a lot about on this floor 
over the last couple weeks. One was that we do not deal with sexual 
predators in this legislation. Let me tell you what we did in this bill 
we are about to vote on, or whenever we are going to be allowed to vote 
on it. There are two things we did.
  One, it explicitly allows a community to be notified when a sex 
offender is released from prison into the community. All sex offenders 
must keep the law enforcement agencies apprised of their whereabouts 
for 10 years after their release. And sexual predators, as defined by 
that worst class of offenders, must register with the police for the 
rest of their lives.
  A sexual predator who is released from jail, nobody in America will 
not know where that person has moved. So if you live on a street that 
that person has moved on to and that person is adjudged a sexual 
predator, you will know that person lives in your neighborhood so we do 
not end up with a horrible situation like we did in many places. The 
most celebrated case unfortunately was a young girl named Megan in New 
Jersey recently. They must register for life.
  Guess what? If in fact the State does not set up one of these 
registries to accommodate this because they do not like this bill, they 
lose 10 percent of the police money they most care about, the so-called 
Byrne grants.
  The second thing I heard a lot about on the floor is the so-called 
safety valve, a concept which at one point a number of my Republican 
friends supported, and I did not support, but I kept hearing and seeing 
little cards handed out. They were quite amusing. They were handing out 
little monopoly cards saying, ``You pass this crime bill and you are 
going to let 10,000 drug dealers out of jail,'' because they said there 
is a provision--and they were right about only one part--there was a 
provision saying those who had been convicted in the past, who were 
still in jail under a minimum mandatory sentence, would be eligible to 
apply for an earlier release based upon the grounds that they were 
nonviolent when they were convicted. They did not use a gun or a knife; 
a child was not involved, and so on, a whole list of things, and they 
said this is retroactive.
  I suggested, along with others in the compromise in the House, that 
we take out this retroactive provision of this law for the safety valve 
will apply to no one who is presently in jail. So they better take back 
their monopoly cards because they no longer mean anything. They did not 
mean anything when they handed them out. Now for sure there is no 
retroactivity in this legislation relative to the issue of the so-
called safety valve.
  We also added what a number of my colleagues have wanted on the 
Senate side, mandatory HIV testing for anyone who is charged with rape, 
whether they are found guilty or not. There is mandatory pretrial--
pretrial--HIV testing with any person charged with rape.
  So, the three things I heard most about were:
  This is a terrible bill.
  There is too much pork in it. We cut $3.5 billion out of the bill, 
so-called pork, which was not pork in the first place. Prevention 
money, $3.5 billion, is taken out.
  There was not enough money for the prisons in the bill. We added $3.2 
billion more prison money.
  Third, that it has a retroactivity provision that lets all these 
people out of jail. We struck the retroactivity. It is not part of this 
bill.
  Fourth, people charged with crimes of rape are not able to be tested 
to see if they are HIV positive so their victims can know. We have 
mandatory HIV testing.
  The other thing I heard the most about was the predators, and that is 
that as to sexual predators, the community did not have to be 
manditorily notified and that it did not include enough people. It is 
everything and more than anybody asked for.
  Lastly, there is one thing in here that I must tell you I do not 
like. I want the Record to reflect it. Senator Dole and Congresswoman 
Molinari on the House side had a provision that I think is, quite 
frankly, outrageous, but my colleagues all liked it. Even though I 
authored this bill, this is one provision I did not author.
  The bill says that for anybody who is charged with a sexual crime of 
violence or child molestation, there is going to be a different set of 
rules that apply to them when they go to trial.
  Right now, Mr. President, if the reporter is charged with bribery or 
robbery--I keep picking on these people; they are nice folks and they 
would not be charged with anything--but if he were and he goes to 
trial, and the prosecutor wants to bring in someone who says, in eighth 
grade he stole my wallet, to prove this is the guy who has always been 
stealing his whole life, the court says that is crazy, you cannot do 
that. This has nothing to do with this crime, and it happened 31 years 
ago, or in the reporter's case 15 years ago. You cannot do that. If you 
are charged with burglary, you cannot have someone say, ``By the way, 
when I was 26 I lent him my car and he never brought it back.'' ``Did 
you ever go and report it to the police?'' ``No.'' ``Was he ever 
charged with the crime?'' ``No.'' What proof do you have? All the 
witnesses are dead. It happened 40 years ago. It is just my word.
  The court says, ``That is crazy.''
  For 800 years we said that is a crazy idea to let people come in and 
do that. It has nothing to do with the crime.
  Most all of my friends, about 80 on the Senate floor and about 300 of 
them on the House floor, said if it is a child molestation case or if 
it is a crime of sexual violence, allegation of sexual violence against 
a woman, the prosecutor not only can bring in evidence that relates to 
the crime, but can go out and find anybody who at any time in the past, 
a day after, 2 years before, 50 years before, who will allege that the 
defendant did something like that to them then.
  Can you imagine how prejudicial that is going to be? You have a son 
who is 21 years old. He is being accused of rape. He did not do it. Or 
more importantly you have an employer who is 55 years old, who has a 
disgruntled employee who charges him with rape. It does not happen 
often but it can happen.
  Now what happens? The prosecutor, instead of just having to deal with 
that witness and those facts, is able to go out and find anybody who is 
willing to say, ``By the way, when he was 21 years old when we were 
parked in the car he physically molested me,'' without any proof of 
anything. Now, the people who might have been around to prove that that 
was not the case, the couple you double dated with in the front seat of 
the car, are dead. But you have a witness, the one person sitting 
there, who says, ``But that happened to me 25 years ago.''
  And now, the defendant's lawyer can get up and cross-examine that 
person and say, ``How do you know that?'' and on and on and on. But how 
do you, in effect, defend yourself against one trial, two trials, three 
trials? The one trial you are in, you can bring your witnesses, it is 
contemporaneous, you can say, ``No, I wasn't there. The rape happened 
at 10 o'clock and I have four witnesses that say I was at Charley's 
Smoke Shop at 10 o'clock.''
  But how about the person who comes in and says, ``Twenty years ago, 
this happened to me''? What can the defendant do?
  Then you are supposed to say the jury will not be impacted by that. I 
think it is a crazy idea. But I am in the minority.
  And so, let me tell my friends, who I think subscribe to what I think 
is a crazy idea, what is in this bill. The Hatch-Molinari language, to 
the credit of my friend from up Utah, because he is the guy that was 
over there negotiating. The only two Senators involved in this whole 
deal was myself --that I am aware of--and the Senator from Utah. We got 
to know more House Members intimately than we knew before in our lives.
  I was making the argument--and he won; he won that this kind of what 
I would call, not technically, hearsay, but I would call amounts to 
nothing more than hearsay, should be allowed in.
  We are not talking about prior convictions, by the way. We are not 
talking about not letting the guy who is up for rape and was convicted 
three times for rape and the prosecutor, say, wants the jury to know he 
has been convicted three times for rape. There is already Federal rules 
of evidence to allow that to happen. We are not talking about that.
  But, my friend won. Here is what we put in there. The Hatch-Molinari 
language allowing this kind of evidence in will become law immediately 
upon the passage of this bill, subject to the following two things: 
First, they have to wait 150 days to allow the mechanism that--by the 
way, we do not pass any rules of evidence like this. We had a mechanism 
set up years ago. A couple of decades ago, we decided we should not 
write these kinds of laws, rules of evidence; we should give that 
authority to the Federal courts. And they have set up a judicial 
conference and they make recommendations and then we either vote for or 
against those recommendations. If we do not vote against them, they 
become law, because experts who do nothing but this get to deal with 
them.
  So I must acknowledge that the Senator from Utah compromised a little 
bit on this. He said we have to wait 150 days before it becomes law, to 
let the judicial conference look at it and make a judgment. That is the 
good news from my part.
  Now here comes the bad news. If, within the next 150 days after that, 
we do not affirmatively reject the Hatch-Molinari, et al., law, then it 
automatically becomes law.
  So I am expecting that more enlightened minds, more enlightened 
perspectives--that is, the Supreme Court and the Federal judges--will, 
when they look at this proposed law, say, ``This is crazy.'' I do not 
know; I am hoping they will. If I am wrong on that, then I am totally 
wrong, and I yield. I am beaten.
  But, if they come back and say, ``No, this is a bad idea. Here is how 
we should change the law,'' then, after they do that, I have 150 days 
in which to get out here and affirmatively get 51 Senators to vote for 
that.
  I am sure my friend from Utah would not do this to me, but somebody 
will stand up and require me--because I have to get this done--they 
will require me to be put in a position where I essentially have to get 
60 votes. Because, as I try to pass my law that the judges think this 
is a good idea, assuming they do outlaw this crazy notion, somebody is 
going to stand up in this place--it will not be the Senator from Utah, 
I hope--and say, ``Well, we are not going to play fair and let Biden 
try to get 51 votes, we are going to filibuster him, because if we 
filibuster him and we can make it last 150 days' worth, prevent a vote, 
then this law automatically becomes law.''
  Of everything in this crime bill, the only thing that I have a moral, 
intellectual, and practical aversion to is this last provision I talked 
about.
  Now I cite this not only to not kid anybody who said, ``Gee, Biden 
wrote this crime bill and, man, he is tough on crime. I like him for 
being tough on crime.''
  I want to have truth in lending here. Do not give me credit for this 
last tough provision. I do not like it. I think it is wrong. I think it 
is unfair. I think it violates innocent people's civil liberties. That 
is the first reason I tell you about this.
  But the second reason is to make the concluding point, and then I 
will yield to my friend, and that is that even I do not like everything 
in this bill.
  How long is this bill? This is a copy of the bill. It is relatively 
small print. Single spaced, relatively small print, there is a total of 
412 pages in this bill.
  Now, we have, as my Republican colleagues keep pointing out, a health 
care bill that is this big. We will soon have an energy bill and a 
Superfund bill and a lot of bills that are very thick.
  I plead with my colleagues, do not insist that every single piece of 
this omnibus bill be something that you like. Because if we all do 
that, we will deny forever the additional protection the American 
people need. There must be some compromise. There must be some 
compromise.
  I will do all in my power, which is obviously and discernibly 
limited, but I will do all in my power to get rid of the Hatch-Molinari 
provision, if I can. I will probably lose. But I will vote for this 
bill, because, as much as anything I have ever voted on in 22 years in 
the U.S. Senate, I truly believe passage of this legislation will make 
a difference in the lives of the American people.
  I believe with every fiber in my being that, if this bill passes, 
fewer people will be murdered, fewer people will be victims, fewer 
women will be senselessly beaten, fewer people will continue on the 
drug path, and fewer children will become criminals. It will not end 
crime in our time.
  Can I answer a question like was asked on one of the talk shows, 
Evans and Novak, one of the most unusual questions I have ever heard 
asked? Tell me, they were asking this particular person, what 
percentage of crime will drop if this bill passes?
  What kind of a question is that? I do not know what the percentage 
will be. But I assure you, America will be safer tomorrow with this 
passed than if this is not passed. Our lives literally depend on it.
  There are few things we can say on this floor and be certain when we 
say them; that the passage or the rejection of this piece of 
legislation will affect whether or not someone is alive or dead a year 
from now, crippled or healthy a year from now, safe in their home or 
not safe in their home a year from now.
  It will not end crime. But thousands of Americans, tens of thousands 
of Americans, in my view, will live safer, more secure, and happier 
lives if we take this money that we are getting from firing Federal 
bureaucrats and hiring cops.
  I thank my friends for their indulgence.
  I would like to also add one thing the leader and others have pointed 
out to me. I wanted to debunk the notion that defeat of this crime bill 
will lead to a Thursday adjournment, until after Labor Day. We are not 
leaving here until this crime bill is passed. There are 1,000 little 
methods that are used to convince people--Democrats and Republicans--to 
vote for or against legislation. The most intriguing one used is: If 
you vote for this you get to go home. If you vote against this you get 
to go home.
  One of the rumors circulating is, if you just defeat the crime bill, 
there will be nothing else for the Senate to do, so you get to go home 
for Labor Day.
  I do not want to go home for Labor Day and face my constituency with 
the defeat of this crime bill. But you are not going to get that chance 
anyway. If this crime bill is defeated, the one thing you are not doing 
is going home. That is the one thing you are not doing, is going home.
  But I am stopping and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Utah.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I have enjoyed listening to my colleague 
here today. I have to say he knows an awful lot about this bill. My 
only desire is to continue to improve the bill.
  We had a bill that went out of the Senate that was $22 billion. This 
one is $30 billion. That bill was tough on crime, it had all kinds of 
provisions in it that are no longer in here. Now we have restored some 
over the weekend--that is through the very energetic efforts of some of 
our people over in the House of Representatives.
  But that $22 billion bill passed the Senate 94 to 4 and had the gun 
provisions in it. So the gun provisions have never been an issue as far 
as many of us are concerned compared to having a crime bill that is 
really tough on crime. That is in spite of the fact that I personally 
believe that it is a terrible thing to take away the rights of 
individual, law-abiding sports people--collectors and others who abide 
by the laws--in the frenzy of people who think these innocent people 
are the reason why we have problems with so-called assault weapons.
  Be that as it may, the bill passed the Senate with the assault 
weapons in it. The House then came up with a bill that is not nearly as 
good as the Senate's bill but they upped the ante to $27 billion--that 
is $5 billion more than the Senate. And keep in mind when we argued 
about the trust fund here on the Senate floor, we showed that we might, 
through the Reinventing Government provisions that are cutting 250,000 
Federal Government employees--we might be able to raise $21 or $22 
billion so that the Senate bill would be fully funded. We go to 
conference and the conference is stacked with all liberal Democrats--
not one moderate, not one conservative among the whole group. And what 
do they do? They up the ante to $33 billion, $11 billion more than the 
Senate had that was covered by this so-called trust fund, and $6 
billion more than the House itself did. And they larded it up with 
pork.
  There was plenty of pork in it at the $27 billion figure. In fact 
there was a lot of pork in it at the $22 billion figure. Not nearly as 
much as the $27 billion bill and nowhere near as much as the $33 
billion bill. Over the weekend, because the Members of the House of 
Representatives, both Republicans and Democrats by the way, in a 
bipartisan way rejected the almost-always-granted rule by the stacked 
Rules Committee in the House, Senator Biden and I had the privilege of 
spending all night long Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday 
night, working to try to see if we could bring about some order.
  I, trying to help our young Republicans over there in the House on 
the provisions they wanted to try to get in to improve the bill, and 
Senator Biden helping his Democrat counterparts, to try to resolve it. 
They reduced the pork in this bill $2.0 billion, cut law enforcement to 
a degree, and cut some other programs that really were funny money 
anyway.
  So now we have a $30 billion conference report here today, $8 billion 
more than what we passed in the Senate which we felt was a pretty 
larded bill but nevertheless a tough on crime bill. We were willing to 
vote for it and accept the lard because it was tough on crime. But 
somewhere between the Senate bill and this conference report we have 
lost a lot of provisions.
  Frankly, we also wanted to have as priority spending, prison 
construction, because we are rolling these hardened criminals through 
the revolving door to such a fast degree that they are just in and out. 
And they are heroes when they come out. They are not serving enough 
time. So we need more prison space, and that was the No. 1 priority.
  In fact, there were four priorities that we would consider to be 
basically coequal. Prison space--prison construction: We wanted $13 
billion, the House bill had some $13.5 billion, the Senate bill had 
only $6.5 billion. There is now in this bill $9.8 billion for prisons, 
but $1.8 billion is for alien incarceration, and so you are talking 
about $7.9 billion for prisons. That is still a little bit better than 
the Senate bill but it is approximately $5 billion less than what we 
think is necessary. But what is not said is that hardly any of that 
money has to go for prison construction. It is so broadly written they 
can do all kinds of things with that money besides do prison 
construction.
  No. 2, we wanted cops on the streets. This President, my chairman, 
Senator Biden, and others have continually represented to this country 
that we are going to have 100,000 new cops on the streets over 6 years. 
There is absolutely no way that even spending $30 billion as they have 
done, because there is so much pork in here, there is no way that they 
are going to get more--it looks to most experts--than 20,000 cops on 
the street. And then the States will be stuck with paying for them 
after they will initially get the money. But nevertheless, that was the 
second priority. We wanted prison construction; we wanted 100,000 
police on the street.
  The third priority was to keep all kinds of law enforcement 
provisions. A number of those were taken out. Senate Republicans tried 
30 amendments in the conference, to restore to this bill the tough 
amendments that we had enacted here in the Senate on the Senate floor 
in the Senate crime bill. We were rejected on all but two and those two 
were watered down. So in the law enforcement side this bill is 
deficient.
  Fourth, the Biden-Hatch violence against women bill. I personally 
have fought for that bill from the beginning, along with my colleague 
Senator Biden who deserves a lot of credit on this. But the fact of the 
matter is, it is in this bill now. I am happy for it. By the way, we do 
change evidentiary rules. Senator Biden was concerned about changing 
evidentiary rules with regard to prior acts of violence by rapists and 
child molesters, like that was something we do not do now. We do it in 
the violence against women bill. Why should we not do it against child 
molesters and rapists? Especially since both Houses overwhelmingly--at 
least the Senate overwhelmingly passed it and the House overwhelmingly 
directed their conferees to put it in. Of course, over there they just 
completely ignored what the House vote told them to do.
  So those are the four basic things we wanted to get done. Naturally 
there are other things in there that both Senator Biden and I fought 
for and still are in there.
  Some have said why would you file a point of order over here? Why do 
you not just vote on it and take this bill? Because, No. 1, it is 
larded with pork; No. 2, there are a lot of good tough provisions that 
are not in there; No. 3, we need to cut back some of the moneys; No. 4, 
we need to stiffen some of the provisions--and there are other reasons 
as well. Some are upset because there is $2 billion of walking around 
money in this bill.
  By the way, let us just be honest about it, this is an authorizing 
bill.
  That trust fund does not have $30 billion, nor will it have $30 
billion. I have always questioned whether it will really have $22 
billion, which is what we estimated it would have when we debated the 
bill on the Senate floor. And I do not believe it will have that much.
  So the fact of the matter is, last week we passed the 1995 Commerce, 
Justice, State appropriations bill. That funded the first year of the 
crime bill. We funded the community policing program of $1.3 billion, 
but only funded prison grants at $24 million. Who is kidding whom? What 
is likely here, if we adopt this conference report, is we will say all 
these wonderful things we are going to do for America, and the 
Appropriations Committee is not going to put the moneys there, because 
they are not there.
  There is a $13 billion deficit in this bill, and let me tell you what 
will be funded over the next 6 years. It will be all the pork barrel 
projects that do not do anything against crime. That is what is going 
to be funded. It is deceitful, but that is really what is going to 
happen to the American people.
  The Dole-Hatch antigang provisions are no longer in the bill.
  The Simpson provision, the criminal alien deportation amendment, is 
no longer in the bill. Under that amendment, a judge could sentence the 
alien who committed the crime and then immediately issue an order to 
deport that alien so that after that alien serves time, that alien is 
automatically deported.
  Tough Federal mandatory minimum sentences when criminals use a 
firearm, no longer in this bill.
  Tough Federal mandatory minimum sentences for selling drugs to 
minors, no longer in this bill.
  Tough Federal mandatory minimum sentences for those who employ minors 
in the sale of drugs, no longer in this bill. Why would that not be in 
the bill? Do we not want to do something against these people who 
subvert minors to sell drugs? What is wrong with that provision? Why is 
it not in here? Because the left, in their wonderful discretion, kept 
it out because they stacked the committee with total left people and it 
is tough to get anticrime matters in there because, in all honesty, 
there is a great concern by many of them for the criminals.
  I might add, the Terrorist Alien Removal Act, no longer in this bill. 
It was in the Senate bill. There are a lot of things that I could talk 
about.
  I want to compliment my friends in the House on the Republican side, 
and some Democrats as well, for working to restore a few provisions. 
The Dunn-Zimmer provision--that is the sexual predators provision--was 
restored. It is good that it was. It is time for communities to know 
when sexual predators live among them. Why should women not know about 
that? I heard the complaints over there from some of the liberals that, 
``My goodness, you'll be infringing upon the rights of that poor sexual 
predator; people will know who he is.'' Well, I sure as heck hope they 
know who he is, and it is about time we do.
  You have heard the distinguished chairman of the committee, Senator 
Biden, say that he hates the Molinari-Dole-Hatch provision. That is a 
provision that allows into evidence prior acts by rapists and child 
molesters. Why should we not let the juries know and the judges know 
that these people have a pattern and a series of acts that they have 
done that have amounted to rape or child molestation, or in some cases 
both? Why can we not get tough on these people?
  I commend my colleagues for putting that in. By the way, what does 
that amount to? Does that amount to letting somebody put in some 
allegation 31 years ago into evidence? Of course not. What it does is 
it simply gives a presumption in favor of bringing it in. The court 
still has the protective Rules of Evidence to keep it out if it is not 
fair. Our judges know those rules. They are not going to let in unfair 
information. But when you have a rapist that has committed acts of rape 
before, been convicted, we know that it has happened, why should it not 
come in? The fact is, it should.
  I might add, on the mandatory HIV testing, you could not believe the 
left over there and here, by the way, who whined and moaned and groaned 
that we want to find out whether these people are HIV positive who rape 
these women. I kind of put myself in the shoes of the poor woman who 
has been raped sitting there wondering, ``Did that guy have AIDS? Was 
he HIV positive? Am I going to get it?'' That is what these women worry 
about. Why are we not worried about them?
  We were, because those House Members fought to get that in against 
the desires of many on the left. And I fought to do it and I fought to 
get that Molinari-Hatch-Dole or Dole-Hatch language in. You bet I did. 
It is about time we get tough on these sexual predators, these rapists, 
these child molesters. I am getting tired of it in this society and, by 
gosh, to their credit, Members of the House did that.
  They eliminated the retroactivity in mandatory minimum sentencing. 
That is good. That will solve the problem of 10,000 to 16,000 early 
releases of people convicted and sentenced to Federal prison. We think 
that is good. So those are good things.
  Those could not have happened but for a procedural victory over in 
the House of Representatives. That procedural victory was rejecting the 
almost always guaranteed rule of the House Rules Committee that is so 
stacked on the left with liberal Democrats that it is automatic for the 
rule to be passed. But enough people over there saw through it and 
said, ``We're not going to pass that rule,'' and when they did not, the 
left over in the House, and all the rest of the House Members, had to 
sit down and negotiate what now is this conference report.
  I commend them for doing it. They worked all night long Friday night, 
all night long Saturday, all day yesterday and they passed this 
conference report. It is better than the prior conference report.
  Senator Biden and I were there Sunday morning at 2:30 during the 
discussion. Even the President admits this is a better bill--the 
President, who was condemning us up here--condemning us up here--for 
this exercise we had to go through and saying the Republicans are 
trying to stop his crime bill. First of all, let us understand, the 
President never sent a crime bill up here. As much as I like him 
personally, I do not think he knows one-fifth of what is in this bill, 
and for him to condemn people who wanted to make it better seems to me 
a little offhand.
  After this exercise, caused by a procedural vote and forcing the 
Democrats to sit down and renegotiate with House Democrats and 
Republicans who wanted a tougher bill, we now have a bill that even the 
President admits is better than the conference report before. They 
would not admit to the pork barrel spending until this conference 
report was adopted with $2 billion less of it.
  I am telling you, there is still a lot of unwarranted pork barrel 
spending in here. Let us take something like midnight basketball. Is 
that pork barrel spending? Sure, it is. I happen to be a supporter of 
midnight basketball. I think it is a great thing. But if we take the 
language that the liberal Democrats put in there--they were going to 
have quotas on who could play midnight basketball, have Federal rules 
as to who could use this money.
  Keep in mind, midnight basketball was a President Bush idea. I admit 
that. It was a great idea, and it was one of his points of light for 
voluntary support by the communities, raise the voluntary moneys. You 
know, it was working. People were voluntarily raising the money. They 
did not need the Federal Government to send money out to them and then 
tell them who could play and set the rules of the game. That is what 
these people are doing. No, we had a voluntary system that worked. It 
was a community system, people got involved and it worked. These people 
want the Federal Government to dictate who can play and how the league 
can be operated.
  I will go for some of these smaller programs, but what about the 
Local Partnership Act? That is in here for $1.6 billion. And it is 
money they just give to the local communities to spend any way they 
want.
  Now, our mayor from New York, Rudolph Giuliani, and almost every 
mayor in the country, says, ``We want that money.'' Of course, they do. 
Have you ever seen a mayor who did not want more money from the Federal 
Government? I can name a few, but they are darned few, let me tell you. 
Of course, they have their hands out for every nickel they can get from 
the Federal Government and especially when there are no strings to it 
like the Local Partnership Act. That is 1.6 billion bucks that could go 
for law enforcement that is going right down the drain. And the funny 
thing is the cities get their hands out and they expect to keep that 
money there, to the detriment of law enforcement.
  I can name a number of other programs. I believe in prevention 
programs. That is what the Violence Against Women Act is. It is $1.6 
billion. Nobody has fought harder for it than I have, unless it is 
Senator Biden, and I do not think he has fought any harder than I have. 
We have fought side by side. We are both proud of it. We both feel it 
is something that can do a lot of good in this society today.
  Right now, I have my charitable golf tournament going on today and 
tomorrow out in Utah. We are raising $250,000 to $300,000, part of 
which is going to women in jeopardy programs, battered women shelters, 
because I feel so strongly about it.
  The fact is that is a prevention program, one that will work, one 
that is needed, one that I am willing to put my money where my mouth 
happens to be. But some of these are just do-good, give-away programs 
with no real suggestions on how to do it.
  What mayor in his or her right mind would not want that money? I 
cannot blame them. My mayor of Salt Lake City wants that money, and I 
do not blame her. Any time you can get free money, it is a wonderful 
thing. And all you have to do to get it is say we are going to do 
something about crime.
  Well, any altruistic good thing, you can argue, will do something 
about crime because anything that is good tends to make people good. So 
we could have millions of programs that we could argue are anticrime 
programs. But we have scarce resources that I want to go to fighting 
crime. And in all honesty, when the chips are down, other than trying 
to get maybe 20,000 police on the streets--and that is about all you 
are going to get from this bill, if you get that. Some estimate as low 
as 2,000, while the President is still talking 100,000. That is a joke. 
Sooner or later, when the chips are down, and the moneys are raised, 
you mark my words; most of that money is going to go for these pork 
barrel projects rather than for the anticrime projects. And that is 
what we are fighting for.
  Now, what is my point? My point is that in the House of 
Representatives, the Republicans were criticized, and the Democrats who 
voted with them were criticized, for beating a procedural rule. But 
even today, because they beat that procedural rule, the bill is better 
than it was before they beat that rule. Even the President admits it is 
better today. And the reason it is better today is because Republicans 
and Democrats beat the rule and then forced some of these very good 
changes.
  As many as they did, there are only a comparatively few changes. 
There is still a lot that needs to be done. So there will be a point of 
order, I believe, filed, and if we sustain the point of order, then 
that means we have to sit down and work out some more good changes 
before we pass this bill. I, for one, will work my tail off to make 
sure that we get those good changes and that we pass this bill, as I 
have worked ever so long.
  Like I say, I compliment my colleague from Delaware. He was over 
there all day Friday, all night long Friday, all day Saturday, all 
night long Saturday, and all day Sunday just like I was. I compliment 
him for it because he feels deeply about this and would like to have an 
anticrime crime bill. And I know he is sincere in trying to do so. 
Well, so am I. And if we win on that procedural vote--it is an 
important procedural vote--then we will do everything we can to make 
sure we improve this bill in the best interests of everybody in 
America.
  Now, what I have trouble seeing is why, when we set $22 billion in 
the Senate crime bill that really is a crime bill, and we are worried 
about funding that in this trust-fund approach through reinventing 
government, the gradual getting rid of 250,000 Federal employees, why 
when the House ups it to $27 billion--and it is clear that they cannot 
fund it all--why it is going to work better with $30 billion that 
literally we know we cannot fund.
  Mr. President, the most effective prevention program we can enact is 
one that provides for the swift apprehension of criminals, their speedy 
trial, and their lengthy incarceration. Now, the conference report 
before us, even with these good changes, falls far short in that 
regard.
  The report's provision on prisons is too soft. The so-called prison 
provision permits, if not requires, every dime of its Federal aid to be 
spent on ``alternative correctional facilities''--what we are getting 
to is the Federal Government taking over the State prison systems--
facilities such as halfway houses and the like.
  They are essential, but we do not want to have the Federal Government 
tell us how do it. These are alternatives to the brick and mortar 
prisons, what the conference report calls ``conventional prison 
space.'' All of the so-called prison money can and, given the wording 
of the provision, perhaps must be spent on alternative facilities that 
free prison space, not on building and operating prisons. We need, 
instead, an emergency buildup of real prison space if we are going to 
house these hardened criminals.
  Further, all of the money in the prison section is conditioned on the 
State's adoption of a liberal correctional plan, including diversion 
programs, job training programs, rehabilitation programs, and treatment 
programs--further diverting resources away from building real prisons.
  The bill spends too little money on prisons even if we can straighten 
out these problems, and thus far we have not been able to.
  The bill spends far too much money on social programs, and the bill 
remains insufficiently tough on criminals.
  Let me add that the President says this bill will put 100,000 new 
police officers on the street. Independent experts on both sides of the 
aisle, both the Republicans and the Democrats, say that is poppycock. 
It may add 20,000 additional police officers to the rolls of the police 
departments over several years, a fraction of which will be on the 
street at any one given time.
  The President talks of three-strikes-and-you-are-out provision of the 
conference report, but it affects 500 or less criminals a year. It is 
almost inconsequential. Those of us who allowed it to pass, and even 
supported it, we know that. Tough Senate Republican amendments obtained 
in the Senate crime bill affecting thousands of criminals were dropped 
in conference.
  By the way, the three-strikes provision of the Senate bill was much 
better and it involved all kinds of people. But they changed that as 
well.
  We have the means substantially to improve this bill. Like I say, a 
budget point of order lies against the conference report. If it is 
sustained, which requires 41 Senators to vote against a motion to waive 
the point of order, I am prepared to seek these substantial 
improvements. We can do so through bipartisan negotiations in this body 
just like they did in the House and get a better bill, after which I 
think the President will say, ``By gosh, that is even better yet'' and 
have everybody supporting it, or at least virtually everybody 
supporting it.
  The budget point of order is not intended to kill the crime bill. It 
is intended to provide the basis for making the bill tougher. Indeed, 
the course I am proposing parallels the course of action which occurred 
in the other body. A procedural vote ultimately forced the 
administration and the House Democratic leadership to deal with the 
moderate House Republicans. The result is a somewhat improved bill, not 
one that I approve but somewhat improved. I was there advising but 
certainly not approving everything they did.
  If the budget point of order is sustained in this body, the same 
negotiation process should occur here and we will get a stronger crime 
bill. That is my purpose. There is plenty of time left in this session 
to produce a worthy crime bill, and we can do much better than this 
conference report before us. Now, I think the American people deserve 
no less.
  Let me recount briefly where we are and how we got here on this crime 
bill. The Senate passed a crime bill last November after reviewing over 
250 floor amendments. It was not a perfect bill, as Senator Biden said. 
I voted for it, however, because I believed its good sections 
outweighed its bad sections. It passed 94 to 4. The other body took 
until April to pass a crime bill. It then took the two bodies, 
controlled by the other side of the aisle, over 3 months to produce a 
conference report.
  This delay occurred through no fault of this side of the aisle.
  The conference produced a crime bill much, much weaker than the one 
which passed the Senate.
  Senate Republican conferees offered approximately 30 amendments in 
conference. I express my appreciation to Chairman Biden for 
facilitating consideration of those amendments. Unfortunately, only two 
of our amendments, in watered down form, found their way into the 
conference report. Senate Republican conferees also offered a $28.25 
billion 5-year, fully funded, no gimmmicks crime bill with 90 percent 
of its money going to prisons and law enforcement. It was turned down.
  When the rule on the conference report reached the House floor, as we 
all know, it was defeated. Shortly thereafter, following a burst of 
partisan rhetoric from the administration, negotiations occurred 
between Members of the other body from both parties, and with the 
administration. I stress that this was a House, not a Senate, 
negotiation.
  I commend Representatives Castle, Kasich, Molinari, Lazio, and 
others. They got some definite improvements in the bill such as: The 
mandatory HIV testing of persons charged with rape, a provision of mine 
in the Senate bill which the conference had initially dropped; the 
Dole-Molinari-Hatch provision on the admissibility of evidence of prior 
acts in sex offender and child molestation cases, in a modified form.
  They put it off for a year, so that the left in these two bodies 
could try to kill it. But we are not going to let them kill it.
  Other improvements include: The mandatory minimum penalty provision 
is improved, although it is still not back to the tougher Senate 
provision; a somewhat improved sex offender notification provision; and 
$2 billion in pork have been cut from the conference report, a good 
start which we should build on in the Senate.
  I might add that as bad as the original conference was, it did 
contain some worthy provisions which are still in the bill.
  On balance, however, the conference report before us remains too 
weak. We can do better.
  There are several key elements that a crime bill worthy of Senate 
passage should contain, and which this conference report omits.
  A crime bill worthy of the Senate's support should have at least $13 
billion in real money for the actual construction and operation of real 
prisons.
  A crime bill worthy of the Senate's support would not condition the 
States' receipt of prison funds upon the adoption of a liberal 
correctional plan, which is what this bill requires. In other words, by 
making these preconditions, the conference report is dictating to the 
States what they have to do. Frankly, the States do not need this. They 
are doing a good job, by and large, by themselves in this regard.
  A crime bill worthy of the Senate's support should not squander 
billions of dollars in scarce crime-fighting resources on gauzy social 
spending schemes straight out of the failed Great Society of the 
1960's. I note, Mr. President, that attention has been focused on some 
of the pork cut from the bill. Let us not lose sight of the pork 
remaining in it.
  A crime bill worthy of the Senate's support should impose stiff 
mandatory minimum penalties for the use of a gun in a crime. This bill 
does not.
  A crime bill worthy of the Senate's support should impose stiff 
mandatory minimum sentences for selling drugs to kids.
  This bill does not, even though there is a chance to put it in there. 
While I will never understand the liberal mind, why are they not more 
concerned about these kids out there?
  A crime bill worthy of the Senate's support should retain the many 
tough provisions passed by the Senate and abandoned by the conference--
provisions ranging from the Mosely-Braun-Hatch amendment subjecting 13-
year-olds committing certain heinous crimes to prosecution as adults, 
to the tough Dole-Hatch-Brown Federal antigang provision.
  A vote for this conference report is a vote effectively to repeal 
mandatory minimum sentences for many drug traffickers, conspirators, 
and dealers--a much broader provision than the Senate adopted in 
November.
  A vote for this conference report is a vote to spend a woefully 
inadequate amount of money for the construction and operation of prison 
space. A careful examination of the conference report's provisions on 
prisons reveals it is much better suited for sound bites by the 
President and those who favor spending as little as possible on real 
prisons than it is suited for the actual construction and operation of 
prison space.
  A vote for this conference report is a vote to waste literally 
billions of dollars in 1960's style social spending boondoggles, rather 
than spend these precious resources on hard-nosed law enforcement 
programs and more prison space. This is a cave-in by the President who 
supported this diversion of crime-fighting funds into social spending 
boondoggles. This diversion is an effort to appease liberal special 
interest groups on whom he relies for political support. House 
Republicans compelled the administration to trim some of the fat. The 
Senate should cut out the rest of it.
  A vote for this conference report is a vote to acquiesce in this 
administration's cynical, back-door betrayal of the American people 
concerning the death penalty. This administration has said it will 
implement by Executive order what it cannot achieve through the 
legislature, that is, the misuse of statistics to undermine, if not 
end, the use of the death penalty where it is otherwise merited.
  A vote for this conference report is a vote to be soft on crime.
  A vote on this conference report is a vote for deficit spending 
because there is at least $13 billion in deficit spending, assuming we 
fund the bill, which everybody here knows will never happen. Then 
again, if they fund most of it, it will be for the pork barrel parts of 
it.
  Of course, that does not apply to the extent of $1.6 billion for 
violence against women. I do not consider that pork barrel. Even though 
it is prevention money, it is money that I think will make a 
difference.
  A vote for this conference report is a vote to restrict second 
amendment rights without any real impact on crime.
  Let me turn to each of these concerns.


