[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 146 (Saturday, October 8, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 8, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           PARTISAN POLITICS

  Mr. WOFFORD. Mr. President, most of my life, I have worked from the 
outside to prod Congress into taking action which I thought was good 
for our country, from passing civil rights legislation to creating the 
Peace Corps up to the National and Community Service Act of 1990.
  Now I am completing my first full session in Congress. What I have 
seen from inside, this year, appalls and angers me. Never in my life 
have I witnessed the kind of petty partisanship and calculated 
obstructionism that has been practiced over this past year.
  On some important fronts, we have achieved real results in this 
session: The crime bill, national service, family and medical leave, 
expanded college aid for the middle class, and the rest of the list so 
eloquently described by the majority leader, Senator Mitchell, and by 
the Senator from Arkansas, Mr. Bumpers.
  In each of those cases, in almost every one of those cases, it has 
been because moderate Republicans have broken from the party line to 
join with Democrats in pragmatic, commonsense action that helps 
families and communities in Pennsylvania and around the country. Many 
of these Republican colleagues were working with us on a practical 
first step in health care reform.
  In these last weeks, even before their leadership rejected 
consideration of even any such first step, and through this very week 
and this very day, we have been working to reach final agreement on a 
bipartisan interstate waste bill that I have been working for since I 
came to the Senate. The bill would finally have given Pennsylvania the 
legal authority to meet the onrushing pile of garbage coming from 
outside and put reasonable limits on out-of-State waste coming to fill 
our landfills, and it would have helped many, many other States begin 
to control their destiny in the matter of interstate waste. Yet, at the 
11th hour, despite overwhelming bipartisan support, despite long, hard 
work over years by Senator Coats; the chairman of the Environment and 
Public Works Committee, Senator Baucus; by the senior Senator from 
Pennsylvania, Senator Specter; by Senator Durenberger, and others of 
us, the politics of ``no'' was just applied, right now, when I heard 
the Republican leader block the passage of this bill, so vital to 
Pennsylvania and to communities all over this Nation.
  I waited to beyond the 11th hour, right to this last minute before 
midnight to say this. But what we have just seen on this interstate 
waste bill and on these other bills vital to the American people that 
have been killed in these last weeks is what makes American people hate 
politics. More and more in Congress, the kind of bipartisan spirit we 
need is being crushed by blind, selfish obstructionism, by a strategy 
based on a calculation as to what is best for the next elections, not 
what is best for the next generations.
  Mr. President, the politics of obstruction, the politics of ``no'' is 
easy, but with all the challenges facing our country right now, our 
challenge is finding the ways to say ``yes'' to those actions which 
will make a difference in the lives of people. And I warn some of my 
colleagues whose electoral calculations have led to this year's 
politics of ``no'' that the letters GOP are coming to stand for 
gridlock over people. As the Republican leader, Senator Dole, was 
reported to have said in explaining why he objected to Republicans 
working with Democrats to craft a good first step on health care reform 
in the last couple of months, ``We've got a party to think of.''
  Mr. President, I suggest a different approach. I believe we have a 
country to think of. Listen to some of the recent headlines. ``GOP 
taking joy in obstructionism.'' ``Senate GOP tactics threaten lobbying, 
education environment bills.'' ``Republicans kill lobbying bill in 
Senate.'' ``Serial Senate filibuster looms.'' ``Republicans seek 
political advantage with gridlock.'' That one was from the not so 
Democratic Washington Times.
  As Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry wrote in part 
yesterday, ``The opposition these days isn't ideological or 
interesting. It's petty, partisan, and tiresomely predictable.'' No 
matter how much fun the game seems to those who play it, this poisoning 
of our politics threatens to do a good deal of harm to America.
  I think, Mr. President, that most Americans are tired of the endless 
bickering in Washington. They know that it does harm our country and 
their own lives. We can and we must do better. We must wake up and see 
that this is not just a political game, that this is about people's 
lives.
  Last week, as promised, I introduced a bill that might bring that 
point home to my colleagues. I posed a simple proposition, that Members 
of Congress should not take from the American people what they will not 
arrange for the American people. That bill would cut off taxpayer-
financed health benefits that Members of Congress have arranged for 
themselves. I offered it as an amendment last week. No one spoke 
against it. But through procedural tricks, we were prevented from 
having a vote. At that time, the leader assured me that he intended to 
bring up the Congressional Compliance Act and that I would have an 
opportunity to introduce my amendment and have it considered then.
