[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 17 (Friday, January 27, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H836-H837]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         MAKING TOUGH DECISIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Tucker] is recognized for 5 minutes.

  Mr. TUCKER. Mr. Speaker, I first would like to associate myself with 
those remarks by my colleagues and congratulate the pages also. They 
certainly do a fine job here on the floor of the House. There were some 
things in my colleagues' comments that I thought were somewhat 
remarkable and worth mentioning and worth underscoring when they talked 
about the bipartisanship with which this House has, last night, passed 
a balanced budget amendment. Also the bipartisanship in the whole 
democracy, contextually, in which the gavel was passed from Mr. 
Gephardt to Mr. Gingrich.
  Certainly this is highly reflective of and symbolic of the kind of 
democracy that we so wonderfully enjoy here in the United States of 
America. Whether we like something or not, whether we voted for 
something or not, the majority rules, and so it goes.
  Last night, Mr. Speaker, I did not support the balanced budget 
amendment, but, thank God, we live in a country where I can say that 
democracy had its will and its way. As to the reasons why I did not 
support it, they are precisely because it did not prohibit things like 
Social Security being on the chopping block. In other words, it did not 
take Social Security off the chopping block. So everything is on the 
table, Social Security and other things are on the table.
  The other reason I did not support it is it allows for a three-fifths 
rule, which would allow for a minority to have control over whether or 
not you are going to expand budgetary outlays.
  Certainly, from my standpoint it was unconstitutional and it provided 
a scenario under which you can have minority controlling a House that I 
believe should be controlled by a majority.
                              {time}  1500

  But nonetheless the majority did make that decision, and so the 
majority ruled, but it brings me to the point, Mr. Speaker, of what I 
would like to talk about today, and that is precisely how important it 
is for this House to weigh out what it does.
  Last night a lot of people were happy about the balanced budget 
amendment passing, and to them I say, ``Congratulations.'' They 
certainly did a lot of hard work, persons like my colleague, the 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm].
  But the rather interesting excitement and inebriation, if my 
colleagues will, that they experienced last night, I just hope that 
they continue to feel those feelings of joy after they wake up from 
that moment of inebriation to the sobriety of the reality of what they 
have done, for indeed, Mr. Speaker, we are going to make some very hard 
choices in the months ahead for how we balance the budget, and my 
reason for not supporting that amendment was precisely the same reason 
that I say today, that we must not balance the budget on the backs of 
the poor and the needy.
  The balanced budget amendment is only a prelude to what we are going 
to be dealing with very shortly when we start talking about welfare 
reform. It is going to be another tough choice, another very difficult 
decisionmaking process through which and by which we are going to have 
to ask the difficult questions. How can we come up with the right 
solution, by the right means?
  And so, Mr. Speaker, what we are saying is, ``You can have a right 
goal, and you can have a right objective in mind, but we can't 
accomplish it by the wrong means, and certainly everyone in this House 
talks about welfare reform and the fact that we need to overhaul the 
system that is arguably antiquated and that has some indicia of fraud 
and abuse, and we understand that, and it's not only the Members in 
this House that believe that, but the surveys show and are very replete 
with information that all of America, just about, feels that welfare is 
in need of an overhauling. But we have to look at some of the specific 
points about welfare, and we need to be very, very careful.''
  Mr. Speaker, as we start reforming and retooling our welfare system 
so that we can be fair to the welfare recipients, and be fair to this 
country, and indeed be fair to the principles of democracy, let us 
start off, first of all, 
[[Page H837]] with the aspect of who are the recipients who most, in 
most instances, actually benefit from welfare, Mr. Speaker, Well, a lot 
of people have promulgated and propagandized this notion that it is all 
of these lazy, shiftless welfare mothers, and they are bilking the 
system, and they are exercising all kinds of schemes, and fraudulent 
schemes, in order to sustain themselves. But the reality is, Mr. 
Speaker, as a matter of education and edification, that 70 percent of 
all recipients on welfare are children. So, when you start taking out 
the cleaver, and we start talking about cutting welfare, and we start 
talking about eliminating welfare, let us, first of all, understand 
that we are talking about America's children.
  A lot of people think that welfare is a matter of African Americans 
who predominate the welfare rolls. That can be no further from the 
truth, Mr. Speaker. The majority of those who are recipients of welfare 
are actually white Americans. So, when we talk about welfare, we have 
to be honest, and we have to be clear about what the fact are.
  Now we talk about America's children. There have
   been proposals that say that if a mother is under age, under the age 
of 18, that she should not receive any welfare benefits, or therefore 
her children should not receive any welfare benefits. She could be 17 
years, and 11 months, and 28 days--29 days, and under the age of 18, 
and still she and her children will not receive any benefits. But when 
she becomes 18, the children still would not receive any benefits for 
the rest of their lives. These are the kinds of proposals that we have 
to be very careful about because obviously these children are the ones 
who bear the brunt of that kind of a policy. The children are at stake.

  We have heard things like, ``Let's have orphanages because we need 
some type of a controlled setting by which these children can be 
raised,'' but, Mr. Speaker, those kinds of policies are antiquated. 
Those types of policies are archaic. They are outdated, and they are 
inefficient.
  We do not need to take the baby and throw it out with the bathwater, 
if you will. What we need to do, Mr. Speaker, is we need to be very 
careful about trying to rehabilitate and trying to provide some social 
support for American families. We need to get away from the monikers of 
illegitimacy and realize, yes, that we have a high incidence of this 
country per capita of out-of-wedlock births, but that does not make a 
child illegitimate. That should not cause us, as Americans and as a 
country, to put some type of disparaging association on some child 
because that child's mother did not choose or did not happen to, for 
whatever reason, marry.
  There are many, many outstanding leaders and citizens of our country 
and our communities who are products of broken homes. In fact, Mr. 
Speaker, as we look more and more, we realize that one out of every two 
American families now evidence a broken home or a single parent family, 
and usually that single parent is a mother.
  So what we have to do is we have to start now reeducating ourselves 
and resensitizing ourselves to the new America. This is not the America 
of Wally Cleaver, and ``Leave It To Beaver,'' and Ozzie and Harriet. 
This is the America of the 1990's, and we have to be realistic about 
what family values mean these days, and family values these days to me 
mean that we should adopt that adage of the old African proverb that 
says it takes a whole village to raise a child. It does not mean that 
the village should be called an orphanage. I mean we should look at 
things like group homes, but group homes where the parents or parent in 
this case, a single parent, can still be with their children. We should 
not be trying to separate the parent from the child. We should be 
trying to keep them together, and if, in fact, we are going to employ 
the basis of a group home, then let us make sure that we do it in a way 
where we can give social skills to the parent as well as help to the 
children.


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