               liberal mandatory minimum sentence reform

  Both the Senate and House crime bills return some measure of 
discretion to Federal courts to sentence a limited category of 
convicted criminals below the otherwise applicable mandatory minimum 
sentence for certain drug offenses. It has been stated repeatedly that 
there should be some measure of discretion returned to judges in 
sentencing defendants who are first-time, nonviolent offenders. The 
House and Senate, however, differ on how to define first-time, 
nonviolent offenders. In a word, the House provision takes a decidedly 
more liberal approach than the provision I authored in the Senate crime 
bill.
  The Senate version was adopted as part of a Hatch amendment and 
passed by a vote of 58 to 42. The Senate voted overwhelmingly to 
instruct its conferees to insist on its version of the legislation by 
the even larger margin of 66 to 32.
  The Senate version delivers the narrow reform needed to return a 
small degree of discretion to the courts for a small percentage of 
nonviolent drug cases. It essentially permits the courts, consistent 
with the sentencing guidelines, to impose sentences below the mandatory 
minimums for drug trafficking, distribution, and possession offenses 
(21 U.S.C. 841, 881, 941), provided the defendant is a first-time, 
nonviolent offender. Mandatory minimum sentences for violent offenses 
or for child-related drug offenses are not affected by this measure. 
Before the court can even consider departing from the mandatory 
minimum, the court would have to find that each of the following 
factors have been met:

  First, the defendant has ``0'' criminal history points: Essentially, 
this means the offense must be the defendant's first felony conviction, 
with some narrow exceptions.
  Second, no injury: The offense did not result in death or serious 
bodily injury to any person.
  Third, no weapon: The defendant did not carry or possess a firearm or 
other dangerous weapon during the course of the offense, or direct 
another to do so.
  Fourth, not a leader or organizer: The defendant was not an 
organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor as defined under existing 
sentencing guidelines. This ensures that a first-time offender, who is 
nevertheless a major dealer or trafficker, will still face the 
mandatory minimum sentence.
  Fifth, nonviolent: The defendant was nonviolent, in that he or she 
did not use, attempt to use, or threaten to use force against the 
person of another during the offense. Any person who uses or credibly 
threatens violence should face the mandatory minimum penalty.
  Sixth, did not own the drugs: The defendant did not own the drugs or 
finance any part of the offense.
  According to the Sentencing Commission, less than 1 percent of 
mandatory minimum drug defendants would meet all of these factors. If 
all of these factors are met, a sentencing judge would then be 
permitted to apply the sentencing guidelines without being bound by the 
mandatory minimum.
  The House version, now part of the conference report, differs in 
several troubling ways from the Senate proposal.
  Under the conference report provision:
  First, defendants with prior drug and violent records who managed to 
avoid substantial prison time are permitted to benefit as first-time 
offenders; second, defendants with foreign convictions are still 
considered first-time offenders; third, defendants who sold drugs can 
benefit; and fourth, defendants who directed others to carry firearms 
are considered nonviolent, and could benefit from the reform.


                       inadequate prison spending

  Mr. President, the conference report spends an inadequate amount of 
money on prison construction and operation. In fact, not one dime of 
the so-called prison money must be spent on prison construction and 
operation.
  The other side of the aisle claims to spend $9.8 billion on prisons. 
Yet, $1.8 billion of that funding is given to the Attorney General to 
hand over to the States with total discretion to alleviate the costs 
associated with the incarceration of criminal aliens. Not one dime of 
the $1.8 billion in alien incarceration grants has to be spent on 
prison construction.
  The remaining $7.9 billion in so-called prison spending is in the 
misleadingly rugged-sounding program entitled ``Violent Offender 
Incarceration and Truth in Sentencing Grants'' section. Yet, not one 
dime of this money has to be spent on prison construction or operation. 
Let me repeat that: not one dime of the prison proposal supported by 
the President must be spent on prison construction or operation.
  Rather, the money can be spent on alternative confinement facilities 
intended to free up existing prison space--not to build new prisons. 
These programs will ostensibly free up existing prison space facilities 
like half-way houses for some offenders, and similar alternatives to 
prison. In other words, all of the money can be spent on soft-headed 
``alternative confinement facilities'' and other alternatives to prison 
construction and operation. Indeed, I believe the wording of the 
conference report actually prohibits spending this money on building 
and operating what it calls ``conventional prison space for the 
confinement of violent offenders.''
  Moreover, this program requires State recipients to implement a 
``comprehensive correctional plan.'' The plan must include, among other 
things, ``diversion programs, particularly drug diversion programs, 
prisoner rehabilitation and treatment programs, prisoner work 
activities, and job skills programs.'' What do any of these things have 
to do with locking up violent offenders?
  In effect, in order for the States to qualify for the ``prison'' 
grants, they have to spend much or all of it on a costly, liberal 
``corrections'' scheme. This is a shell game. Ironically, the so-called 
truth-in-sentencing Republicans had fought for was opposed by some on 
the other side of the aisle as being too costly for the States. Yet, 
they have little trouble requiring the States to implement the Clinton 
administration's version of appropriate correctional policy--diversion 
programs, including drug diversion, treatment, and job skills 
programs--in order to qualify for the prison grants.
  To make matters worse, the conference report supporters suggest that 
the bill conditions as much as 50 percent of the so-called prison grant 
funding on State implementation of truth-in-sentencing. Yet, State 
adoption of a determinate sentencing scheme under their proposal will 
only apply to second-time violent offenders. Furthermore, these grants 
are subject to the same condition I mentioned earlier--the State must 
implement a liberal ``corrections'' scheme.
  Moreover, for whatever reason, the other side of the aisle is intent 
on giving the administration broad discretion to distribute the crime 
bill money how and where they see fit. Although the other side of the 
aisle eventually inserted a formula, 15 percent of this prison money is 
turned over to the Attorney General to do with as she pleases. As well, 
if the Department chooses to delay allocation of the formula funds long 
enough, the unallocated formula grants are turned over to the Attorney 
General's discretionary fund.
  The reason criminals serve less than 40 percent of their sentences is 
not because we have failed to spend precious prison dollars on drug 
diversion and job skills programs. Our Nation's prisons do not have 
revolving doors, where murderers are sentenced to 15 years but serve 
less than 7, and rapists are sentenced to 8 years but serve less than 
3, because we have failed to spend an adequate amount of our prison 
dollars on drug and sex offender ``treatment programs'' and ``post-
release assistance.''