  When the leader did try to bring up that Compliance Act, which I 
support and have cosponsored, there was a technical objection raised 
from the other side of the aisle that could not be overcome in these 
last hours. So Congress was denied the opportunity to take up a good 
bill, the compliance bill that enjoys wide bipartisan support and could 
have passed. Once again by that stratagem, this Congress avoided having 
to consider my amendment which, like the Compliance Act itself, would 
have put Congress in the same boat as the American people.
  Then came the bill on unfunded Federal mandates. A Senator on the 
other side introduced an amendment that was a bill killer. That 
destroyed the opportunity to debate and pass a bipartisan bill to help 
our cities and States, and it ended the chance for introducing and 
debating other amendments, including mine.
  Mr. President, I did not come to the Senate to take anyone's health 
insurance away. I came to help make health insurance more secure, more 
accessible, and more affordable for millions of Americans. I came here 
to provide to the American people the same kind of affordable private 
health insurance that Members of Congress have arranged for themselves 
and for millions of Federal employees and their families.
  As Senator Grassley said yesterday, we cannot have laws that apply to 
mainstream and do not apply in the Nation's Capital. I agree.
  Mr. President, Members can run with procedural tricks and technical 
dodges, but they cannot hide from the power of this idea. Let us look 
again at what Members of Congress have arranged for themselves:
  A practical way--this is from the Federal Employees Benefits Plan--a 
practical way to help meet the costs of health care;
  A choice of plans and options;
  Up to 75 percent toward the cost of your premium, paid by the U.S. 
taxpayers;
  Payroll deductions for your share of the premium;
  Immediate coverage without a medical examination or restrictions 
because of your age or physical condition.
  The other chart, Mr. President, is what Members of Congress--of this 
Congress--have guaranteed other working Americans. It is blank. There 
is nothing there.
  When I was appointed to the Senate, in accepting the nomination, I 
held up the Federal Employees Benefits Plan and said this is the model 
of what we should extend to the American people: private health 
insurance choices, each year the employee having the choice and the 
employer paying a fair share.
  That is fair, if that is the system that the American people are able 
to enjoy. But it is wrong for us to be enjoying that kind of a good 
health care plan when we have failed to take even the first substantial 
steps toward guaranteeing private health insurance for the American 
people.
  Yesterday, I heard Senator Gramm boast about the success in blocking 
reform that would have extended health insurance for other Americans. 
But Senators have made sure that they will keep that kind of health 
insurance for themselves.
  Members of Congress played political games to stall job training and 
reemployment proposals at a time when incomes for many Americans have 
been stagnant. But incomes have not been stagnant for Members of 
Congress, whose annual salary has gone up about $30,000 since 1991. 
They tried, and thank God they failed, to block a tough, smart crime 
bill that is already helping put more police on the streets in this 
country.
  Let us remember, Members of Congress have their own cops on the beat: 
The Capitol Police. And it is good that they are there, but it is even 
better that we have now taken action to increase community policing all 
over America.
  Last year, they tried and failed to block a tax cut for millions of 
working Americans, but now they are back to selling a tax cut for the 
wealthiest Americans, like Members of Congress who make more than 
$130,000 a year. So Members of Congress will leave here tonight with 
their private health insurance secure, paid by the taxpayers but 
without taking action to extend the same kind of affordable private 
health insurance choices to the people who pay those taxes.
  Mr. President, if Members of Congress had to live like the American 
people, then they would find it easier to come together to do the right 
thing for the American people. I am going to keep fighting for that 
idea. It is an idea whose time has come, because the politics of 
selfishness is wearing thin. People are seeing through it and they do 
not like it. They do not want Members of Congress to ask only what is 
good for my party or what is good for me. They want us to ask what is 
good for the country. They want us to demonstrate that this is not only 
about winning political games, but it is about improving people's 
lives. They want us to recapture the spirit of the common good, to work 
together again, Democrats and Republicans, to solve our problems and 
move this country forward, to rediscover, as the first great Republican 
put it, the better angels of our nature.
  I yield the floor, Mr. President, and suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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