[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 138 (Wednesday, September 28, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 28, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                          LEGISLATIVE PROGRAM

  (Mr. GINGRICH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I ask for this time to allow my colleague, 
the gentleman from California, and the distinguished majority leader to 
discuss the prospect of taking up a debate on Haiti and the way in 
which we will proceed. If I might, I will yield first to the gentleman 
from California to express his concerns.
  Mr. COX. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank the majority 
leader for joining us on the floor for this colloquy.
  Mr. Speaker, as both the Republican whip and the Democratic majority 
leader know, I filed a privileged resolution even before the Haiti 
occupation for the purpose of forcing what ought to have been scheduled 
freely, an open debate on the floor of the Congress and decisionmaking 
by way of vote on the subject of whether an occupation is a good or bad 
idea, the wisdom of that policy; second, on the scope of the operation 
and the objectives; and, third, on the cost and what sources we might 
be willing to make available to pay for such an operation.
  I have rolled that resolution so that in the interim the United 
States has actually occupied Haiti. I have rolled it again because 
there have been good-faith efforts to see to it that we get such a 
debate, and I am willing to do so once again, because I know that the 
majority leader is working on this.
  Mr. GEPHARDT. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. GINGRICH. I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. GEPHARDT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  As the gentleman probably knows, the Committee on Foreign Affairs 
today did vote out a resolution that deals with a variety of questions 
with regard to Haiti, and I believe under that resolution which we will 
bring to the floor next week we can, in cooperation with Members on 
both sides of the aisle, structure a debate on all of the three 
questions the gentleman raised. We also would obviously intend to have 
alternatives available to the resolution from the Committee on Foreign 
Affairs, undoubtedly one for the minority, and there may be other 
Members on both sides of the aisle who would like an additional 
alternative, and there may be a vote allowed on that as well.
  My own feeling is that the questions that you raise and have been 
asking to raise through the offering of a privileged resolution can be 
structured into this debate, and it is appropriate that it happen in 
this debate, and we will try to structure a sufficiently long debate so 
that the Members of the House on both sides of the aisle can be heard.
  Mr. COX. I appreciate very much what the majority leader has 
described, and I have questions about it.
  If I may proceed, do you know what you have in mind by means of 
complete time for debate? How much time would be devoted to this? I 
allude to the Persian Gulf debate, for example, when we expended in 
excess of a day because of the urgency of this matter, because our 
troops could become involved in hostilities without notice as a 
defensive matter, because October 15 is nearly upon us. If the 
agreement is not upheld, we might be required to mount offensive 
operations. Time really is of the essence. This will be our only 
opportunity to have a full and free debate. How much time would the 
majority leader have in mind?
  Mr. GEPHARDT. If the gentleman will yield further, we will obviously 
consult with Members including yourself on both sides of the aisle 
about how the debate should be structured. I cannot make a commitment 
now as to the exact length of the debate, but I do believe, and I think 
the chairman of the committee and others believe, that this should be a 
sufficiently long debate so that people can get the ability to express 
themselves and to have a give and take so that the issues that are 
involved here can be well presented both to the Congress and to the 
American people.
  I agree with the gentleman that the debate on the Persian Gulf was a 
constructive moment, and I believe a high moment for this institution, 
and we want to use that kind of an effort to tease out all of the 
issues involved in the Haiti questions.
  Mr. COX. Is the majority leader proposing this debate take place on 
Monday?
  Mr. GEPHARDT. That decision has not been made. I would doubt that 
Monday would be the day for this. It probably would be Tuesday or 
Wednesday.
  Mr. COX. Tuesday or Wednesday. And would the procedure on the floor 
permit consideration of the major points that I have described, the 
wisdom or not of an occupation, first, the possibility of legislating 
objective criteria for that mission, if it were decided that occupation 
were a wise idea; second, and; third, the sources of funding for any 
such efforts?
  Mr. GEPHARDT. I believe the resolution that has come from the 
Committee on Foreign Affairs largely deals with those issues. But 
obviously if the minority is afforded an alternative, and I believe it 
will be, if it is your feeling or the feeling of a group on your side 
that these issues have not been sufficiently addressed in the 
resolution, they will have the opportunity to present an alternative.
  Mr. COX. My only concern is that because the division on all of these 
questions is not a partisan one, because most of the positions that are 
possible on every one of the items that I mentioned are represented on 
both the Democratic and the Republican sides, that if we structure 
debate on the floor around a single measure that would, for example, 
limit our participation in Haiti to 60 days or a Republican alternative 
that had a different number in it, we would be having a full debate on 
only a footnote of the entire issue that Congress really ought to 
engage in. This issue has been a significant one in American foreign 
policy for many months now.
  The United Nations voted to authorize, and the Congress did not. And 
while I would have preferred that the President actively seek our 
participation by way of debate and a vote, it is nonetheless incumbent 
upon this institution to take that up itself, not only under article I, 
section 8, and the war powers that we share with the President, but 
also our broader powers under article I to raise and support armies 
and appropriate funds and so on.