  Our Nation's criminal justice system lacks credibility because we 
have failed to provide an adequate deterrent to crime and enough places 
to lock up hardened criminals.
  We desperately need an emergency buildup of prison space. A Senate 
Republican amendment to put $13 billion into the construction and 
operation of prisons was rejected in conference.
  According to the Criminal Justice Institute, our Nation spends 
approximately $19 billion a year building and operating prisons. The 
minimum of $13 billion over 4 years in the Republican proposal would 
have made a significant different in boosting prison capacity.
  In over half of our States, at least one prison is under a court-
ordered inmate population cap. Seventeen States have emergency release 
programs to relieve overcrowding. In 1992 alone, 32,999 inmates were 
released under these programs. Florida accounted for 26,000 inmate 
releases. These are just the emergency releases. These figures do not 
include those released on parole after serving less than half of their 
sentences as a matter of course. And, let me remind my colleagues, we 
are a very mobile society, and prisoners released in another State can 
readily show up in our States.
  In Florida, the State has initiated a new policy to free-up prison 
space. Clemency is granted to foreign drug dealers, and they are 
deported. Recently, Governor Lawton Chiles approved the release of 113 
such prisoners, and the program could ultimately release thousands 
more--the Washington Times, June 10, 1994. The INS is apparently 
cooperating with Florida in this program. Instead of aiding and 
abetting the early release of prisoners from State prisons, the Federal 
Government should be helping States build adequate prison space.
  As this example shows, our communities could use these resources to 
address the prison space problem. Let's put this money into real crime 
control instead of social programs with a crime control label.
  Prisoners who should remain incarcerated are being released for no 
other reason than a lack of prison space. We must deal adequately with 
this problem. And I certainly do not want more States emulating 
Florida's experience.
  Regrettably, this may be happening in one fashion or another in some 
of our States.
  A.M. Rosenthal, in a June 3, 1994 column in the New York Times, noted 
that in 1991,

       34 States released 326,000 prisoners, 90 percent on parole. 
     Including murderers, they had served 35 percent of their 
     sentences * * * Prisons save lives. Tripling prison 
     population from 1975 to 1989 reduced potential violent crime 
     in 1989 alone by almost 400,000 rapes, murders, robberies and 
     severe assaults.

  Mr. Rosenthal noted,

       The cost of imprisoning criminals is as much as $25,000 a 
     year. But the price to society for every murder is estimated 
     at $2.4 million. From 1987 to 1990, the lifetime costs of 
     violent crimes alone are estimated at $178 billion.

  The bottom line, simply stated, is: Incarceration of violent 
criminals reduces violent crime. Convicted criminals should be spending 
more time serving their sentences.
  Yet as the Washington Post reported on July 16, 1994, some States 
``have been taking a second look at the hard-line anticrime measures 
and mandatory minimum sentences they enacted in the 1980's'' because 
they do not have adequate prison space.
  Some States are looking at what is called ``capacity-based 
sentencing.'' Under that concept, a State sets sentences based on 
available prison space. This, of course, has it backward and is a 
terrible development. Penalties should fit the crime and if there is 
not enough prison space to house convicted criminals in the States, we 
should provide the resources to build and operate that prison space. 
The American people expect and deserve no less.
  There is another reason why the conference report is inadequate on 
prisons. I have always been willing to cooperate with the President's 
desire to place more police on the street. Of course, many experts 
believe the administration has vastly inflated the number of police 
officers its proposal would actually put on the street. But what does 
the President think these new police officers, if they ever reach the 
street, are going to do? Sure, they will deter some crimes. But are 
they not also going to apprehend violent criminals as well? Where will 
society put these violent criminals? If the conference report is 
adopted, I will tell you where many of them will wind up: back on the 
street through the same revolving door plaguing our society today. We 
do not have enough prison space today. Putting any number of new police 
officers on the street without a commensurate build up in prison 
capacity will only turn the revolving door faster.
  But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would rather spend 
money that ought to go to prisons on yet more social programs. If my 
colleagues are set on resorting to 1960's style social programs with 
new labels on them, I respectfully suggest that they get their funding 
out of existing social spending programs rather than raid a trust fund 
that is aimed at fighting crime.


               wasteful social spending in the crime bill

  Mr. President, I support spending some money on so-called prevention 
programs. The Senate Republican conferees offered an alternative which 
included $1.1 billion in smart prevention programs. But the conference 
report wastes billions of dollars in pure social spending, much of it 
originating in the other body. This conference report is, in 
significant part, a resurrection of the President's failed stimulus 
package. For example, the Local Partnership Act is precisely the wrong 
kind of program for this bill. In reality, it has nothing to do with 
fighting crime.
  This amorphous program would give local governments $1.62 billion 
over the next 2 years to spend on three ill-defined purposes: Education 
to prevent crime, and jobs programs to prevent crime. That is it. There 
are no other real standards for spending this $1.62 billion.
  The provision does list no less than 19 wide-ranging drug treatment, 
education, job-training, and other social programs on which the $1.62 
billion can be spent. But the money under this provision can be spent 
not only on those 19 social programs, but also on activities 
substantially similar to those 19 programs, or again, for any other 
education, job-training, or drug treatment program purporting to 
prevent crime. The tagline ``to prevent crime'' is an attempt to 
convert this Great Society program into an anti-crime proposal. By 
slapping the phrase ``to prevent crime'' in these purpose clauses, this 
provides the cover to hijack $1.62 billion in precious crime-fighting 
resources for anything at all that localities will label ``education to 
prevent crime'' or for drug treatment, or for more Government jobs 
programs. The $1.8 billion would be much better spent in really 
fighting crime by spending it on prisons.
  The General Accounting Office recently reported to Senator Dodd that 
there are seven Federal departments sponsoring 266 prevention programs 
which currently serve delinquent and at-risk youth. Of these 266 
programs, 31 are run by the Department of Education, 92 by HHS, and 117 
by the Justice Department.
  The GAO found that there already exists ``A massive Federal effort on 
behalf of troubled youth'' which spends over $3 billion a year. The GAO 
went on to report that:

       Taken together, the scope and number of multi-agency 
     programs show that the government is responsive to the needs 
     of these young people* * * . [It] is apparent from the 
     federal activities and response that the needs of delinquent 
     youth are being taken quite seriously.--GAO Report, Federal 
     Agency Juvenile Delinquency Development Statements August 
     1992.

  Despite the findings of the GAO, the conference report throws even 
more open-ended social spending money at State and local government 
under a prevention label.
  The Model Intensive Grant Program is yet another social spending 
program, originating in the other body, which does not belong in this 
conference report. In reality, it has very little to do with fighting 
crime, and much to do with providing Federal tax dollars to favored 
social spending programs.
  This program gives the Attorney General nearly total discretion to 
spend $625.5 million in grants to 15 chronic high crime areas. Some of 
this money might be spent on inadequate police or public safety 
services, equipment, or facilities. But of course, if any of this money 
is actually spent on State or local police or police equipment, there 
are better ways to target help to police than this program, such as the 
Byrne Grant Program.
  Moreover, this $625.5 million can be spent on anything at all, so 
long as someone does not forget to try to link the spending to crime, 
no matter how tenuous that link. The conference report says this 
program's money can be spent on youth programs, deterioration or lack 
of public facilities, inadequate public services such as 
transportation, drug treatment, and employment services.
  Thus, this big-spending Federal social program could fund public 
works programs, additional social services, and more job training 
notwithstanding existing Federal programs in these areas. And there are 
no real standards in the bill. It is pretty much an old-style giveaway 
program.
  Although police and law enforcement equipment are at least included 
among the permitted uses for these grants, in my view, the overall 
focus of this program is wholly inappropriate. Merely calling a program 
an anticrime measure does not make it so. It makes no sense to spend 
$625.5 million of scarce crime-fighting money on ill-defined social 
welfare and public works programs. Our crime crisis is too severe for 
that.
  A stated purpose of this grant program is to compare various crime 
control and prevention strategies, and determine which ones work. But 
of course, we already know what works in crime control.
  Experience has demonstrated that one very effective way to reduce 
violent crime is to identify, target, and incapacitate recidivists and 
violent criminals.
  In order to do this, we need to spend more on prisons than the 
proposed conference report is prepared to do. Let me stress again, 
briefly, what A.M. Rosenthal wrote in a June 3, 1994 column in the New 
York Time entitled ``Prisons save lives'': ``Tripling prison population 
from 1975 to 1989 reduced potential violent crime in 1989 alone by 
almost 400,000 rapes, murders, robberies and severe assaults.''
  The Local Partnership Act and the Model Intensive Grant Program, 
totaling nearly $2.25 billion, originated in the other body.
  Instead of spending billions on nebulous social boondoggles with a 
crime control label, let's spend it on crime control that works. Let us 
spend it on more prison space.
  Instead seeing that a multi-billion-dollar pot of money has been 
established to fight crime, advocates of big spending social programs 
could not resist the urge to raid funds desperately needed for actual 
law enforcement--for more prison space, more FBI agents, more DEA 
agents, more Federal prosecutors, more money for local law 
enforcement--in order to fund yet more social spending. There are those 
who want to hold down the crime bill's spending on prisons and law 
enforcement as much as possible. They have the active support of the 
Clinton administration.
  I am not against all so-called prevention programs. But the American 
people demand that we spend their money wisely. Indeed, in a recent 
letter to me from the Attorney General in which she conveyed the 
administration's views on this legislation, Attorney General Reno noted 
that ``in these times of fiscal restraint, we must ensure that the 
money is spent well.'' She went on to say that we should ``avoid the 
duplication, waste, and bureaucratic battles that too often accompany 
government programs.''
  Now, I agree with General Reno on this. So I am particularly dismayed 
that the administration supports yet more job-training services in this 
bill, such as in the Local Partnership Act. it is one more instance 
where the Clinton administration talks tough, but doesn't deliver.
  According to the GAO, in the current fiscal year, there are 154 
separate, overlapping Federal employment and training programs which 
are run by 14 separate executive departments and independent agencies. 
Within these departments and agencies, 50 different offices are 
responsible for these programs. The total cost? In fiscal year 1994, 
nearly $25 billion was budgeted for these programs.
  If my colleagues want to spend money on such social spending, let 
them take it from existing budgets from the Labor Department, HHS, and 
the Education Department. Do not take it from scarce crime-fighting 
funds. We know from experience that the swift apprehension and sure 
incarceration of violent criminals prevents as well as punishes violent 
crime. If you want to prevent crime, raise its costs substantially.
  Let me mention another social spending boondoggle.
  The National Community Economic Partnership Program is a total waste 
of $270 million crime fighting money. Indeed, unlike many of the other 
social spending programs raiding scarce crime-fighting resources in the 
conference report, this program does not even make the false pretense 
of being remotely related to crime or even crime prevention.
  I want the American people to know what my friends on the other side 
of the aisle and the Clinton administration are prepared to waste 
precious crime-fighting resources on. The purpose of the National 
Community Economic Partnership is ``to increase private investment in 
distressed local communities and to build and expand the capacity of 
local institutions to better serve the economic needs of local 
residents--now, get this--through the provision of financial and 
technical assistance to community development corporations.''
  This crime bill is entitled, by both Houses, the ``Violent Crime 
Control and Law Enforcement Act.'' Yet, this part of the conference 
report authorizes that leading Federal crime fighter, the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services to provide lines of credit to community 
development corporations so they may ``finance projects intended to 
provide business and employment opportunities for low-income 
unemployed, or underemployed individuals and to improve the quality of 
life in urban and rural areas.'' Let me repeat that last part--this 
violent crime control and law enforcement bill will fund efforts ``to 
improve the quality of life in urban and rural areas.''
  Of course, the purpose of addressing violent crime directly, as this 
bill is supposed to do, is, in fact, to improve the quality of life 
throughout our country. By helping Federal, State, and local law 
enforcement agencies apprehend and convict violent criminals and drug 
dealers, and helping them build prisons in which to incarcerate them, 
we will do more to improve the quality of life in more parts of the 
country and for more people than a program like this. I want the funds 
in this program to go to prison construction or operation, or to local 
or Federal law enforcement agencies, not to community development 
corporations.
  This is an antipoverty program being funded out of a crime bill. We 
tried that approach to law and order in the 1960's and it doesn't work. 
If Congress must spend money on such a program, I urge its sponsors to 
go to HHS and redirect existing funds to this program. But please keep 
hands off scarce funds needed to lock up violent criminals.
  This program does not even make the pretense of targeting high crime 
areas--it makes not even the cosmetic reference to crime that other 
wasteful social programs in this bill make. Not that throwing in a few 
such phrases will really mask the true nature of this social program 
any more than those phrases really transform the Local Partnership Act 
or the Model Intensive Grant Program contained in the conference report 
into anticrime measures. But those programs at least had the misleading 
label on them. This one makes no pretense.
  Part of the money under this program goes to ``grants to community 
development corporations to enable such corporations to attain or 
enhance the business management and development skills of the 
individuals that manage such corporations or enable such corporations 
to seek the public and private resources necessary to develop community 
and economic development projects.''
  We should not be spending money on enhancing the skills of community 
development corporation leaders in a crime bill. We should spend that 
money to incarcerate criminals.
  Republican efforts to move wasteful social spending into prisons or 
into State and local law enforcement through the Byrne Program have 
been rebuffed by the other side of the aisle in conference.
  These three programs alone squander over $2.5 billion in scarce 
crime-fighting resources on 1960's style social program boondoggles in 
order to satisfy the special interests on the other side of the aisle. 
This is neither tough nor smart.
  Let me mention another one of the wasteful spending programs in this 
bill. The so-called Community-Based Justice Grants Program is another 
particularly egregious example of the misguided view of criminal 
justice which permeates this bill.
  My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would have the public 
believe that the $50 million that they would spend on community-based 
justice grants is aid to prosecutors. I believe that it's time to apply 
some truth-in-labeling. In reality, these millions of dollars would be 
spent on coddling violent young criminals.
  The community-based justice grants will exhume the failed criminal 
justice policies of the 1960's and 1970's. These grants would require 
social workers' involvement in the prosecution of criminal cases. 
Participating prosecutors would be required to ``focus on the offender, 
not simply the specific offense, and impose individualized sanction 
[such as] conflict resolution, treatment, counseling and recreation 
programs.''

  The softheaded sanctions would be imposed not just on nonviolent 
offenders, but also on individuals up to 22 years of age ``who have 
committed crimes of violence, weapons offenses, drug distribution, hate 
crimes and civil rights violations * * *.'' Let me repeat that. The 
program defines young violent offenders as individuals up to 22 years 
of age ``who have committed crimes of violence, weapons offenses, drug 
distribution, hate crimes and civil rights violations, and offenses 
against personal property.''
  Instead of punishing these young thugs, this program will only 
encourage their disrespect and disregard for civilized society by 
teaching them that committing violent crimes has no real consequences. 
I cannot think of a more inappropriate lesson to be sending our young 
people. Violent criminals, whatever their age, need to be treated as 
such.
  Instead of coddling violent youths, this money should be used for law 
enforcement and prison construction to help implement the true, tough 
crime control measures the American people are demanding.
  Last year, the Congress rejected the President's pork-barrel stimulus 
package. The American people saw this so-called stimulus package for 
what it was--a retread of the failed Great Society programs of the 
1960's. Having failed to get what they wanted last year with the label 
``economic stimulus,'' the big spenders in the administration and 
Congress have slapped a crime-bill label on these programs. That is not 
tough and it sure is not smart.


                 tough provisions dropped in conference

  Over 2 long days, Senate Republican conferees offered numerous 
amendments to the proposed conference report in an effort to toughen 
the bill and eliminate this wasteful spending. I personally offered 19 
amendments, most of which were taken from provisions contained in the 
Senate-passed crime bill. Of these, nine were accepted in whole or in 
part by the Senate conferees. All but two were rejected by the House 
conferees in the initial conference, and both of these were watered 
down. A few improvements were made in the second conference.
  Before I list for my colleagues the tough provisions dropped in the 
conference report before us, let me mention the three-strikes-and-
you're-out issue. The President has trumpeted the conference report's 
three-time-loser provision. Yet, the impact of any such proposal is 
directly related to the scope of its qualifying convictions. In my 
view, the conference report proposal is far too narrow, affecting as 
few as 500 cases a year.
  The Senate-passed crime bill, on the other hand, contained a broad 
approach to dealing with recidivist, violent offenders. In fact, the 
Senate-passed bill provided mandatory life imprisonment for two-time 
losers who sell drugs to children, employ children in the drug trade, 
or who commit murder. The Senate bill, which federalizes crimes 
committed with a firearm, would subject thousands of three-time violent 
offenders and drug traffickers to life imprisonment. I believe this 
provision, rather than the conference report's narrow proposal, should 
be included in the crime bill. Indeed, the Senate agreed with me on 
this point having voted to instruct our conferees to insist on this 
measure. The Senate's position was rejected by our conferees from the 
other side of the aisle.
  Mr. President, let me list for my colleagues some of the other tough, 
smart crime control measurers offered during conference by Republican 
Senate conferees which were rejected or severely weakened by the other 
side of the aisle. Many of these were passed overwhelmingly by the 
Senate when we first considered this bill. Among the provisions not 
included in the conference report:

