[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 137 (Tuesday, September 27, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 27, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]


                              {time}  1740
 
                    REPUBLICAN CONTRACT WITH AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, to my colleagues, today was a historic 
day. The Republican candidates for the House of Representatives for the 
104th Congress laid out a contract with the American people. I came to 
this body about 21 months ago with the hope and the expectation that we 
could significantly alter the way that the people's house worked. In 
many ways, I have been disappointed by what we have been able to 
accomplish or what more importantly we have not been able to accomplish 
in this Congress, in making the people's house nmore responsive to the 
American people, bringing forth and debating and voting on and 
enhancing many of the ideas that were an element of our campaigns 2 
years ago. What we did today is we outlined a contract with America 
that gives a vision for what the people's House can and should again 
become.
  I talked about many of these ideas over the last 18 months. Eighteen 
months ago I proposed a piece of legislation that would allow the 
American people to become more involved in the process of setting the 
agenda for this country, a process that said we are going to let you 
help set an agenda because we are going to allow on a national and 
Federal level the initiative and referendum process. That legislation 
never made it out of committee.

  Six months ago, we introduced a second piece of legislation that 
built off this first piece of legislation. We said if we cannot bring 
in its purest form initiative and referendum to this national body, let 
us experiment with the idea of letting the American people more 
directly set and influence the agenda here in Washington. We introduced 
the concept of an advisory referendum, an advisory referendum that said 
we are going to allow you, the American people, to instruct us on term 
limits, to instruct us on a balanced budget amendment, and to instruct 
us on a line item veto. Again, that legislation has stayed bottled up 
in committee. Now, however, we have outlined an opportunity for the 
American people to judge this Congress and have a referendum on this 
Congress and to help influence the agenda of this next Congress in 
January 1995. Highlights of how and what is included in this referendum 
include things like on the opening day, we would change the tenor and 
the character of this body:
  First, we would require all laws that apply to the rest of the 
country to also apply equally to Congress, an innovative idea that I 
think will bring radical change to decisionmaking in this body.
  Second, we will select a major independent auditing firm to conduct a 
comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud, or abuse.
  Third, we will cut the number of committees, and we will cut 
committee staff by one-third.
  Fourth, we will limit the terms of all committee chairs. Committee 
chairs will now have to rotate. They will not be able to stay in place 
for an extended period of time.
  Fifth, we will ban the casting for proxy votes in committees. When we 
debated and worked on the health care bill in the Committee on 
Education and Labor, over 50 percent of the votes cast were proxy 
votes.
  Sixth, we will require committee meetings to be open to the public. 
When this Congress had the debate on the largest tax increase in 
American history, the debate was held behind closed doors. In the next 
Congress, that would not happen.
  Seventh, we would require a three-fifth majority to pass a tax 
increase. We would no longer again see a tax increase passed by only a 
single vote.
  Eighth, we would guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal budget 
by implementing a zero-based line budgeting versus the budgeting we see 
today where when we talk about cutting future spending, we are talking 
about decreasing an increasing an increase so we will still be 
increasing. It is a convoluted way to run a budgeting process.
  These are the changes we will be talking about on opening day. We 
have also outlined a series of 10 bills that I will be talking about 
later this week that we will debate and consider within the first 100 
days, 10 bills that will significantly and radically change the way 
that this government does business, a government that is too big and 
that spends too much.

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