  I think all of those questions are properly debated here on the 
floor. I would hate to see us so constricted that we had a resolution 
with a time period on one side and a different time period on the other 
and that was it.

                              {time}  1630

  Mr. GEPHARDT. If the gentleman will yield, I would think we would 
want to have enough general debate time so that the debate on the 
larger questions could be well structured.
  Mr. COX. With that understanding, would it be fair to say that no 
later than Wednesday this would occur? We are running out of time, of 
course, in the whole Congress, so we are running up against the wall 
next week in any case.
  Mr. GEPHARDT. If the gentleman will yield, and I am not trying to 
indicate we are not going to do this issue, we are going to do this 
issue, I cannot commit to a specific time because we have an active 
schedule. We are trying to leave by October 7, and there is every 
intention here to do that. We will have this debate next week. It will 
be on probably Tuesday or Wednesday, it could be Thursday, I am not 
sure. I cannot make a commitment at this point because we have so many 
other matters we have to get done. We are not going to put that in a 
time period when Members cannot participate, we are not going to avoid 
it, it will happen.
  Mr. COX. I am advised that the length of the debate on the Persian 
Gulf was about 26 hours. I do not know that 26 hours is necessarily the 
right time for the debate on the Haitian occupation, but it would seem 
to me that somewhere in the neighborhood of a day of debate rather than 
just a few hours of debate would be appropriate.
  Mr. GINGRICH. If I might make an observation for a second, it does 
seem to me--and I hope the majority leader can agree with this--what we 
might do is indicate to Members on both sides of the aisle that the 
debate is upcoming and that if we have some expression of interest, say 
by Monday, that we would have a notion of whether, for example, we 
might want to start the debate--and I am not sticking to Wednesday--but 
if we are going to have the votes on Wednesday, we might well to start 
the debate on Tuesday at the end of the legislative session. Literally, 
if there are that many Members who want to engage in a serious debate, 
to allow it to begin in a fairly open manner leading up to a more 
structured environment on the day of the actual votes.
  I remember I stayed here, I had the assignment, until 5 o'clock in 
the morning or something, on the first when we literally ran out of 
time on the Desert Storm debate. I do not know if that, for my friend 
from California, would be a good starting point, but if we could say to 
all of our colleagues this debate is coming up, it is very serious, it 
is potentially a matter of life and death and certainly a matter of 
American foreign policy, if you think you are going to have an interest 
in substantial time on this, let us know so that we can on a bipartisan 
basis insure that every Member have the time by creating that kind of a 
scheduling opportunity.
  Would that be a starting point to what the gentleman is describing?
  Mr. COX. Yes. I would point out that the privileged resolution which 
I filed both before the occupation and subsequently has a very short 
resolution, and that is that the Speaker should immediately schedule a 
debate and vote upon the scope of an authorization for the United 
States military occupation of Haiti. If that commitment were made here 
on the floor, not necessarily to have the debate immediately, we might 
not be having it until Tuesday or Wednesday or even Thursday of next 
week, but to schedule it immediately so that would provide Members with 
the advance notice they would need. And it would set up a procedure so 
that we could all be confident in knowing that it is going to take 
place.
  Mr. GEPHARDT. If the gentleman will yield, we will be releasing a 
schedule for tomorrow for next week, and undoubtedly this will be 
scheduled on that schedule so that Members will have notice, and we 
will make a special effort to let Members have notice and we will make 
a special effort to let Members know this is coming. We may even try to 
figure out how many Members would like to talk so that we can schedule 
adequate time.
  Mr. COX. Finally, I would raise once again something that the leader 
and I discussed in private conversation on the floor, and that is the 
possibility that rule sufficiently open to encompass the things we have 
discussed might be structured so that the majority leader and the 
minority leader would control what amendments to whatever basic vehicle 
made it to the floor would be in order. I think certainly every Member 
of this Congress would trust the judgment of the majority leader and 
Bob Michel, tthe Republican leader, in matters of war and peace that 
would permit us the widest scope but also insure that nothing brought 
up with parochial interests or some other purpose would interfere with 
the discussion on this floor of the wisdom of our Haiti policy. Would 
that suggestion----
  Mr. GEPHARDT. I appreciate that suggestion. We would obviously 
consult with the minority in putting this procedure together.
  Mr. COX. Well, with the understanding that the debate will take place 
next week, whether it amounts to the 26 hours we had on the Persian 
Gulf or not, we would be talking about perhaps a full day of debate, 
with the understanding that the scope of that debate would not be 
constricted to a resolution calling for a pullout by a date certain or 
allowing merely a time period, but also would extend to the financing 
of the venture and the wisdom of the occupation and objective criteria 
for success or failure, I have no reason to press my privileged 
resolution.
  Are those things a fair statement of what we have discussed in this 
colloquy?
  Mr. GEPHARDT. I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. COX. With that understanding, I yield back.

                          ____________________