  An effective, fully funded prison provision to provide $13 billion in 
grants to the States for prison construction, including tough 
incentives for truth in sentencing--rejected.
  A fair formula for distributing prison grants, to ensure that each 
State gets its fair share--rejected.
  Tough Federal penalties for violent juvenile gang offenses, the Dole-
Hatch-Brown language--rejected.
  The Moseley-Braun-Hatch provision to prosecute violent juveniles 13 
and older as adults in appropriate cases--rejected.
  Tough Federal mandatory minimum sentences for using a firearm in the 
commission of a crime, the D'Amato provision--rejected.
  Mandatory minimum sentences for selling drugs to minors or employing 
minors in a drug crime, the Gramm provision--rejected.
  Fully restricting so-called drug-court treatment programs to 
nonviolent, first-time offenders--rejected.
  Returning sentencing discretion to judges in a limited number of 
cases involving first-time, nonviolent offenders--rejected.
  Subjecting those convicted of attempting to kill the President to the 
death penalty when he or she comes close to succeeding--rejected.
  Ensuring the swift removal of alien terrorists without disclosing 
national security secrets in the deportation process, the Smith-Simpson 
provision--rejected.
  Ensuring that criminal aliens are swiftly deported after they have 
served their sentences, the Simpson provision--rejected.
  Stemming the tide of frivolous prisoner lawsuits through reform of 
the laws governing exhaustion of administrative remedies to prisoner 
grievances--weakened.
  A honest, fully funded trust fund that pays for the crime bill 
without increasing the deficit--rejected.
  Setting priorities for the trust fund, ensuring that prison, police, 
Federal law enforcement, rural crime, and violence against women 
programs are funded first--before social programs--rejected.
  The Equal Justice Act, which would prohibit both racial 
discrimination and the inappropriate use of statistics in death penalty 
cases--rejected.


                    the so-called racial justice act

  Mr. President, let me take a minute to expand on this last point. We 
had hoped that the affirmative prohibition on the misuse of statistics 
in death penalty cases would not be necessary. But events and 
statements by the administration make it clear that this hope is 
misplaced.
  The Senate recognizes that the racial quota death penalty provision--
the so-called Racial Justice Act--is really a death penalty abolition 
act. That is why it voted overwhelmingly--58 to 41--to instruct the 
Senate conferees to reject the RJA. Despite this, House conferees from 
the other side of the aisle insisted on sending the provision to the 
Senate after publicly acknowledging that a bill containing it could not 
pass the Senate. The Senate again rejected it.
  Moreover, this administration is being on implementing the so-called 
Racial Justice Act through unilateral action. According to press 
reports, the President has entered into a deal with opponents of the 
death penalty to take such action, either through Executive order or 
similar directive, after this conference report is acted upon.
  The misuse of statistics in applying the death penalty, as the 
administration and the proponents of the Racial Justice Act favor, 
could only lead to an unconscionable result--the active and conscious 
consideration of the race of a defendant during capital sentencing. The 
result would be a quota system for capital sentencing, rendering the 
death penalty virtually unenforceable.
  Thus, we believe that the Equal Justice Act is now necessary in any 
true crime bill. The Equal Justice Act protects against racial 
discrimination in the application of the death penalty. At the same 
time, it saves the death penalty from a weak administration buckling 
under to anti-death-penalty forces. It does so by prohibiting the use 
of statistics in attacks on sentences in capital cases. The Equal 
Justice Act also contains other provisions identical to provisions of 
the Senate-passed crime bill: It provides that the court in a death 
penalty proceeding shall instruct the jury that race and other improper 
factors may not play any role in its decision. In addition, it provides 
that each juror will be required to certify that he or she has complied 
with this instruction.


                            deficit spending

  The conference report is not deficit neutral. It actually increases 
the deficit by $13 billion in the out-years in order to accommodate the 
added wasteful social spending programs contained in this bill. And 
even with this $13 billion in deficit spending, the bill is not fully 
funded.
  The Republican alternative trust fund, as well the original Senate-
passed trust fund, is deficit-neutral. It requires a cut in 
discretionary spending--either through personnel reductions or through 
cuts to other programs. the Republican alternative in conference was a 
$28.25 billion, 5-year plan. The conference report before us, however, 
is a $30 billion, 6-year plan--full funding takes until the year 2000--
which proposes $13 billion in deficit spending during its last 2 years. 
The conference report actually increases the deficit during those years 
by mandating $13 billion in spending in 1999 and 2000 without extending 
the budget caps in those years. The bottom line is, the conference 
report proposes $13 billion in deficit spending to accommodate liberal 
social spending interests.


                      assault on second amendment

  Lastly, Mr. President, let me briefly discuss one final issue. In 
addition to all the other flaws in this conference report, its ban on 
so-called assault weapons takes direct aim at the second amendment 
rights of law-abiding citizens without making an appreciable impact on 
the fight against violent crime. This provision is a smokescreen for 
those who wish to appear tough on crime, but who are unwilling to 
support tough measures to punish the perpetrators of violent crime.
  The so-called semiautomatic assault weapons ban is a misleading 
substitute for fighting crime. Criminals generally obtain firearms from 
the black market, from other criminals, or by stealing them, rather 
than by obtaining them from gun shops or licensed dealers.
  This is especially true for so-called assault weapons, which, in any 
event, are little used in the commission of crimes. Less than 1 percent 
of all serious crimes involved the use of assault-style weapons. (NRA; 
drawn from Uniform Crime Reports and State criminological data; Ralph 
Z. Hallow, the Washington Times, May 5, 1994, at A8.) The fact that 
these firearms are semiautomatic merely means that a round is fed into 
the chamber when the weapon is fired. They are not machine guns. 
Indeed, they fire no differently than any semiautomatic hunting rifle.
  Moreover, even if criminals are unable to obtain specific 
semiautomatic firearms, they will obtain other firearms to commit their 
crimes. This measure is just one more step in an ongoing effort to take 
firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. Of course, that 
effort will be magnified if this ban becomes law. The Clinton 
administration is part and parcel of this effort. It is the most anti-
second amendment administration in memory, if not in our Nation's 
history.


                               Conclusion

  Mr. President, I did not come to the decision to oppose this 
conference report lightly. I have worked long and hard to craft a crime 
bill that will do what the American people are demanding of us. Indeed, 
the Senate passed such a bill last November, although it was not a 
perfect bill. Unfortunately, the conference report before us magnifies 
the flaws in the Senate bill, adds many more problematic provisions, 
and strips from the Senate bill many tough and smart law enforcement 
provisions the Senate passed last year.
  Yes, there are some good provisions in the conference report which I 
would very much like to see become law. I either sponsored or 
cosponsored a number of these, such as the Violence Against Women Act, 
the Senior Citizens Against Marketing Scams Act, and the rural crime 
initiatives.
  But the inclusion of a few good provisions cannot make up for the 
fact that this bill does not fulfill our promise to the American 
people. It does not provide for an emergency build-up in prison space 
to stop the revolving door. It wastes billions of dollars on social 
spending at a time when communities across the Nation, urban and rural, 
are crying out for true law enforcement assistance. It infringes on the 
Bill of Rights. It does not include the tough, effective criminal 
penalties that the American people are demanding. It facilitates 
implementation of a back-room deal to adopt a racial quota death 
penalty at the Federal level. And with all of these flaws, it also 
increases the deficit by $13 billion.
  Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to reject the conference report. 
I urge my colleagues to take the time on the No. 1 issue facing the 
American people to get it right. We can do better than the crime bill 
before us. We can do better if we sustain the budget point of order and 
then fix this bill.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland [Ms. Mikulski] is 
recognized for 8 minutes.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer for 
recognizing me and the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary 
Committee. I wish to congratulate both Senator Biden and his Republican 
counterpart, knowing that you worked very long and hard over the 
weekend with our colleagues in the House to fashion a workable crime 
bill. One that we hope will pass the U.S. Senate within the next few 
days.
  That is why I wish to come to the floor, to lend my support for this 
legislation, and then try to refashion a compromise on health insurance 
reform.
  Mr. President, America is at war, and we have been invaded. We have 
been invaded by illegal drugs. We have been invaded by a proliferation 
of guns. Crime is overriding our streets. And ordinary American people 
in cities and small towns are being held prisoners of that war in their 
own neighborhoods, afraid to go out to church meetings at night, 
reluctant to go to shopping malls on Saturday afternoons, and unable at 
times to be able to leave, in some of the neighborhoods, their own home 
at any time.
  That is why I hope we pass this crime bill and that we do it within 
the next 2 days. This crime bill, I believe, meets three tests that the 
American people have put to us.
  No. 1, does it emphasize policing to make sure that we have enough 
resources to be able to catch the criminals?
  No. 2, once we catch them, will we be able to punish them and not 
continue this revolving door?
  No. 3, do we emphasize prevention where we say yes to the young kids 
who are saying no to drugs and to criminal activity?
  In Maryland, as across the Nation, we have seen the compelling need 
for this bill.
  Just recently, a youngster in Baltimore riding on a bike was held up 
by a gunman armed with a 9 millimeter semiautomatic handgun. The 
robbers took that bicycle. A 40-year Metro police officer in Landover 
was shot by a teenager. That young man is now in prison.
  We have a 98-year-old man, a distinguished African-American citizen, 
beaten in his own home, who lapsed into a coma only a few days ago to 
die in the hospital.
  We have a Catholic nun who was brutalized, murdered in her own 
convent.
  Each case is more shocking than the last. Not only is there more 
crime, but there is more violent crime, and there is more cruel crime. 
The brutalizing of a Catholic nun, the beating of a 98-year-old citizen 
that the whole neighborhood loved. Behind every incident, there are 
families and friends for whom the pain will never go away.
  We need to act and we need to stop the delays, and we need to stop 
the politics. People do not want political rhetoric. They want action. 
They want results. And that is why I support this crime bill.
  It will put 100,000 police officers in communities across America on 
to the streets. I believe community policing is the best way to reduce 
crime. In the neighborhood, the neighbors know their local officers. 
The officers know what is going on in the neighborhood, and they can 
spot the criminals, spot the crime patterns, and also identify those 
people in the neighborhood who are defenders of the good.
  Part of policing also is being able to control the availability of 
deadly weapons. I absolutely support the assault weapons ban. Right now 
the crooks, bums, and thugs are better armed and outgun our police 
officers.
  The weapons that we are talking about outlawing are not those used 
for hunting deer in western Maryland or shooting ducks on the Eastern 
Shore. These assault weapons' only purpose is to maintain terror and 
perpetuate a cycle of violence. Automatic weapons are weapons of war, 
and they are being used to create war zones on our streets and in our 
neighborhoods.
  Also, I support prevention programs. I do believe we need to invest 
in prevention. Much has been said about ``social pork.'' I do not know 
what ``social pork'' is. But I do know that we need to say yes to the 
kids who say no. Sure, we cannot fund every good intention, but I do 
believe we need to make sure that we help the young people who say no 
to drugs and no to crime, and say yes to going to school, yes to saying 
their prayers, yes to doing their homework, and yes to trying to stay 
out of trouble.
  When we do that, I believe we will have our most successful efforts. 
Prevention programs should be structured. They should offer role 
models. They should be a safe place for kids to go. And we need to be 
able to say yes to their parents. We need to have policies that will 
reward work and help families.
  I happen to believe that the most important prevention programs are 
public education, public safety, and public health. I believe that the 
Elementary and Secondary Education Act that we passed will be the most 
important crime prevention program. It will teach kids how to read and 
encourage them to stay in school.
  Also I believe we ought to pass universal coverage. Why should we do 
that? So we can say yes to the mothers and fathers who are going out 
there working for an honest living.
  Public schools, public libraries, access to public health, these are 
the important things that we need to do.
  Finally, the crime bill will provide for tough punishment for the 
predators in our society. It will require tougher sentences, new 
prisons, and the death penalty for certain heinous crimes. It does have 
three strikes and you are out.
  We have also included laws that allow a community to be notified when 
sexual predators are released. I believe this is a very important tool 
because of the horrible and repugnant lessons we have learned. We need 
to know this. We have to have this legislation.
  We have learned about the shocking sexual attack on Megan Kanka in 
New Jersey, the kidnaping of Polly Klaas in California, and all of 
those other children who have been victimized by these sexual 
predators.
  Also we have a component in this bill that will deal with the 
violence against women, issues related to rape and to other forms of 
sexual assault and battery.
  So, Mr. President, it is time to pass the crime bill. As I said, 
people want police, they want punishment, and they want prevention. 
They want results. They do not want rhetoric. They want to see crooks 
and thugs behind bars in prisons. They do not want to have to stay 
behind bars in their own homes.
  So let us say yes to the crime bill and let us say yes in the next 48 
hours.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I thank my colleagues for 
yielding me this time so that I may make those remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware has the floor.
  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maryland for her 
remarks, and I also thank her for her leadership in this area.
  She is one tough Senator. She has been, from the time that she has 
gotten here and well before that in the House, and has never been 
reluctant to be as hard and tough on criminals as they come.
  As a matter of fact, were I someone who had committed a crime, I 
would not want to be before her were she a judge. I imagine if the 
maximum were 10 years I would get 12.
  So I thank her for her work, not only in trying to help us get 
through this final phase, this final little inch we have to go before 
we cross the line--it has been 6 years in getting here; she has been in 
on all aspects of this as a House Member for the previous years and 
here as a Senator.
  So I hope we will all be able to celebrate with the American people 
when we finally cross this last threshold and, as I said, she has been 
involved from the outset.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, since he has been 
waiting all afternoon, that following Senator Specter's remarks, my 
colleague from Texas, Senator Gramm, be recognized to speak on this 
bill for 15 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HATCH. I yield the floor.
  Mr. SPECTER addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from 
Pennsylvania [Mr. Specter].
  Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I support the crime bill. I believe it 
has many good features. I believe it has some features which are not so 
good. I believe that there are many important features which are 
omitted. But all factors considered, I believe it will be a significant 
step forward in our fight against violent crime. I say that having 
spent most of my adult life considering issues of law enforcement or 
being actively engaged in law enforcement.
  When I moved to Philadelphia, PA--after having grown up in Wichita, 
KS, a small town when I lived there of about 130,000 people, then 
moving at the age of 12 to Russell, KS, a small town of 5,000, and then 
coming to college at the University of Pennsylvania, in a big city of 
some 2 million people--I was astounded by the incidence of violence in 
a big city.
  Soon after graduation from law school in 1959, after practicing in a 
big law firm for some 3 years, but always being interested in law 
enforcement and in criminal prosecution, I became an assistant district 
attorney. The ideas that I have on criminal law enforcement are molded 
by my 12 years as a prosecutor--4 as an assistant district attorney and 
then 8 years as a district attorney of Philadelphia, where we had some 
30,000 prosecutions a year, including some 500 homicide prosecutions.
  As the years have unfolded, we have seen the problems of violent 
crime, which used to be so heavily concentrated in the cities, spread 
to smaller communities like Wichita, KS, or like Williamsport, PA, 
where there is now a tremendous incidence of crime. Crimes are also 
spreading to small towns like Russell, KS, or to south-central 
Pennsylvania, where you have gangs like the Crips and the Bloods 
traveling into small communities.
  In the Congress of the United States, we have labored for years 
without coming up with a major, comprehensive crime control bill. While 
I think that we could have done a better job than the conference 
report, which is coming to us from the House of Representatives, I 
believe that, all factors considered, this bill is a step in the right 
direction.
  I note, Mr. President, that the bill was passed by some 40 votes, 235 
to 195, in the House of Representatives. And the balance for passage 
was provided by 46 Republicans who fought hard and I think made 
considerable improvements in this bill.

  This bill authorizes some $30.2 billion, and it is subject to a point 
of order under the Budget Act. But, similarly, the $22 billion bill 
which passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 94-4 was also subject to 
challenge on budget considerations. It cannot exceed the budget. We 
decided at that time by an overwhelming vote, 94-4, to pass the bill 
even though it exceeded the budget. Why did we do that? We did that 
because we believed that crime is a big problem in America. According 
to the polls, it is the No. 1 problem in America, and we thought that 
when we could not trim it back any further, we would exceed the budget 
to some extent to pass the bill.
  The budget considerations are very complicated because most of the 
expenditures, even in this $30.2 billion bill, will be paid for by the 
so-called trust fund from economies and Government. But I think that in 
our evaluation of this measure, although we can look at the 
hypertechnical budget considerations, it is not unusual for the 
Congress to waive the Budget Act; and just as when this bill initially 
passed the Senate, I believe that now we should enact this bill despite 
the budget considerations.
  The bill has $13.5 billion for police. It has almost $10 billion--
$9.9 billion--for prisons. Contrasted with that, there are $5.5 billion 
in prevention programs, and $1.4 billion in antidrug efforts, which 
leaves $23.4 billion for the toughest, law enforcement measures, and 
$6.9 billion for those items which are aimed at prevention. That, Mr. 
President, in my opinion, is a fair balance, with most of this bill 
being directed to tough measures against violent crime, with police and 
prisons, and $6.9 billion directed at crime prevention measures.
  I point out initially, Mr. President, that when you talk about crime 
prevention measures, you are not talking about being soft on crime. You 
are talking about measures which are designed to prevent crime, are 
realistic and are effective. When we take a look at the statistics on 
what happens with rehabilitation measures, you can turn to a 1994 
Federal Bureau of Prisons study, which found that 44 percent of the 
inmates who did not complete any educational program while in prison 
had been rearrested within 3 years of release. Whereas, 35 percent of 
those inmates who had completed one or more classes had been rearrested 
within 3 years of release. So that when a significant number of inmates 
have educational opportunities, it is a demonstrable and important 
crime prevention program.
  The Alabama Council on Vocational and Technical Education studied 
recidivism rates for Alabama inmates who took vocational or academic 
courses over a 4-year period, and they found a 35 percent recidivism 
rate for the entire population of Alabama prisons. But those who 
completed vocational or academic courses in prisons averaged only a 5 
percent recidivism rate, which I suggest, Mr. President, is a very, 
very significant impact.
  A 1992 Federal Bureau of Prisons study demonstrated that of inmates 
who received job training and work experience in prison, 86.5 percent 
obtained a full-time job upon their release, contrasted with 62 percent 
of other inmates who were able to obtain full-time employment.
  It is no surprise that when someone leaves prison as a functional 
illiterate, without a trade or a skill, and is drug dependent, that 
that individual and others like him return to a life of crime. So that 
when we provide some balance--again emphasizing the fact that the 
overwhelming amount of money for this bill goes to prisons and police--
it is a solid investment.
  In the area of drug treatment, there is a 5-year study by the 
National Institute on Drug Abuse of 10,000 individuals in treatment 
that found that 3 to 5 years after leaving treatment, the proportion of 
people involved in predatory crimes was reduced by as much as 50 
percent.
  There are numerous other studies which support the proposition that 
carefully crafted preventive and rehabilitation programs do make sense. 
This is not a product which is new or untried. I point to programs in 
effect during the days of the administration of President Nixon, when 
certainly no one could say that there was anything but a tough attitude 
on crime. There were grants made to the city of Philadelphia, when I 
was district attorney there, that were very meaningful in our fight 
against violent crime. There was a program on juvenile gang violence in 
1970 which was directed against an insurgence and a spree of gang 
killings, where an effort was made to reduce juvenile gang violence, 
especially murders, through the expansion of the Youth Service Bureau, 
concentrating on troublesome, hard-to-reach, dangerous juveniles, 
concentrating on gang members.
  While I was district attorney of Philadelphia in 1970, there was a 
substantial grant to the juvenile branch of the family court division 
which provided for voluntary crisis intervention to divert juveniles 
from formal processing by the police and court. A unit involved in 
screening, counseling and referral services was designed to service 
approximately 6,000 juveniles.
  (Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN assumed the chair.)
  Mr. SPECTER. Madam President, that was part of a program which we put 
into effect in the early 1970's while I was district attorney which 
sought to divert individuals out of the criminal justice system. It was 
a novel program on diversion, which has since become a standard part of 
the Pennsylvania rules of criminal procedure, and which has provided a 
model for the country.
  What was done, succinctly stated, was to bring in individuals who 
were charged with nonviolent first offenses. So it was not a matter of 
violence, and it was not a matter of a repeat criminal. In those 
situations, we took some 8,000 cases out of the criminal justice system 
of some 30,000 cases. A judge would meet on an informal basis with up 
to 8 individuals in a day, with nonjury trials, where a judge might be 
able to try 3, 4, 5 cases, or 6 at the most.
  Those individuals were told that if they stayed out of trouble for a 
year their criminal record would be expunged, but if they got into 
trouble they would be back in the criminal justice system, they would 
be prosecuted for a new offense, and they would be prosecuted for the 
old offense.
  The current bill does provide for education, training, research, 
prevention, diversion, treatment, and rehabilitation, programs that are 
designed to prevent young children from becoming involved in gangs, 
programs which are designed to take young people out of the criminal 
justice cycle.
  Overall, I think these programs make sense. Some would like to spend 
all of the money on prisons or all of the money on police. While I 
believe that the emphasis ought to be on police and prisons and the 
tough aspects of law enforcement, this bill is appropriately balanced 
with about 70 to 75 percent of it being directed to those tougher 
measures.
  When we talk about a program of three strikes-and-you-are-out, it 
sounds good and it is good rhetoric, but there has to be something in 
addition to simply that kind of a slogan or that kind of rhetorical 
toughness if we are to get the judges to impose those kinds of tough 
sentences.
  In my own experience in prosecuting many felony cases, robbery cases, 
burglary cases which are the backbone of violent crime in our country 
today, I found it extremely difficult to get Pennsylvania judges, 
Philadelphia judges, to impose life sentences under the habitual 
offender statute because at the moment of sentencing it is extremely 
difficult to get that judge to impose a life sentence if the judge does 
not feel that there has been some opportunity for realistic 
rehabilitation.
  That is why I think that it is very important to make an effort at 
early intervention to take an individual out of the crime cycle, and if 
that person becomes a second offender or a third offender and when the 
time for sentencing comes, there is an opportunity by the prosecuting 
attorney to demonstrate to the court that that individual has had a 
chance with rehabilitation and has failed, then I think it is realistic 
to get the judge to impose a life sentence for a career criminal and a 
habitual offender who has been convicted of three or more major 
offenses. And as we have seen the results only at an early stage from 
those States which have imposed three strikes-and-you-are-out laws, 
they simply have not worked because the background has not been set for 
that kind of tough sentence where the judge is satisfied that a 
realistic opportunity has been made for that kind of rehabilitation.
  Madam President, in articulating these views today, they are not 
anything new on my own approach to criminal law enforcement. After 
being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980, one of the first groups of 
bills which I introduced in 1981 involved the career criminal bill 
which provided up to a life sentence for three-time offenders caught in 
the possession of a gun, a bill that I worked on for several years 
until it became law in 1984 and has been widely noted as being very, 
very effective, especially against organized crime and drug dealers. 
That bill number was S. 1668 in the 1981 session.
  Bill S. 1689 provided for incarceration of State prisoners sentenced 
to life as career criminals in Federal institutions, a concept which 
has been worked on by many Senators, including the chairman of the 
Judiciary Committee, on regional jails, to give Federal help to State 
institutions, which is now significantly embodied in this legislation.
  Then there was a bill S. 1690 to provide for rehabilitation requiring 
States to provide prisoners with a trade before paroling them.
  Those ideas of realistic rehabilitation have been ideas which I have 
introduced repeatedly which were incorporated in the District of 
Columbia correctional systems when I served as chairman of the 
appropriations subcommittee of the District of Columbia, and I think 
have been adopted in the Federal system to a substantial extent and I 
think will make very, very good sense in this bill.
  Madam President, although some may disagree with the provisions at 
rehabilitation and the provisions for job training, none can disagree 
with the basic fact that the lion's share of the funding in this bill 
will be directed at hardcore juvenile offenders and will be directed at 
the very basic lines of providing more police which are at the core of 
law enforcement.
  There is also no doubt that the provisions on violence against women 
will fill a very major void in our law enforcement system at the 
present time. We have had a rash of violence against women following 
the celebrated incidents of the O.J. Simpson case. I had occasion to 
visit shelters for women in Harrisburg, PA, and Pittsburgh, PA, during 
the course of the last several weeks and was really surprised to find 
an increase in the incidence of violence against women where the male 
companions of the victims would say in the parlance of the day, ``We're 
going to O.J. you.''
  We have provided some funding under the appropriations subcommittee 
for health and human services, but that is relatively minor in terms of 
what needs to be done in violence against women. Senator Biden outlined 
in some detail the problems in the field, and this legislation will be 
a very, very significant step forward in a very, very important line.
  With respect to the issue of police on the street, the 100,000 police 
which will be added here--and it is true that there will have to be 
some local participation, but that is a common practice in the Federal 
system to offer seed money, to offer 75 percent funding to encourage 
local communities to add more police to the streets--the data shows 
that as crime rates exploded between 1950 and 1980, law enforcement 
resources did not keep pace. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of 
serious crimes in America grew by some 400 percent from 3.4 million to 
13.4 million and the number of crimes grew by 460 percent, from 288,000 
to 1.3 million. During the same period, the number of full-time police 
officers in America grew by only 85 percent, from 195,000 to 361,000. 
Police resources were not expanding in proportion to do the job that 
they were expected to do and the crime clearance rates declined 
drastically.
  During the 1980's, as there was a response to the need for law 
enforcement, police forces did grow in proportion to the crime numbers. 
Between 1980 and 1988, law enforcement ranks grew by 14 percent and at 
that time the number of serious crimes rose just under 4 percent, with 
the number of violent crimes rising 16 percent. As police numbers 
finally grew in proportion to the crime numbers, the arrest clearance 
rate stopped going down and the crime rates gradually stopped rising.
  So it is plain that the provision for more police on the street and 
the effort of this bill to encourage local communities to hire more 
police will have a very significant effect based on the statistics of 
the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's.
  The addition of extra prison space, I would suggest, is really of 
vital importance. We have some 39 States of the 50 States at the 
present time under court orders. Some 15 States have had emergency 
release programs for overcrowding, and some 20,971 inmates were 
released in 1993, individuals who should have been kept in prison but 
who were released from prison because there simply was not enough space 
in the State prisons. The $9.9 billion provided in this bill will be a 
significant step forward in addressing the very serious shortage of 
prison space in America.
  There is another very important aspect about this legislation, 
because it has a provision which will require a specific showing that 
there was a constitutional violation to an individual inmate before a 
Federal court may impose a cap on the population of any prison. There 
are many prison caps in effect in the United States today which were 
entered into under a consent degree without, at the time it was 
imposed, a showing having been made to demonstrate that there was a 
violation of the eighth amendment provision against cruel and unusual 
punishment caused by overcrowding. Such a prison cap is in effect in 
Philadelphia today. The enactment of this bill will require a specific 
showing of a constitutional violation against a particular inmate 
before that or any other prison cap can be enforced or extended. And in 
cases in which a constitutional violation has been demonstrated, there 
is a provision in this bill for review of such a prison cap every 2 
years to determine if the cap is needed to prevent a constitutional 
violation. This provision is effective immediately, so a prison 
authority need not wait for 2 years before seeking review of a prison 
cap under this bill.
  Madam President, in supporting this legislation, I acknowledge a very 
substantial constituent interest in opposing the gun control provisions 
which are in here. I have not supported gun control provisions as a 
general matter because my experience has demonstrated to me that 
criminals are able to gain guns, able to get possession of guns, no 
matter what kind of prohibitions may exist. As, for example, when I was 
district attorney of Philadelphia from 1966 to 1974 and there was a gun 
ordinance, the criminals had no problem getting their hands on weapons.
  But when you take a look at the totality of this bill, the laborious 
process which has been undertaken to try to get it passed, the very 
tough battles which were undertaken in the House of Representatives 
where the bill was very, very substantially improved, on the totality 
of the circumstances, it seems to me that the national interest 
requires the enactment of this legislation.
  The bill has been improved in very significant aspects. The cost has 
been reduced by about 10 percent, some $3.3 billion. There was the 
removal of a provision on retroactive application of the mandatory 
minimum sentences, going back into the record to make a determination 
about the so-called mules who had been sentenced under mandatory 
sentences. And on that subject, it is worth noting the comments of 
Chief Justice Rehnquist, who is well known for being strong on law 
enforcement, who spoke in an opinion of ``the respectable body of 
opinion which believes that these mandatory minimums imposed unduly 
harsh punishment for first-time offenders, for mules''--that is, 
runners--``who play only a minor role in drug distribution schemes.''
  So that in this legislation, taken as a whole, there has been very, 
very considerable improvement.
  The one major omission from this legislation which I think is very 
significant is the omission of revisions to the Federal law on habeas 
corpus, which is the Latin phrase ``to have the body,'' which is an 
ancient writ and a very important writ, but one which I think has been 
overused to destroy the imposition of the death penalty in State 
criminal prosecutions. Today, when someone is sentenced to death in a 
State court, it takes an average of 9 years for that case to go through 
the Federal courts, and some cases are held up for as long as 17 years.
  In 1990, the Senate adopted an amendment which I offered to the then 
pending crime bill which would have abbreviated the time for the 
pendency of habeas corpus petitions, something which could be done 
within a range of 2 to 3 years, giving defendants adequate protection 
with adequate counsel but still retaining the death penalty as an 
effective deterrent. The death penalty has been declared 
unconstitutional on two occasions by the Supreme Court of the United 
States, in 1972 and again in part in 1976. Following those declarations 
of unconstitutionality, some 37 States have come back and have imposed 
the death penalty because of the prevailing view that the death penalty 
is a deterrent against violent crime and is an appropriate weapon in 
the arsenal against violent crime.
  This bill also, Madam President, brings back the death penalty in the 
Federal law for very important Federal offenses, such as fatal car-
jackings, drive-by shootings, terrorism, murder of U.S. citizens abroad 
through terrorists, and the assassination of an American President. It 
is indeed an anomaly, Madam President, that if the President of the 
United States were to be murdered by a criminal conspiracy in 
Washington, DC, those conspirators, those murderers, would not face the 
death penalty because there is no death penalty in the District of 
Columbia and there is no Federal death penalty.
  So when you add up all of the pluses and all of the minuses and you 
take a look at the number of police, with an expenditure of some $13.5 
billion, and the additional prisons so badly needed in this country 
today, $9.9 billion, so that the preponderance of this legislation is 
directed toward tough law enforcement, and then the $6.9 billion on 
prevention and antidrug efforts realistically designed to take 
individuals out of the crime cycle, but if they stay in the crime cycle 
to set the stage for life sentences for habitual offenders, I think 
this bill makes sense.
  We have been working on this crime bill, Madam President, for years, 
and it has not survived action by the Congress of the United States. 
The House of Representatives has just gone through a grueling 
experience and has passed this bill by some 40 votes, with the majority 
being provided by 46 Republicans.
  When you talk about a point of order on budget considerations, it is 
true that, on the technicality, that would lie, that could be asserted. 
But in considering that issue, it should be remembered that the $22 
billion-plus crime bill, passed by the Senate by an overwhelming vote 
of 94 to 4, could have been subjected to that same point of order.
  This is not a perfect bill. It is an improved bill. It is a serious 
step against violent crime in America. I think it ought to be passed by 
the Senate so it can be signed by the President.
  And to those who say that we should not take any action unless the 
President receive some credit, I would reply, Madam President, by 
noting that the bulk of the American people today are not likely to 
give Washington, DC, any credit for anything we have done. But if the 
President of the United States derives some credit for it, so be it, 
when the bill is in the national interest.
  It is time that the Congress of the United States put politics aside, 
took a hard look at the serious problem of crime in America, and took a 
significant step--not a perfect step, but a significant step--forward 
in the fight against violent crime.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I understand that the Senator from Texas 
has the next 15 minutes. Senator Gramm was just on the floor and 
indicated to me that he had to step down the hall for a minute to speak 
with someone quickly.
  I ask unanimous consent to proceed for a few minutes, or until he 
arrives, on this bill.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BIDEN. Immediately upon his arriving, I will yield the floor.
  Let me compliment my friend from Pennsylvania. There are a number of 
things he is that are fine, but one of the things is he is a man of his 
word. No one in the U.S. Congress, and surely in the Senate, which I 
know for certain, has worked harder to improve the criminal justice 
system or to deal more thoroughly with the plight of crime in America 
than the Senator from Pennsylvania.
  We happen to know each other well. We represent neighboring 
constituencies and we live very close to one another. And I know of the 
intensity of his commitment to aiding local law enforcement in order to 
make the streets of his hometown and mine and every other one safer.
  So I compliment him. I realize it is not easy politically for him to 
have made the speech that he made today and taken the position he has 
taken within his party. But, then again, I have never known politics to 
be a consideration in what decision he ultimately makes.
  But I did want to recognize his leadership and acknowledge that for 
most of us, that would have been a tough position to take. But he is so 
accustomed to taking those kinds of stands where he believes something 
is right regardless----
  Mr. SPECTER. Will my colleague yield for a moment?
  Mr. BIDEN. I am delighted to.
  Mr. SPECTER. I thank the Senator from Delaware for those comments. My 
own view is that this is not a close question. This crime bill is not a 
close question. It spends a lot of money, but it spends a lot of money 
for a very, very important cause.
  When you have 435 Members of the House of Representatives, there are 
a lot of disagreements about how you want to spend the money. There are 
disagreements about whether it all ought to go for police and prisons 
or whether some of it ought to go to the inner city on crime 
prevention. I have seen the inner city of Philadelphia, a really rough, 
tough town.
  When I was district attorney I got Federal grants for crime 
prevention for gangs. We had a rash of juvenile gang killings, about 60 
of them during the summer of 1970, and about that number in 1971. We 
were in competition with Chicago, Madam President, your hometown, as to 
which city would have the most gang killings.
  When we got this money for juvenile crime prevention, it was very, 
very well spent. One of the major grants on safe streets was 
administered by my district attorney's office. When there was another 
major grant to divert cases out of the criminal courts and try to take 
people out of the crime cycle, it made a lot of sense.
  Since my first days here in 1981, I have tried to get realistic 
rehabilitation, because the basic proposition is that if you release 
functional illiterates from jail without training or a skill, they are 
likely to go back to a life of crime, especially when they are drug 
dependent. And the statistics have shown that education, job training, 
and drug rehabilitation work.
  My first effort on drug treatment was on Gaudenzia House, back in 
1968, a long time ago, when we got Pennsylvania to put up $250,000 for 
drug prevention. It is important to be tough on crime. I do not think 
anybody in America has been tougher on crime than I have--tough 
sentences for tough criminals, refusal to plea bargain, fights with 
judges, being held in contempt of court by a judge who disagreed with 
my vehemence on protecting a life sentence for a drug dealer.
  But there is also another aspect to law enforcement, and that is 
crime prevention. This bill is balanced very heavily in favor of police 
and prisons and lightly on the subject of rehabilitation and job 
training programs. So that when my colleague from Delaware makes a nice 
comment, I tell him that it is not a tough choice. There are 46 
Republicans in the House of Representatives who provided the margin on 
this bill. This bill is not a Democratic bill. It was not passed by a 
majority of Democrats. The majority came from Republicans.
  That is not to take any credit for it. It ought to be bipartisan and 
we ought not talk about Democrats and Republicans. But we hear the talk 
in corridors and cloakrooms about not wanting to give the President a 
victory. I do not consider it a victory for the President, just as I 
did not consider it a defeat for the President when the House did not 
pass the bill. In the legislative branch, we article I officers have a 
duty to do our own jobs without respect to what the President has to 
say.
  We have very important issues to consider. There is a lot of 
dissatisfaction out there in America with the haggling that goes on 
across party lines. This is a bill which I do not think is a close call 
at all, and I came and sat here for 2\1/2\ hours to get a few minutes 
on the Senate floor because I wanted to speak early on this bill and I 
wanted to state the reasons it makes sense for America, whether you are 
a Democrat or a Republican. The criminals do not check your 
registration when they make you a victim of crime.
  I thank my colleague from Delaware.
  Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I thank the Senator. I, too, agree it is 
not a close call on the merits. What I was referring to is, although 
many times on both sides of the aisle Senators occasionally know 
something is not a close call on the merits, they have a significant 
tug and pull from their political parties and/or interest groups to not 
go with what they think is the best call.
  Usually, the cover that they find to not go with what they think is 
the best thing to do is to say that this or that vote is not a 
substantive vote but a procedural vote, to give them an opportunity to 
attempt to satisfy two things: One, the fact that they are not backing 
off a principle; and, two, being able to stick with their party. It 
happens on the Democratic side. It happens on the Republican side.
  My larger point was that that never dissuades the Senator from 
Pennsylvania. If he thinks on the merits something is right, I have 
always found him to be willing to take on whomever it was, whether it 
is his party, occasionally his constituency, an interest group--it has 
never seemed to get in his way. For that, I compliment him. That is why 
it is a pleasure to work with him.
  It is also a bane to work with him when he is against you because he 
is so effective. This time, we happen to be together--as we most times 
are. I compliment him.
  One point I would like to make while we are waiting for Senator Gramm 
to come and claim the floor--and I will yield when he comes through the 
door--is that as I finished my earlier comments on this bill, I walked 
off the floor and one of my colleagues said to me: You know, Joe, if we 
do not overrule the Budget Act--which is a technical point, which is a 
fancy way of saying if we keep the bill from becoming law--it is not 
over, because then we just go back to the House-passed bill that was 
sent over here.
  To the listeners, this will not make much sense, but to Senators, we 
understand the jargon and the procedural situation here. It is said 
once we defeat this conference report by that vote--so it is going--
then Biden and Mitchell and the key players on this side will go into a 
room with Republicans who oppose the bill the way it is, and we will 
just sit down and work out a further compromise and bring the bill back 
on the floor and we will vote on it.
  I have been doing these bills, now, for the last 10 years. I can say 
without equivocation, absolutely confident that no one can contradict 
me, there has never been a crime bill that has been open to amendment 
that has not drawn several hundred amendments. Everyone in this body 
knows if this crime bill goes down on a procedural vote--like what 
happened in the House of Representatives 2 weeks earlier--that we are 
here for the next 3 weeks. We are not going to go home for Labor Day. 
We are not going anywhere.
  The one thing I am convinced of--and I believe I know from my 
discussions with the majority leader who controls the schedule--and 
Senator Mitchell is convinced of, this issue is so important to the 
American people there is not a chance that we will go home not having 
resolved passing a crime bill.
  So everyone should be on notice that if they think by voting against 
this bill when the procedural vote comes up today, tomorrow, or the 
next day, whenever it is, that somehow that means I am going to go into 
a back room--not a back room; I do not mean that in a pejorative 
sense--but go into a room with Senators Dole and Gramm and Hatch and 
others, whomever, and we are going to sit down and work out a 
compromise on further things I would like to see changed in the bill 
and they would like to see changed, and we are going to come back out 
on the floor and spit-spat pass it, they are dreaming and they know it.
  No one thinks that can happen. One of the things the Senator from 
Pennsylvania said is he observed how torturous a process it has been to 
get this bill this far. The American public must be wondering what is 
going on. They saw the Biden crime bill introduced a year and a half 
ago that had all this in it--all the cops, the money, and these big 
numbers for help for local law enforcement in terms of prison cells, 
and the rest. They know the bill I introduced 4 years ago passed both 
Houses, passed the conference, passed the House just like this did--got 
to the same stage. People who do not do this for a living--and thank 
God, most do not--do not necessarily remember what they learned in 
their civics classes. They should not remember it. I would not remember 
it unless I were here.
  The way it works is the Senate passes a bill and the House passes a 
bill. If there are differences, they go sit down, literally, in a room 
between here and the House; we sit down and we work out the 
differences. Which is like another House working on it.
  Then, when that passes, it is called a conference report. Then that 
goes to the House of Representatives. They debate it all over again and 
they vote on it.
  Then the last step in the journey is it comes back over here and we 
vote on the conference report. The only difference between a bill and a 
conference report is a conference report is not able to be amended.
  How many weeks did we spend on the crime bill? Weeks and weeks and 
weeks--I think there were over 300 amendments that were filed on the 
crime bill when I introduced it last October.
  We did not pass this new crime bill until November. It took from 
November all the way until the middle of August to get it to the House 
of Representatives. Then it took, when they did what this outfit is 
trying to do now, and that is, on a procedural vote, turned down the 
conference report, it went back into a conference.
  The conference took another 10 days. Then it finally got out on a 
pejorative, angry, contentious session that took place Saturday and 
Sunday. It took until Sunday evening to finally adopt it. Now it is 
here on Monday morning.
  Does anybody truthfully believe if we turn down all that work that 
took over a year--almost a year--to get this far, that we are going to 
be able to turn this down now, the last 10 yards before we score--we 
already have gone 90 yards--that that is not going to put the ball all 
the way back to the 20?
  Excuse my football analogy here, but that is where we are. Yet, I 
walk out of this Chamber and I hear one of my Republican friends say, 
``Well, the Republican leadership says not a problem, we'll just vote 
this down and we'll get Biden to sit down with us and Biden will work 
it out.'' I like the idea that everybody thinks Biden is so powerful. 
What makes everybody think I can walk in a room, sit down with the 
Republican leadership and not ask the other 55 Democrats in here and 
say, ``Don't worry, just let me handle this, I will compromise these 
things. Trust me''--thank God they do trust me. They let me write the 
bill in the first place, and during the negotiations on the House side, 
I was the only Democratic Senator because they trusted me, and I was 
the only one in the conference because they trusted me to give me their 
proxies because I have been doing it so long. I know what every one of 
them think after 6 years doing this. I could write a book on every 
position every single Democrat has on every one of these contentious 
issues.
  But my ability to walk into a room and at the end of this week say, 
``Well, let's start this from scratch again,'' then you know what 
happens? We pass it. Let us assume we can do that. Now that whole thing 
has to travel back to the House again and they have to vote on it 
again. Then we have to go to conference again and then we have to adopt 
a conference report again and then it goes back to the House again and 
then it will be back here. And I promise you, if you we are able to do 
that, they will have some other excuse as long as guns were in it. If 
guns are in this bill, I assure you that the Republican side of the 
aisle will, in fact, not let something go easily. And I respect their 
position on guns.
  Speaking of guns, I see my distinguished friend from Texas is here. 
If you notice, every time I say ``guns,'' he puts his hand on his right 
hip. I guess that is a Texan thing, I do not know. But he is my good 
friend. He is here and I thank my colleagues for allowing me to explain 
what I perceive to be the reality of a defeat of this conference 
report. We are here for a long, long time because we are not going home 
until we get a crime bill.
  I thank my colleagues for their indulgence. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, thank you for the recognition.
  Let me make it clear that I would like to pass a crime bill, I expect 
us to pass a crime bill and, quite frankly, in listening to the plans 
of the majority leader, my feeling is that he is overestimating the 
time required to remedy this problem because I think there is a simple 
way to fix it.
  But before I get into that, let me just say to the chairman of the 
Judiciary Committee and to our ranking member, while there are many 
things in the conference report that I am still unhappy about, I do 
believe the conference report was improved in this round of 
negotiations in the House, and I want to thank both the chairman and 
our ranking member for their efforts.
  I have enjoyed having an opportunity in the 6 years that we have 
developed this bill to work with both of them. I have the highest 
regard for them. As I am fond of saying of our dear chairman, his heart 
is good, it is just that it has been minted in the sixties and its 
frame is bent a little to the left. In any case, his intentions are 
always good, he is always honorable, and I always enjoy working with 
him.
  The House improved the bill--and I think we need to congratulate our 
colleagues in the House, the Democrats who opposed the rule, it was a 
courageous thing to do; the Republicans who opposed the rule and 
hammered out a majority that gave them an opportunity to go back and to 
delete some $3 billion of pork barrel spending which, in turn, allowed 
them to marginally improve the crime portions of the bill. It is easy 
for us in the Senate to say, ``Well, there are still a lot of things 
that should have been done, there is still a lot of pork there, there 
are still a lot of good, tough procrime provisions that were adopted in 
the Senate that were not included in the revised conference report.
  All those things are true. But that does not change the fact that 
fighting with a very small stick in the House, with a very small 
minority--we had good people working hard to improve a bill that is 
important to the future of the country. So I want to congratulate them, 
and what I hope to do in the Senate is to build on their effort.
  Let me try to be brief because I know there will be other people 
today who will want to speak, and certainly in the last 6 years on the 
subject of crime, I have spoken enough that certainly the Members of 
this body who are interested in my opinion know what it is. But let me 
say what I believe is wrong with the bill and what I would like to see 
fixed.
  First of all, the original conference report had an extraordinary 
provision which at least around here has become known as the get-out-
of-jail-free provision. This provision basically tracked the 
President's agenda which has always been to overturn mandatory minimum 
sentencing for drug felons. The President and the Attorney General have 
consistently supported that effort. That effort was fought in the 
Senate and defeated, but it ended up prevailing in the House and it was 
part of the first conference report.
  What that provision would have done is not only overturn mandatory 
minimum sentencing for drug felons convicted in the future, but it 
would have produced the extraordinary specter of going back 
retroactively and allowing people already in prison to file petitions 
for shortening of their sentences. We could have had, over time as all 
those petitions were ruled on, as many as 10,000 people currently in 
the Federal penitentiary for selling drugs, many of them for selling 
drugs to minors, who could have been let back out on the streets. I 
think people were shocked at the possibility of that happening. I am 
delighted that the conference eliminated this retroactive provision so 
that the people who are already in jail will serve out their term.
  I would like, if we have an opportunity to amend the bill, to go back 
to the Senate provisions which to me represented a compromise. On of 
the issues here, Madam President, is this: There are those who say that 
there are a lot of people who sell drugs who just happened to be in the 
wrong place at the wrong time; that this person just happened to be at 
a junior high school trying to sell drugs to our children; society 
supposedly had done them wrong; it was the first time they had done 
anything like this; they just happened to stumble in there and maybe 
sending them to jail for 5 years is too much. I have never bought that 
logic.
  I view selling drugs to children as being a violent crime, and I have 
no sympathy for these drug traffickers whatsoever. If they sell drugs 
to children, I want them to go to jail and I want them to be there a 
long time.
  But in trying to work out a crime bill, I think it is important to 
remind people that there has been a compromise in the Senate and 
Republicans have done some compromising. As our two colleagues who are 
here will remember, while I did not want to change the provisions 
relating to mandatory minimum sentencing and, in fact, I am going to 
talk about a provision we adopted in the Senate to strengthen them, I 
agreed to a compromise which we worked out here and with which I think, 
basically, people were satisfied.
  What the compromise said was this: We would give judges some 
sentencing discretion, but only under the following circumstances: The 
person involved had no criminal record, including a juvenile record. A 
lot of people have a massive juvenile record as long as your arm, they 
have committed violent crimes--and I see our Presiding Officer 
remembers that her juvenile provision was dropped from this bill. I 
have not forgotten that myself.
  But they have a juvenile record as long as your arm, often they have 
engaged in violent behavior and committed violent crimes, but with 
their first drug offense as an adult they might still not go to prison.
  So our compromise was that if they had no previous criminal record, 
they were not carrying a gun or other weapon, they were not the leader 
of the drug conspiracy and no one was hurt in the crime, that the judge 
would have some discretion in their cases.
  Now, we speculated about how many people that would affect. My view 
is it would be a couple hundred, no more than 500 people a year who 
would fall into that category. That was a compromise that I did not 
like, but I was willing to make to help us pass a crime bill.
  I wish to open the bill for amendment, take out the provision that is 
in the conference report that will overturn mandatory minimum 
sentencing on a broad basis, and put the very carefully written 
compromise language of the Senate back in the bill.
  Second, we have two amendments which I have offered traditionally in 
this debate. One amendment proposes 10 years in prison without parole 
for selling drugs to a minor or using a minor in a drug conspiracy, and 
life imprisonment for a repeat offense. That was adopted in the Senate. 
It has been adopted on numerous occasions.
  What I wish to do is open up this conference report and get an 
opportunity to offer that amendment again and to put back in this bill 
stiff mandatory minimum sentencing for selling drugs to children.
  It is certainly no secret that I am one of the people in the Senate 
who believes that gun control is a copout; that it will not be 
successful in taking guns away from violent criminals. They have plenty 
of guns, and they are not going to be deterred by a legislated gun ban 
when they are out killing people. What I wish to do is to try to deal 
with the criminals who are using these guns.
  I offered in the Senate, as I have for 6 years, a provision which was 
modified and adopted in the Senate. It provided 10 years in prison 
without parole for anybody who possesses a firearm during the 
commission of a violent crime or a drug felony, 20 years in prison for 
discharging the firearm, life imprisonment for killing somebody, and 
the death penalty in aggravated cases.
  That provision has been adopted consistently in the Senate. It was in 
our bill that went to conference. It was dropped out of the conference 
report. I would like to have an opportunity to put that back.
  I would also like to have two other opportunities. No. 1, I would 
like to try to do something about the $7 billion of social spending 
that remains in this bill. I would have to say, Madam President, that I 
had thought I had seen great creativity in spending the taxpayers' 
money, but I have to admit that this crime bill reached an all-time 
global maximum. And it was not midnight basketball. It sounds almost 
incredible to say it--but a provision would allow someone to apply for 
money that would be used to train people who sprayed graffiti, to train 
them to be real artists.
  Now, I thought I had seen every bad idea for squandering the 
taxpayers' money, but I have to admit that one takes the cake.
  Now, what I would like to do is to go back and go through this list 
of $7 billion of social spending, and my own preference would be to 
strike out every bit of it. This is a crime bill. It is supposed to be 
about tough sentencing, about putting police officers on the street, 
about building prisons, and about putting violent criminals in prison. 
I think most people are surprised to know that we still have $7 billion 
of social spending in this bill.
  My view is that we ought to cut all of that money out and then let 
committees that deal with social problems try to see where they would 
like to cut other programs to fund some of these great ideas if they 
are so moved to do it. My guess is they would not be moved to do it.
  So I am hoping to have an opportunity along with my colleagues to 
offer an amendment--and I would like to do it in one amendment so we do 
not slow this whole process down--to take out the repeal of mandatory 
minimum sentencing in the House bill that will eliminate mandatory 
minimum sentencing for many drug felons and replace it with the 
strictly constructed compromise we adopted in the Senate--put back 
mandatory minimum sentencing for gun crimes, 10 years, 20 years, life 
imprisonment, or the death penalty, put back mandatory minimum 
sentencing for selling drugs to a minor, and while I would like to take 
out the whole $7 billion of social spending, my guess is in trying to 
line up the votes we would end up with a compromise. But, quite 
frankly, I think we can do better than the House did.
  I would like to put back a provision related to treating juveniles as 
adults in these violent gun crimes. That is something I would like to 
look at. I am certainly supportive of it.
  That basically is what I would like to do. We are going to have a 
vote on a budget point of order. I would be the first to say that the 
vote on the budget point of order is basically a vote as to whether or 
not we are going to open the bill for amendment. If you do not want to 
open the bill for amendment, if you want to see it pass exactly as it 
is, then you would vote to waive the Budget Act.
  If, on the other hand, you would like to get some more of this pork 
out of the bill, if you would like to get more mandatory minimum 
sentencing back in the bill, if you would like to eliminate the 
provision that will repeal mandatory minimum sentencing for many people 
who are selling drugs including selling drugs to children, then you are 
going to want to sustain this budget point of order and open the bill 
for amendment so that we will have an opportunity to offer these 
amendments.
  Let me say, in conclusion, that while I am eager to get a chance to 
improve this bill, I do not claim for a moment that there are not good 
things in this bill. I congratulate our two leaders in the Senate for 
preserving some of the good things we adopted in the Senate. I 
congratulate the people in the House who worked to make it better.
  My point is simply this. We have a chance to dramatically improve 
this bill. I believe every amendment I have talked about is going to be 
adopted by an overwhelming vote in the Senate. The bill will then go 
back to the House with this amendment in disagreement. I am confident 
that when they have to vote up or down on it, they will adopt it; we 
will get a crime bill; the President will be able to celebrate; he will 
be able to sign the bill and say ``Look what I have done,'' and it will 
be a good bill that will deal with the crime problem in America.
  Why pass a poor bill when we can dramatically improve that bill? So 
tomorrow, I assume it will be, when we offer this budget point of 
order, I hope people will vote to sustain it and open the bill for 
amendment. I, along with others, will offer the amendment that I have 
outlined. It is a good amendment. I hope people will vote for it. I 
think then we will have a dramatically improved crime bill. I know 
there will be others who might want to offer an additional amendment. 
The focus of my attention on the amendments that I have outlined here. 
I believe we can make this bill better. The House, with the limited 
ability they had, with the rules that they have, was able to improve 
this bill.
  Surely, in the Senate, with the rules that we have, with the makeup 
of the Senate as it is, I think we can do a better job, not erasing 
what they did but building on it to pass a better bill that will put 
more criminals in jail, that will guarantee we build more prisons, that 
will spend the money on police officers and prisons instead of social 
work.
  I thank the Chair.
  Mr. BIDEN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
  Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Senator from Texas for his comments. Let me 
ask a very serious question. The amendment that the Senator is talking 
about packaging which has the three or four parts he has outlined, some 
of which I agree with, is he suggesting that if we chose that route, 
there would be a unanimous consent agreement that would be the only 
amendment that would be introduced in the entire floor?
  Mr. GRAMM. Let me say that I would certainly be willing to sit down 
and talk to people about how we would deal with it. My objective is to 
focus on those issues I have outlined.
  I think the Senator would be willing to say that those are the things 
I have consistently fought for on this bill. There are provisions in 
the bill I do not like. I do not think gun control works. It takes away 
rights of law-abiding citizens. I think the Senate has spoken on that 
issue. There may very well be an amendment on that issue from some 
source.
  My focus here is the amendment that I have outlined, and certainly if 
the Senator wanted to sit down and talk about how we would deal with 
that amendment and possibly his involvement in it, I would be willing 
to talk with him. Obviously, I cannot control the actions of every 
Member of the Senate. But my intention is not to do each of these 
individually. I assume that we could get the whole package adopted. And 
it is something that I think we could do relatively quickly.
  But obviously, it is all contingent on sustaining the point of order. 
If we do not sustain the point of order, we will not have an 
opportunity to offer anything. These are the amendments that I would 
like to offer.
  Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Senator for his answer.
  Madam President, let me explain the dilemma we find ourselves in, if 
we go the route the Senator suggested. As he pointed out when he first 
stood up, he was very gracious in complimenting the Senator from Utah 
and me about having worked with us for 6 years on this bill without 
having a bill. Just so I understand it, and I wish some of the staff of 
the majority were here because parliamentary maneuvering is not my 
forte, assuming I have any. But that is not mine. As I understand it, 
though, and I stand to be corrected if I am wrong, if the point of 
order were sustained this technical vote we are going to take, it 
wins--by sustain I mean it wins--then we are back on the only vehicle, 
thing, we have to amend, which is the House bill that was originally 
sent over to us.
  I ask the Chair if that is correct.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. A House amendment to the Senate amendment to 
the House bill would be before the body.
  Mr. BIDEN. My understanding then, that is fully amendable. We open up 
the entire process for anyone who has an amendment on anything. Under 
our rules, it can be anything from abortion to health care to crime. It 
is totally amendable.
  Is that correct, Madam President?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment would be amendable in two 
degrees.
  Mr. BIDEN. But any subject matter could be raised.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct.
  Mr. BIDEN. And any number of amendments could be raised; 1,000 could 
be raised.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct.
  Mr. BIDEN. It also is my understanding, and I am not sure of----
  Mr. HATCH. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. BIDEN. Not yet, I want to follow through.
  Mr. HATCH. It is on that point.
  Mr. BIDEN. The vehicle that we would be on--just so my friend from 
Texas knows at least what I know, and he knows more than I know on this 
I suspect--the vehicle, although he would not move to take guns out 
with his amendment, guns would already be out because the vehicle that 
we have, the House vehicle does not have the assault weapons ban in it, 
and it does have the Racial Justice Act in it.
  So now we are back to square one. We have fought for 6 years over 
guns. Although he would be satisfied with having this small package of 
amendments, one of which at least I agree with, the others I could live 
with, but I compromised with him on those before, I have no problem 
with it, he and I would be happy as the proverbial clam; no problem. 
But then Senator Feinstein and others, as would be their right, would 
say, ``Wait a minute, do you mean now assault weapons can continue to 
be made? And there would be someone standing with an amendment to 
strike assault weapons?'' That is good for at least a week's worth of 
debate all by itself.
  Then, if she prevailed on this side, someone, the distinguished, 
tall, handsome Senator from Utah here would say, ``Oh. Wait a minute. 
That bill before us has the Racial Justice Act in it.'' So he would 
move to amend it, to strike the Racial Justice Act. That has been good 
in the past for 3 days of debate. I mean that has been the record.
  Then you would have all the other amendments that are in order, which 
means anything is in order. But the one thing we could be guaranteed of 
is that the whole assault weapons battle starts over again.
  I know my friend from Texas was not being disingenuous. But, if we 
reject the point of order, guns are dead. They have to be affirmatively 
put back in the bill. That is a mile of difference because right now 
they are in the bill. They are banned. But if the point of order is 
sustained, and it falls, then the bill which comes popping up its ugly 
or handsome head is a bill that has no gun ban in it.
  So once again, even though it may not be the intention of the Senator 
from Texas, this is about guns, guns, bang, bang, shoot-him-dead guns. 
And we know for 6 years we have debated. We had no crime bill because 
of guns, guns.
  Mr. HATCH. Will the Senator yield on that point?
  Mr. BIDEN. I will yield for a question.
  Mr. HATCH. Let me say this: Is it not true--it is a lengthy question. 
Is it not true that we passed the Senate bill with the gun provisions 
on it 94 to 4? And I think what the distinguished Senator from Texas is 
saying, if a point of order is sustained, and we are going to get 
together as we did over this past weekend, and we will have a 
substitute amendment that at least the vast majority of people here 
will agree to. And we know that they are not going to agree to an 
amendment without the gun problem resolved. We believe that everybody 
knows we are near the end of the process. And what we want to do is 
improve this bill. I think people here of good will can do that.
  The only way we can do that is by sustaining the point of order. When 
we do that, I think we can sit down, just like the House did this last 
weekend and get it resolved, hopefully, and have a bill that will pass 
the Senate at least 94 to 4-- if not that, 85 to 15 or whatever it is.
  The fact is, I think you would have something to be a far more 
consensual bill than the one you are trying to present.
  Mr. BIDEN. To answer the question, Madam President, that would be 
possible, if the amendment that the Senator was going to introduce--if 
this was a single package, and he put the gun ban in it. Does he commit 
to me that he will put the gun ban in it?
  Mr. HATCH. I cannot do that. But I believe that is what will happen. 
And I believe we can bring people together to do it. We did it once 
before. The reason we are here is because the Senate crime bill was a 
good bill. It had the gun provision in it, and 94 Senators voted for 
it. I believe that we can do a similar thing and adopt much of what the 
House has done yesterday, while adding some more intelligent anticrime 
changes that really were overwhelmingly voted up in the Senate to begin 
with. I believe that if we do that the House is going to take it.
  Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I thank the Senator for his second 
question. But let me point out a little bit of history.
  From the historical standpoint, we passed the Biden crime bill 4 
years ago. It had guns in it. No one voted for it when it was here, and 
the expectation was that when it got to the House it would not have 
guns. But guess what? They did. And the conference report got here. We 
had guns.
  Guess what? The same people who voted for essentially the same bill 
the second time decided they will not vote for the bill because now it 
was real. Now it meant it would become law.
  I want everybody to look through this smokescreen here. If my friends 
are sincere about wanting this, just to make those few little changes 
they want to improve it, then I stand ready to listen to them. I stand 
ready for them to give me a unanimous-consent agreement that they will, 
in fact, only have that amendment that the Senator from Texas talked 
about, and they will include guns in the bill because it is in the bill 
now, and that there will be promise of no filibuster on the gun issue. 
Then we can start to talk.
  But guess what? If they do not agree to only those few amendments, it 
took 6 years now we have been doing this, and they will not agree to 
put guns back in, or they will not agree that if guns are not put back 
in, there will be no filibuster, then it would make one thing--at least 
raise the question of whether or not this was a very clever device in 
the name of just making sure that schoolchildren cannot be sold dope by 
somebody who might get out of jail early--a very clever device to do 
away with the single most contentious issue in the 22 years I have been 
here that relates to the criminal justice system, and that is guns, 
guns, guns.

  That is what this is about.
  Mr. HATCH. Will the Senator yield one more time?
  Mr. BIDEN. I will yield for a question, without losing my right to 
the floor.
  Mr. HATCH. Madam President, the Senator has indicated that he would 
begin to talk if that could be brought about. Everybody over here knows 
that either this conference report is going to pass--and a lot of 
people over here are unhappy with it, as are some on the other side--or 
if we sustain the point of order, we have to sit down and resolve it. I 
commit to try and resolve it with the distinguished Senator from 
Delaware, and I have been able to deliver in the past. I do not know 
that I can deliver, but I believe that we can, because I believe people 
want a crime bill. I believe they would like it to be the best possible 
crime bill, and I will do everything in my power to get it there 
without undue delay.
  If there had to be a cloture vote in order to satisfy those who are 
very concerned about guns, once and for all, I personally believe I can 
work it so that we can have that within a very short period of time.
  Mr. BIDEN. But we would have another vote on guns, right?
  Mr. HATCH. I do not know. We would have to see where the good will 
is. My question is, if we can do that, then it seems to me--I am asking 
the Senator, Why do we not try to sit down and see if we can resolve 
it?
  Mr. BIDEN. My answer is if cows had wings, they could fly.
  Speaking of guns, the distinguished Senator from Idaho has come on 
the floor--and he is distinguished, and he is from Idaho--and he is a 
man who feels ardently about the second amendment rights of Americans, 
who believes fundamentally that a ban on assault weapons violates the 
second amendment. He is a member of the board of the NRA, if I am not 
mistaken, and it is not a bad thing to be; it is a good thing.
  I will ask him the question, if he is willing to answer: Would he 
ever agree to a new bill that had guns banned in it under any 
circumstance? Will he agree to a second shot here? If we took up a bill 
other than this one, would he agree to add the exact language we have 
now? Would he agree to add that to a new bill?
  He need not answer if he does not want to, but my guess is that, the 
honorable man that he is, he could not do that. He could not make that 
agreement. He would be required to fight it. I respect that. I truly 
do. In his case, I really respect it. This is a man who does not like 
anything having to do with limiting anything, probably from bazookas to 
guns. I do not know.
  Mr. CRAIG. Madam President, if the Senator will yield, when it comes 
to constitutional debates, and when it comes to a ban on legitimate 
firearms, the Senator knows the total parameters of the second 
amendment debate. He came to the floor last week and spoke of his 
professorialship in that area.
  The Senator knows the bazooka argument is a phony one. But as it 
relates to whether I would allow any crime legislation to move across 
this floor that had a ban on legitimate firearms in it without a vote, 
I would not.
  Mr. BIDEN. I respect that, Madam President, and I understand that. It 
makes my point. It makes my point that we would be moving maybe not 
back to square one, but assuming that this trek of the crime bill for 6 
years was 10 giant steps, this proposal of turning it down through the 
vehicle of a parliamentary maneuver--wrong word; ``maneuver'' sounds 
pejorative--a parliamentary provision, sustained by the Chair on a 
technical issue where you do not vote for or against the crime bill, 
that gamble, if it were to succeed, means this crime bill has moved 
from square 9, where it is now, back to at least square 3. It has taken 
6 years to get it to square 9. That would move us at least back to 
square 3--or, I would argue, back to square 1.
  Let us assume further that my friend from Texas--and my mom always 
says, ``You argue with him so much, why do you keep calling him your 
friend?'' He is my friend. It is a tradition. And sometimes I think 
when people hear us, they say, ``What is with these guys and women? Do 
they not mean what they say?'' Seriously, the guy is my friend. I know 
what will happen.
  Let us assume he was correct and, in fact, we could end up with one 
jumbo amendment that allowed us, after defeating this crime bill that 
is now at square 9, and we pick up a new bill off the desk, or an old 
bill off the desk, in effect, and we start amending that; let us assume 
that there was one giant amendment to that and that I could go in the 
back room and agree with the Republican leadership on it and say, yes, 
I will accept it; and assume I could walk into the Democratic caucus 
with the Presiding Officer and 54 other Democrats and say, look, ladies 
and gentlemen, I have worked this out; accept it for me; and you all 
say, look, you have worked so hard, we will do what you want. Assume I 
come to the floor then, and I say we are all set, and there are no more 
votes and we voted up or down, and it is now a new package; what 
happens next? What happens next is that the bill walks down this aisle, 
all the way across to the House of Representatives, and it starts all 
over again. All over again.
  What happens then is the House of Representatives debates it. Does 
anybody think that the incredible debate over racial justice is not 
going to take place again on the floor of the House of Representatives? 
Does everybody think if these folks here got a chance to reopen it, the 
Black Caucus will say it is OK for those western guys, they got them to 
reopen it; but for us to reopen this bill, it would be viewed as being 
against crime. When they want to reopen the bill, it is not against 
crime. When the Black Caucus wants to do it and talk about racial 
justice, it is against crime prevention. What do you think is going to 
happen to the proguns people over there? Do you think they will say, 
OK, the Senate has done it; we know they are a superior body, and we 
are just going to take what they sent back to us on its face? We are 
just going to go ahead and do that?
  Then we are back in the mix again. The whole thing starts over again. 
It would be easier for me to walk from here to Alaska. I could get to 
Alaska on foot faster than I could get this crime bill passed if, in 
fact, we open it up again and start all over.
  I see my friend from Alaska here. We go back a long way. He is 
smiling, which means I am about to get in trouble. If he is looking for 
me to yield, I will be delighted to yield. But the point is that we are 
at a spot where this sounds reasonable to say: Look, Joe, just let us 
vote down this point of order and get to this new vehicle, and we will 
sit down and work something out and get a better bill. If guns are off 
the table, if racial justice is off the table, if all the big-ticket 
items we debated for 6 years and finally got this far--with, I might 
add, a majority in both Houses being for--keep in mind--I want 
everybody listening to this debate to understand--my Republican friends 
are not going to say let us vote and see whether Biden has 51 votes for 
this bill. That is not what they are going to say. The Senator from 
Texas was straightforward. He always is. This is not about the Budget 
Act, raise or lower the tax or caps. He says anyway this is about a 
simple thing: do we want an imperfect bill, from his perspective, to 
pass or take it back to try to improve it?
  To him it is a substantive vote. That is what it is. It is 
substantive. It is not like everybody does not understand what is going 
on. It is not like my Republican friends are saying, Biden, we are 
going to test you to see if you have 51 votes to pass it. They are 
totally within their right. They are going to say: No. Biden, we are 
going to see whether you have 60 votes.
  Name me another place in our life's experience where you have to have 
60 percent instead of 51 percent?
  That is what I am being asked--not asked. They are entitled to that. 
They are entitled to this vote. I am not suggesting this procedural 
vote they ask for is somehow wrong to ask for it and they are not 
within their rights or not within the rules. It is. But it is really a 
substantive vote.
  In order for me to pass the crime bill as it came out of conference, 
I have to convince 59 of you to vote on this rule, this budget point of 
order, the way I think you should vote, which is to vote to overrule 
the ruling of the Chair and say: ``Now we are not going to sustain this 
budget point of order. We are going to waive it. We are going to waive 
it. So long. It does not count.''
  We waive it all the time, by the way. It is standard operating 
procedure. We waive the technicalities of the Budget Act every single 
year, every month, and almost every day. We waive it. There is nothing 
unusual about that. But my friends are going to say it is only a little 
technical problem.
  Mr. STEVENS. Madam President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. BIDEN. I am delighted to yield to the Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. STEVENS. I witnessed the debate last week in the House and saw 
how it stretched out. Finally, the leaders of the House sat down in two 
sort of marathon sessions and put together a more bipartisan approach.
  Would the Senator from Delaware not agree with this, that when the 
bill was before us when we passed the $22 billion bill it was much 
different from the perspective of this side of the aisle than the bill 
that came back, this $30 billion bill? Would he not agree with that?
  Mr. BIDEN. I will not agree. I am not being argumentative. It is more 
money but the same major provisions in the same percentage of 
distribution of each prevention, law enforcement, and prisons is in 
there. More than everything, in that sense it is a difference, but it 
is not different in any substantive sense.
  Mr. STEVENS. I am spelling my friend from Utah, and I am pleased to 
have this chance to visit with my friend from Delaware. I intended to 
speak tomorrow to delineate some of the items that are not in this bill 
before us now that were in the bill when it passed the Senate before 
with $22 billion.
  Mr. BIDEN. In fairness to my friend from Alaska, there were a number 
of things that were in the bill as it left the Senate that are not in 
it now, and there are a number of things that were not in the bill that 
left the Senate that are in it now. He is correct in that regard. But 
if I can give----
  Mr. STEVENS. If my friend will yield further, I do not have my notes 
here.
  Mr. BIDEN. Yes.
  Mr. STEVENS. But if my friend would be willing to sit down with 
Senator Hatch and others on our side as they did in the House and go 
through the night and come back to us tomorrow with a Senate version of 
the reconference version I believe there are some of us who would not 
see the point of order in the same light.
  I think there has only been one side for a reconference. There was a 
conference. The House then went and reconferenced in those two long 
meetings and made a change that brought significant bipartisanship to 
that bill in the House.
  That has not been done over here from our perspective because some of 
the amendments that I as a matter of fact helped author are not in this 
bill now.
  Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I would be willing to do that if the 
Senator from Alaska would agree by unanimous consent that all we had to 
do was get 51 percent to agree on this.
  Mr. STEVENS. Madam President, I would say this is the problem with 
that. This is the Budget Act we are talking about. We are not talking 
about a Crime Act. We are talking about a Budget Act. The 60 votes is 
to waive the Budget Act.
  I have not voted to waive the Budget Act that I can recall. I believe 
that the Budget Act is a different mechanism. It is a mechanism we 
established to set discipline with regard to the deficit.
  The Senator from Delaware makes it sound like we are refusing to 
accept the 51-vote normal procedure for the crime bill. That is not so. 
The point of order is on the Budget Act, and if the Budget Act point of 
order is raised, it takes 60 votes. That is my understanding of the 
situation. But it is not something that is a new procedure we are 
inventing.
  Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, that is not what my point was. The 
Senator is right on the Budget Act.
  But the Senator stood up and said that if I would be willing to sit 
down with Senator Hatch and himself, and other interested parties who 
know a lot about this, and the Senator does, then they would be willing 
to look at the Budget Act in a different light. And then he by way of 
analogy said ``just like the House did.''
  The House had nothing to do with the Budget Act. The House 
Republicans and House Democrats--and I was there for every one of the 
meetings--sat down and in a sense renegotiated the conference report. 
The reason that that was able to be done is that where the House 
Democrats and House Republicans disagree they ended up going to the 
floor and voting, and they only had to get a simple majority. What I am 
speaking to is not the Budget Act. I am speaking to----
  Mr. STEVENS. Will my good friend yield there?
  Mr. BIDEN. Surely.
  Mr. STEVENS. My friend is missing the fact we do not have a rules 
committee that can raise a point of order. That happened in the House. 
They did not have a chance to raise the point of order in the House. We 
have not waived the point of order. We did not raise the point of order 
when it was a bill that was a different bill at $22 billion. I think 
that ought to be noted.
  Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, again I was responding to this notion 
that somehow the House got together and they were able to work out 
their differences, Democrats and Republicans. Why cannot we do that?
  We did. I wonder if the Senator from Alaska knows that Senator Hatch 
was present with his Republican friends in the House speaking for the 
Republicans in the Senate just like the Senator from Delaware was 
present with the Democratic House Members speaking for the Democratic 
Senators.
  So this idea that they renegotiated House Member to House Member 
without any impact on us is, in fact, not accurate. There was a 
renegotiation, Democrats and Republicans, me speaking for the 
Democrats, Senator Hatch speaking for the Republicans, over with the 
Members of the House of Representatives.
  I hope what is coming clear is the difference between the House and 
Senate. The Senate can hold us up with 60 votes. They cannot do that in 
the House. There is nothing that requires 60 percent over there. It is 
50.1 percent. That is all you need to win over there.
  So, if they want to negotiate with me like the House did, I would be 
willing to consider that if, in fact, it was by the same rules, the 
same circumstances, where if we disagree we come back on the floor and 
vote, and if I get 51 votes for my position my position wins; if they 
get 51 votes for their position, their position wins.
  But that is what happens here. I am at the end of the road every time 
for the last 6 years in order to get a crime bill every time, Madam 
President, and it is within the rules I acknowledge. Every time I have 
passed--I say ``I,'' I mean I happen to be the author of the crime 
bill, OK, and I have had the responsibility because I am chairman of 
the Judiciary Committee since Senator Kennedy was gracious enough to 
leave that post and give it to me. I bless him every night on my knees 
for he having done that.
  But, Madam President, every single time--I see the Senator on the 
floor--every time I have gotten this desk where the manager of the bill 
stands in order to get a crime bill I needed 60 votes, every time, 
every time, not 51--60, because there is a filibuster or there is a 
point of order, or Chicken Little, the sky is falling, or anything--60 
votes.
  Now that is their right. And my gun friends know that. They refer to 
the Senators like Feinstein and Metzenbaum and others who are for an 
assault weapon ban as the antigunners. I call them the gunners. The 
gunners know the rules, just like the antigunners know the rules. But 
the antigunners win 51 votes all the time--not all the time--they have 
won 51 votes on Brady, and on this. And the gunners, within their 
rights, say, no, no; you have to get 60.
  That is where we are now. That is what this is all about.
  So, I see my friend from Massachusetts on the floor, and I assume he 
is seeking recognition.
  Let me conclude by saying all this talk about, ``We get out of 
here,'' ``and you know my friend from Delaware is a reasonable fellow, 
and we work hard together and he agrees with me on these things,'' and 
I do, I happen not to have entered the safety valve Gramm is talking 
about. I thought it was a mistake to even bring it up. I was prepared 
to support minimum mandatory--not ``prepared''--I did support some of 
the minimum mandatory the Senator from Texas has. I do not have any 
problem with it--but then we get down to guns.

  So we stand here and we talk, well, you know, the Senator from 
Delaware and I can just work this thing out, no problem. That is true, 
but when I asked him, do you promise not to make us go back and change 
everything in here, everything that has taken 6 years to get to in 
here, what my friend from Texas named--this whole bill, as I said 
before, is single space, small print, and goes about 400 pages; 
actually more than that. It goes 412, but really only probable, actual 
legislation, with explanatory, it is like 380 pages or something.
  Everything the Senator from Texas talked about could be done in three 
pages--maybe five.
  So, if they only want to fool around with three or five pages, good. 
I will sit down. We can do that, maybe; if I can get the House to agree 
they will do that. But that ``ain't'' what they are taking about, Madam 
President. What they are looking at is a lot more than just those three 
or four or five pages. That is what they are looking at. And I think 
what they are really looking at, if my staff can find the page for me 
here, the page that deals with assault weapons, I think they are 
looking at saying, if we were able to just--I will make you a bet. I 
guess, you know, I will never know whether this will work.
  Page 208 of the ``Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994 
Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 3355.'' I will make you a bet and 
say if I sat here and I said, OK, here is what I will do. I will take 
this part from the bottom of the page, take page 209, 210, list all the 
guns that are legal, and up to page 223, and I will rip those out. I 
will bet you I could pass this bill in 12 seconds.
  Take those pages out. That is what this is all about. They do not 
want to add three pages. They want to rip these pages out, page 208 to 
page 223.
  Now if they promise me this is not what they want me to fight again 
for the sixth year in a row and win again on this, let me keep that in, 
I am willing to talk about anything. I am just a talking fool. I will 
be happy to listen to anything they want to say. If they promise me by 
unanimous consent no one will touch any of those pages, I will talk.
  Then I have to go to the House and make sure the House promises they 
will not touch these pages that have been fought over through late into 
Sunday evening. If those things are out, we can work a lot of things 
out.
  But I respectfully suggest to you that if I asked that, if I stood 
and asked a unanimous-consent request that such a procedure took place, 
there would be at least three or four people over there, at a minimum, 
who would object.
  I see my friend from Massachusetts is here. I am delighted to yield 
the floor so he may have an opportunity to address the Senate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, first of all, I want to express my 
respect for the leadership of the Senator from Delaware on this issue, 
and I am sure I speak for the overwhelming majority of the Members of 
the body on that point. He is a leader on this and so many other issues 
that relate to the security of our fellow citizens.
  I want to commend him for his conscientiousness over the period of 
recent days in pursuing the provisions of the Senate bill dealing with 
the community policing and with the assault weapons ban. These items 
are really at the heart of the bill. Also, he has paid special 
attention to the prevention programs of this bill. The chairman of the 
committee has reviewed the final outcome of the conference. As he said, 
there is about a $1.5 billion difference between the amount of 
prevention funding that passed here and the amount in the conference 
report that passed the House with bipartisan support yesterday.
  So with any kind of fair consideration, one would have to say that 
the chairman of the committee and the other members of the conference 
committee have been true to the feelings and the views of the Members 
of this body on the important provisions in the Senate-passed crime 
bill.
  Some of the prevention programs in the Senate-passed bill and 
included in the conference report were offered by Republicans, 
including my friend from Alaska, Senator Stevens, who was talking about 
the prevention programs.
  Any Member of this body can talk with law enforcement officers out on 
the streets of this country right at this moment and they will tell you 
we need prevention. Any Member can talk to the police officials in our 
major cities, as I have recently in Boston. Every one of them will tell 
you that there are young people who violate the law with impunity and 
they ought to be dealt with in a way that is going to preserve the 
security of the community and in a way which will remove those 
individuals from the community. But they will also tell you that there 
are many young people whose lives can be altered by giving them an 
opportunity to say ``yes'' to something in place of a lifestyle which 
is destructive to them and to the security of others.
  This legislation, for the first time in recent years, really for the 
first time recognizes the importance of the role of crime prevention. I 
think the bill brings an appropriate focus on preventing crime before 
it occurs.
  So I want to commend Senator Biden. He has great responsibilities in 
other areas, especially as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee 
and as chairman of important subcommittees there. But in the area of 
the domestic security of our country, he has really made an 
extraordinary mark on our national policy. All of us are grateful for 
his perseverance and his leadership.
  As he reminded us a little earlier today, it is an extraordinary set 
of circumstances that we find ourselves in. The budget point of order 
that some have threatened to raise could have brought up at an earlier 
time when the Senate was considering the crime bill initially. But 
those Members, many of whom oppose the assault weapons ban did not 
choose to do so.
  We do not need to draw conclusions about the motivations of our 
friends and colleagues, but we do understand and do appreciate the fact 
that if this legislation fails on the point of order, then the assault 
weapons ban falls, the community policing effort falls, as do many 
other worthwhile provisions of this bill. And if the point of order 
succeeds, we start out de novo at this late date when we have yet to 
complete not only this important piece of legislation but also other 
matters of importance, such as the health care debate which has been 
temporarily set aside.
  Madam President, I urge the Senate to approve the crime bill 
conference report. This legislation is both tough on crime and smart 
about fighting crime, and it deserves wide bipartisan support.
  A fundamental responsibility of government is to ensure the security 
of its citizens. But over the last two decades, the rate of violent 
crime in the United States has almost doubled. Although the battle 
against crime is primarily a State and local responsibility, the 
pending measure is a comprehensive and appropriate Federal response to 
assist governments at all levels in meeting this challenge.
  This conference report contains major steps to improve public safety. 
There is a long overdue ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. There is 
Federal support for 100,000 community police officers. There is a 
balanced approach between serious punishment for violent offenders and 
proven measures that are effective in preventing crime before it 
occurs. There are provisions to deal more effectively with violence 
against women. And there are many other provisions to improve all 
aspects of our law enforcement and criminal justice system.
  The assault weapons ban will guarantee that these battlefield weapons 
and large capacity ammunition clips will no longer be sold to terrorize 
our communities. The National Rifle Association would have us believe 
that the debate is about hunting or target practice, but the fact is 
that these weapons of war are designed to kill as many human beings as 
quickly as possible.
  The TEC-9 and the M-11 have become the weapons of choice for drug 
dealers and gang members. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco 
and Firearms, assault weapons are at least eight times more likely to 
be traced to crime than conventional firearms. And because there are so 
few restrictions on access to firearms, any deranged individual can get 
his hands on a weapon capable of killing dozens of bystanders with a 
few sprays of gunfire.
  In the past 2 weeks, some had urged that this effort to ban assault 
weapons be abandoned. Without the formidable opposition of the NRA, we 
could have passed a crime bill a long time ago. But President Clinton 
refused to back down from this fight, and I commend him for his 
persistence. Passing a crime bill with the strong assault weapons ban 
will be a major victory, and well worth the wait.
  This bill also includes $8.8 billion for community police officers 
and $13 billion for law enforcement overall. These funds are a sound 
investment in public safety. Community policing is a valuable anticrime 
strategy in communities across the country. It means more than just 
more police. It means police who have a stake in the neighborhoods they 
patrol, who have the training to recognize the conditions that breed 
crime, and deal with those conditions immediately, in order to prevent 
crime from happening in the first place.
  In February of this year I brought Attorney General Reno to see 
community policing efforts at work in Dorchester, a neighborhood in 
Boston.
  The police maintain a substation at a community center. Young people 
come off the street and they go into this center to play basketball, in 
many instances with the police officers who work in the communities. 
They have daycare there so the younger children can be supervised prior 
to the time that a parent might be able to come home.
  It is a screening center for vaccination and immunization programs 
and some other health needs for members of that community. There are 
translation services, because it is a diverse community, with members 
of the community volunteering, working with new immigrants and helping 
them become a part of the community. That has had an impact on reducing 
crime, by strengthening the social structure.
  It ties into Boston City Hospital, working with the professionals 
there on violence against women and violence against children related 
to substance abuse. It is also tied back into this community policing. 
Community policing also helps small entrepreneurs. It provides 
protection for merchants and helps reduce the amount of pilfering and 
diversion of products. That is basically a spinoff of a very active 
successful community policing program.
  Its impact in reducing crimes of violence and other crimes in that 
area has been noted. It is important and very much appreciated by 
members of the community. Capt. Bob Dunford of the Boston Police 
Department deserves great credit along with Commissioner Paul Evans and 
his entire police force.
  Captain Dunford described the ways in which police officers and 
community groups work together to improve neighborhood conditions. The 
Attorney General heard how the police work in the local community 
center to provide role models for neighborhood children. Community 
policing is thriving in Dorchester and elsewhere, and this bill will 
encourage it.
  One of the important features of the community policing initiative is 
the creation of the Police Corps. Under this program, which is built on 
the national and community service model, participants drawn from the 
community will receive scholarships for college in exchange for 4 years 
of service in a local police department. By emphasizing recruitment 
from the community, the Police Corps can break down barriers between 
police forces and the people they serve, and increase respect for the 
police in the community.
  The original Senate crime bill contained a far larger authorization 
for the Police Corps Program than was included in this conference 
report, and I hope we can remedy that flaw in the near future.
  We have seen where the Teacher Corps Program has worked; we have 
trained teachers and they have stayed in the community, and they have 
made a difference in the development of education excellence within 
various communities. We have the National Service Corps, which is 
bringing services to underserved areas that are not only in rural 
communities but also urban areas. That has been very, very successful.
  Actually it has been expanded in the Mitchell health care bill. We 
had a very strong program that was pretty well emasculated during the 
1980's, and now under President Clinton it is being expanded. But the 
concept of service, taking individuals from communities, providing them 
with education, and having those individuals serve the local community, 
is something that had support in the House and the Senate and is 
included in the conference.
  More police and more effective punishment are part of the answer to 
crime. But we need to do more than just react to crime after it occurs. 
Drug treatment, job training and antigang programs can help to end the 
cycle of crime and violence that is destroying our cities.
  The evidence is clear. Drug treatment works, especially for addicts 
in the criminal justice system. Two-thirds of drug addicts who complete 
a treatment program in prison remain drug-free and arrest-free for at 
lest 3 years.
  We have not, until very recent times, been able to get the kind of 
assistance that is included in this bill, to provide help for 
individuals who are substance abusers and incarcerated.
  But for addicts who get out of prison without undergoing treatment, 
two out of every three will commit new crimes and be back in prison 
within 3 years. This crime bill contains $1 billion for special drug 
courts to treat these low-level, nonviolent drug addicts.
  We can understand the broad politics of this issue. People say, ``Why 
look out after people who are in jail who are substance abusers when we 
do not have all the treatment slots we need outside of prison?'' That 
has been an argument which has been difficult to respond to, other than 
to try to increase treatment resources for community-based programs. 
The health bill contains a very, very important provision to provide a 
comprehensive substance abuse benefit. So we are beginning to deal with 
substance abuse in a comprehensive way, both as a health issue as well 
as an issue in the criminal justice system.
  The bill also includes a provision I strongly supported to provide 
funds for economic development to reduce crime in communities with high 
unemployment and poverty rates. This provision will promote economic 
growth and opportunity in high-crime neighborhoods by assisting small 
and mid-sized businesses, and by providing job opportunities for young 
people who might otherwise resort to crime. This is the only program in 
the bill that directly creates job and business opportunities in poor 
communities. One of the best anticrime strategies is a job and this 
bill supports it.
  I am also pleased that the bill includes a comprehensive set of 
programs aimed at reducing violence against women and providing much-
needed assistance to victims of such crimes. Chairman Biden deserves 
tremendous credit for his efforts on the Violence Against Women Act, 
and I am proud to have had the opportunity to join him in crafting this 
legislation.
  Among the services for victims that this measure funds is a national 
toll-free domestic violence hotline, a provision we including in 
response to concerns expressed by battered women's service groups is 
Massachusetts and around the country, to revive a hotline that closed 2 
years ago for lack of funds.
  The bill also contains a provision that Senator Hatch and I sponsored 
to protect the confidentiality of counseling programs for rape victims.
  I see Senator Hatch on the floor, and that is one of the very 
important provisions in this legislation.
  With regard to the hotline program, which was initially supported by 
the Johnson Foundation, more than 65,000 calls came in over the last 
year it was in effect. This bill provides limited but important 
resources to continue the program. The idea is that when an individual 
calls the hotline, they will be tied right into their local community 
and into the assets that will be available to that individual who needs 
the services.
  So if you are in Methuen, MA, or in New Bedford, and you have a 
problem, you dial this one number and it ties you right back into the 
programs which are available in that community, or as close as 
possible. The technology is available. This legislation will give the 
hotline life again, and it is just one small but extremely important 
program in the Violence Against Women Act.
  That act also provides help to prosecutors and to courts in dealing 
with domestic violence cases, and it will support battered-women 
shelters in our communities. The act is funded at about $1.6 billion 
over this 6-year program. It is a matter of enormous importance, and it 
certainly is one of the very important parts of the bill.
  Another Massachusetts model that this legislation builds upon is the 
community prosecution program developed by the Middlesex County 
District Attorney Tom Reilly. This initiative encourages crime 
prevention partnerships among police, prosecutors, and community 
groups. Such a coordinated approach has proved to be useful in fighting 
crime in my State, and can benefit other communities through this grant 
program.
  Basically, this program gets the district attorney's office working 
with a range of social service providers, working with schools in the 
community, working with parent groups to try to begin to identify those 
individuals who have a continuing record of violence and disruption and 
to give greatest attention to those individuals.

  This program has had an extremely important impact. The people who 
are the strongest supporters of it are the school teachers, school 
administrators, and the parents themselves. The program has improved 
the whole atmosphere of learning in school systems, freeing the 
students from threats of violence in those schools. The coordination 
and seed resources that the program provides have had an important 
impact within the community.
  In addition the bill contains a sensible three-strikes-and-you're-out 
provision to ensure violent repeat offenders remain in prison where 
they belong. Lengthy incarceration is essential for violence career 
criminals. There is also strong support in the bill to help States deal 
with the challenges of high prison costs and overcrowded prisons. In 
these important ways, the bill helps to make sure violent criminals 
actually serve the lengthy sentences that they deserve.
  I have long opposed capital punishment as a matter of deeply held 
principle, and I regret this bill expands the Federal death penalty. 
There is little credible evidence that the death penalty actually 
deters crime. In fact, States with the death penalty generally suffer 
from higher rates of murder and other violent crimes than States 
without special punishment. I also regret the bill does not include the 
Racial Justice Act, which is needed to deal with serious problems of 
racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty.
  But this bill contains so many provisions that deserve to be enacted: 
The assault weapons ban, the support for community policing, the 
Violence Against Women Act, the crime prevention programs, and many 
other provisions that are vitally needed.
  This far-reaching legislation makes the Federal Government a real 
partner with State and local governments in the fight against crime. It 
commits Federal recourses to a balanced strategy of punishment and 
prevention that holds great promise for improving public safety.
  I urge the Senate to approve the strong bill and send it to the 
President for his signature.
  Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HATCH. Madam President, the debate has been an interesting one 
today, but it is pretty apparent we had a very good bill that went out 
of the Senate. It was $22 billion. The House came up with its bill, 
which was a very bad bill. It was $27 billion. Then the liberal 
conferees came up with a $33 billion bill. Suddenly, it jumped $11 
billion from a really good bill that we passed here.
  The bill has been somewhat improved by this last conference, by what 
the House did. It has not been improved enough.
  Frankly, what we would like to do is improve it some more, but the 
only way we can do that is to sustain a point of order that it violates 
the Budget Act and then work out the final anticrime materials that 
have to go into it. That is what we are trying to do here, and that is 
what we are going to do if we can. We think America would be much 
better off if we do.
  I do not think the distinguished Senator from Delaware has to worry 
about losing very much. The only thing we will lose is maybe a little 
bit of time. But we can get this bill so it is much better and would 
have overwhelming support in both Houses of Congress. That is all I am 
dedicated to doing and, frankly, I would like to see us have that 
opportunity.
  There is still a lot of pork in this bill. When we passed our $22 
billion bill, it was $2.3 billion in prevention programs, part of which 
was, of course, the violence against women bill on which Senator Biden 
and I have worked so hard. All of a sudden, it jumped to almost $9 
billion, and now it is down to $5.3 billion, but $3 billion more than 
the Senate bill which some thought had too much pork in it as it was. 
It is time to change that.
  Madam President, let us see what we can do in the next day or so, and 
if we can, it will be for the betterment of our country.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bryan). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, during the course of the last 10 days, the 
crime bill has been debated from one corner of this country to another, 
and I believe debated in a constructive fashion.
  A proposal originally presented to the House of Representatives and 
meant to be presented to the Senate on a take-it-or-leave-it basis has 
now, in fact, been changed in a number of material ways. It is 
unfortunate that that crime bill, originally reported from a conference 
committee, was written largely in secret by a small handful of Members 
without input either from the law enforcement community or from the 
vast majority of other Members of both Houses of this Congress that 
wished to do something constructive in the war against violent crime in 
the United States.
  As a consequence, after its initial setback something more than a 
week ago, more and more Members read sections of the bill which they 
did not understand and other sections with which they vehemently 
disagreed, and the net result was a series of changes which took place 
late last Saturday evening and Sunday morning in a reconstituted 
conference committee devoted, unfortunately, more to attempting to make 
a few changes which would change a handful of votes than it was to 
examining the entire thrust and direction of that crime bill itself.
  Certainly, what we have before us now is improved in at least two 
directions. It is improved from the point of view of the safety of the 
people whom we represent, primarily by the restoration of Senate 
language on sexual predators, language passed unanimously in this body 
last November and language which the House instructed its conferees to 
include by a vote of 407 to 13 just a few weeks ago.
  It was puzzling, at the very least, to face a conference committee 
report which ignored both votes in the Senate and the House--not only 
ignored both votes but which included a distinct right of privacy for 
convicted sexual predators, a right of privacy which, in my view, might 
very well have overridden the laws of a number of States like my own 
which call for the notification of communities when a convicted sexual 
predator is released into their midst. In any event, whatever the 
proper interpretation of that first conference committee report, we now 
have language substantially similar to that which passed the Senate in 
this bill.
  The second area, the second field in which this bill has been 
improved, of course, is in a modest reduction of programs at the most 
remotely are tangentially connected with crime or, for that matter, the 
prevention of crime.
  It seemed that in the course of that bill through Congress, from the 
recommendations of the President, through the House, through the 
Senate, with the conference committee, nothing was ever subtracted, but 
a great deal was added, much of it in the form of individual bills 
introduced by individual Members of the Senate or House; some of which 
have never been the subject of hearings, others which obviously could 
not pass upon their own merits but were gathered together under the 
rubric of crime prevention and included in this bill.
  One of them was removed lock, stock, and barrel--the youth employment 
skills program for $650 million, which would have been, if my numbers 
are correct, the 157th such uncoordinated program managed by half a 
dozen to a dozen different Federal agencies. Several of the others were 
reduced modestly--by, roughly, a 10-percent cut--but remain in this 
bill.
  A few other modest changes have been made in the bill, Mr. President, 
but I am convinced that this bill still requires substantial 
improvement so that it can stand as a true step forward in the war 
against violent crime in the United States.
  We here in the Senate who have been simply spectators of the debate 
in the House of Representatives will shortly have the opportunity to do 
just that, that is to say, to improve this bill to the point at which 
it can receive the votes of a wide bipartisan majority of Members of 
the Senate and, I trust, when it returns to the House, of the Members 
of the House of Representatives as well.
  I wish to speak tonight just to a modest handful of the areas in 
which I think those improvements should take place.
  The first, Mr. President, is connected in a rather interesting way, 
in my own mind at least, with my former position as attorney general of 
the State of Washington where, as was the case with the distinguished 
occupant of the Chair this evening, I was involved in consumer 
protection.
  Mr. President, I am afraid that were it subject to my jurisdiction, I 
would have to sue the proponents of the proposal to put 100,000 new 
cops on the beat for false advertising, in utilizing that number in 
connection with an argument for additional policing, which unites 
almost all of us in this body.
  I would have to do so, of course, because this bill does not provide 
money for 100,000 new uniformed officers on our streets. To the 
contrary, if all of the money in this bill were actually utilized for 
new officers, it would fund fewer, not many more than 20,000 such 
officers.
  Why? Well of course, because this is only a partial subsidy, in fact, 
a declining subsidy to the cities and counties of the United States of 
America. And it is assumed in the bill, but never trumpeted by its 
proponents, including the President of the United States, that the only 
way in which we can get 100,000 new officers is to have local 
communities come up with enough money to fund almost 80 percent of the 
cost of those officers over a 5- or 6-year period. It is in this 
respect that this bill falls greatly short of what it is advertised to 
do.
  I daresay that most communities in this country, if they could afford 
to finance 80,000 new police officers, would be doing so where they 
think appropriate, as they would in many parts of the country from one 
corner to the other. I know that I have been approached by myriad 
police chiefs, sheriffs, and for that matter those in the ranks, the 
police agencies in the State of Washington, with the definitive 
statement that there is no way their jurisdictions can pick up this 
massive local share of the expense of creating our proportion of the 
100,000 new police officers.
  These men and women state that their community budgets are pressed 
and stretched to the absolute maximum at the present time. They will 
resent being told that the Federal Government is funding men and women 
whom it is not actually funding, and whom they will not be actually 
able to take advantage of while, on the other hand, those who will be 
hired to administer the social programs in this bill, will presumably 
be paid for permanently and entirely by the Federal Treasury.
  Second, Mr. President, of some close to $9 billion in social programs 
with only a tenuous relationship to crime prevention in this bill, only 
some $2 billion or so have been cut by this dramatic debate in the 
House of Representatives. And that is not nearly enough.
  The Local Partnership Act, the model intensive grants, the Community 
Economic Partnership Program, all of which duplicate present programs 
in the Federal Government, sometimes duplicating them literally in the 
hundreds, are only reduced very, very slightly in this bill. The real 
irony in this connection is that there is a need for money spent on 
crime prevention. And we have a number of highly successful crime 
prevention programs which involve partnerships between the Government 
of the United States and our local government.
  In my own State, we have ``Operation Weed and Seed'' in the city of 
Seattle, one of approximately 20 such projects going on across the 
country, which combine police work with community activism, married 
together with those who are working on social conditions in their 
communities with those who are enforcing the law in a way which has 
been immensely constructive. If the crime bill conference wanted to do 
something with extra money, why not 200 ``Weed and Seed'' programs 
rather than 20? Why not take something which has worked and expand it 
rather than simply creating a whole set of new programs presumably 
named after their sponsors in areas, many of which have not been 
successful in the past?
  Why not expand a Safe Streets Program? Why not expand Triad? Why not 
expand DARE? Why not deal with those crime prevention programs with a 
proven track record rather than simply to add another juvenile program 
to the 266 we already have, another job training program to the other 
155 that we already have? In this case we should be consolidating. We 
should be determining which ones have been successful and which ones 
have not been successful, and concentrating on those that have.
  Third, and perhaps equally important, is the fact that so many of the 
tough anticrime measures designed to get violent criminals off the 
streets, that were included in the Senate bill, are not included in 
even this conference report. From my perspective, although it may the 
not be the largest of them, one which is utterly inexplicable has to do 
with making it easier to take an illegal alien who has committed a 
serious felony and running through that person's entire deportation 
proceedings while he is incarcerated so that the deportation takes 
place immediately upon the ending of a sentence.
  I was given an example while I was home over the weekend of an 
individual, illegal alien, who has been convicted and jailed on nine 
separate occasions. Yet, the deportation proceedings have never caught 
up with that individual, so that he is released onto the streets in 
order to commit other crimes, and still has not been deported from the 
United States. Making that process easier for criminal illegal aliens 
in the United States, and that provision being dropped by this 
conference committee, absolutely begs explanation.
  New sentencing provisions that are really tough have been removed. 
Some penalties for criminal actions with guns have been removed.
  We just cannot understand why it is that so many of the provisions 
which would have accomplished something with respect to the sanctioning 
of violent criminals in the United States are not a part of this bill. 
Even when it left the Senate, it had done nothing to reform the endless 
habeas corpus appeals through the Federal courts.
  Well, we could accept that. But when progressively we have lost more 
and more of the law enforcement, and progressively have more and more 
duplicative programs with respect to various social goals, we still 
have a bill, while not unsatisfactory of that originally reported by 
the conference committee, still needs a great deal of improvement.
  Much has been made about the gun provisions and the assault weapons 
provisions that are still in this bill. There is much speculation by 
Senators about whether or not the bill would have a better chance 
without those provisions in it. Mr. President, I voted against those 
assault weapon provisions when the bill was before the Senate. It 
seemed to me peculiar that we should aim a law at thousands, perhaps 
hundreds of thousands, of law-abiding citizens in the United States, 
with a particular kind of firearm which many of them feel to be their 
right to hold, in a fashion which almost certainly would have had no 
impact whatsoever on the use of guns of any kind, including those in 
violent crimes in the United States today.
  Nevertheless, the Senate voted for that provision.
  Many of my colleagues voted against that provision.
  I, nonetheless, voted in favor of the crime bill as it passed the 
Senate because, it seemed to me, on balance the good in the bill 
outweighed the negative elements of that proposal. So I would do this 
time around, if I felt that the good outweighed the negative or the bad 
in this proposal. And I am here to say I am convinced that we have 
exactly just such an opportunity. We can gain that opportunity by 
turning down the motion to waive the Budget Act and by amending the 
bill, most particularly in the field of stronger and tougher law 
enforcement directed at violent criminals in our society, and removing 
several billions of extra dollars, additional dollars, from the 
dubious, questionable, marginal, non-law-enforcement elements of the 
bill itself.

  The Senate, in other words, has the same opportunity this week that 
the House of Representatives availed itself of last week. The House of 
Representatives in its changes took significant steps in the right 
direction. The Senate should now follow suit, and if it does so, this 
Senator for one will be delighted to support a bill which is not as 
undesirable as it was 10 days ago, but which needs considerable 
improvement on balance before it becomes the law of the United States 
of America.
  Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois, Ms. Moseley-Braun, 
is recognized.

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