Congressional Record, Volume 141 Issue 40 (Friday, March 3, 1995)

[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 40 (Friday, March 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3441-S3446]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

THE PRESIDENT IS NOT LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE

Mr. COVERDELL. Thank you, Mr. President. I commend my colleague from
Idaho and the Senator from Utah, Senator Hatch, and also Senator Simon,
who is not present this morning, for the effort over the past 5 weeks
they have lent to the effort to create a historical change in the
governance and the financial discipline of our country. I was talking
with my wife last evening, and I wish Senator Simon from Illinois was
here because she had a chance to watch his address to the Nation
immediately following the vote. She said it was most eloquent and even
recommended that I get a video of it so that I might see it. I missed
it as I was in a press conference.
I was so saddened yesterday about the outcome, the narrow defeat of
the opportunity to move forward with the debate in the Nation about
constructing an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced
budget. It reminded me a little of when I was a youngster and the
battle in Korea had just begun. Each day I would pick up the paper and
the perimeter would shrink for U.S. forces trying to hold on against
the surge of the enemy. Every day was a little more sad, because that
perimeter shrunk and shrunk and shrunk until finally it was a very
small piece of that Korean Peninsula surrounding the city of Pusan. Lo
and behold, the will of the country, the will of the alliance to put
back an evil force that would do great damage to the future of the free
world ultimately prevailed. I think the analogy will be so here.
I think over these past 30 to 40 years, the Nation has awakened each
morning a little more worried about the state of the Union, a union
that has pushed away every evil aggressor across and away from our
shores but is perilously close to losing the standing of this great
democracy because of a lack of domestic will, a lack of a will to take
care of our own affairs and pay attention to our own financial health.
Maybe the beginning is in the press conference that will occur in
about 8 minutes. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell came to this Senate on
the same day I did but 2 years ago. Both of us saw the revolution
coming. The Presiding Officer is a product of that revolution. I think
his decision--I have not spoken to him, but it has to be some way
affected by the realization of what the American people are asking of
policymakers in their Capital City and the entrenched view to stand in
the way of the change that America is asking for.
I go back to the President's State of the Union Address. In the
President's State of the Union, after the election--and no one has
received a greater thrashing than the President in that election--it
caused great reflection, supposedly, in the White House, an analysis of
what happened here. The President went back and read his speeches from
1992, the new Democrat theory. He wanted to revisit. What went wrong?
In that speech, he said, ``The American people are not just singing to
us, they are shouting at us.'' How right he was. But he has not heard
the shouts. Senator Campbell has heard the shouting, and he is doing
something about it. The President has not heard the shouting, and he is
standing in the way of what America is seeking.
Yesterday was one of the most important votes ever to be cast in the
history of the Senate. We were dealing with the core governance of
America, the core document by which we live. We were saying that to
secure the future of the Nation, we must have sound financial policy.
We must live within our means. We must stop spending money we do not
have because we impose a debt on future generations. Every child born
today will get either a pink or blue wristband and attached to it will
be a $22,000 mortgage. Unbelievable. Unbelievable that we would consume
everything we have--$5 trillion we do not have, 30 percent of the tax
base of the property taxes of the
[[Page S3442]] United States through unfunded mandates, and now we have
even taken the practice of spending the livelihood of our children and
grandchildren.
The Nation knows this must stop, which is why 80 percent of them said
pass a balanced budget amendment, which is why they overturned the
Congress last November and sent new majorities here. What did they send
them here to do? They sent them here to change the way we do business
in Washington. They did their level best to achieve it. Who was in
their way? President William Clinton.
The defeat yesterday comes from the White House. There can be no
doubt that the amendment would have passed, and it would have passed
with 70-plus votes if it had not been for the President's decision to
stand in its way. So what we have here is a classic division of the
people that sent messengers to Washington to ratify, to honor, to carry
out the will of a nation and a President who, in the final analysis,
chose to nullify.
Mr. President, as you know, in about 3 minutes a very historic event
will occur when Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell--I will put it in this
light--affirms and acknowledges and does honor to what he is hearing
the American people say. He will have chosen to leave the ranks of
those who would nullify, reject, and subject the view of the American
people.
It is hard for me to understand how anybody--particularly if you are
in the White House as President of this great democracy--could miss
what those people are saying out there. Every piece of data you pick
up, it is either 7 out of 10 or 8 out of 10, it is overwhelming. This
is almost like the last 2 years replayed. Last year, we were in a
historic debate again and we were talking about health care. The
President puts on the table a program that you could not even read and
you could not even put it on a chart, a Government takeover of
medicine.
The American people were telling him, in the loudest voice, they did
not want him to do that. They were worried about health care reform,
but they did not want the Government to take it over. They did not want
to be taxed even more. Heavens, they were already working from January
to July for the Government before they kept their first dime for their
family's dream, so they could not understand what he was doing. By the
end of this debate, 85 percent of the American people were saying,
``Stop this nonsense. Don't do that.'' But the President pressed on as
if he knew better, he knew more than this Nation of ours.
I am convinced that it was that battle over that great issue that
made it so clear to America what they wanted to do in the midterm
elections. And that is why there is a new majority in the Senate and
that is why there is a new majority in the House, because the President
kept trying to press on the country something that they were telling
him in every way they knew how they did not want.
So they picked the elections to tell him. They said, ``All right, if
you won't listen to us, we're going to change who the players are in
that city,'' and they sent a whole new class of Senators and a whole
new class of House Members.
And at the center, at the very epicenter of the message was: Manage
the financial affairs of the country. Make our country financially
healthy. Pass a balanced budget amendment. The same numbers, another 80
percent of the American public saying, ``Do this. Do this.''
This makes me step back for a minute and talk about a word that was
used frequently over the last 2 years by the President called
``gridlock.'' He kept saying, ``Gridlock. We can't get anything done.''
Well, I would say to the President that it is one thing to stand here
and try to stop something that the people do not want--which is what
the Republican conference was doing on health care--it is another thing
to stand in front of something that the whole Nation wants to do. That
is the dilemma the President finds himself in on this balanced budget
amendment.
America lost yesterday. It was not a win-lose situation here in the
Senate. We talked about the 33 that voted against it and all those 66
who voted for it. This is not where the winning and losing took place.
The losing took place in Keokuk, IA; in Norman, OK; Atlanta, GA; Miami;
and Anchorage. The Nation knows, without any equivocation, that we must
change the way we manage our financial affairs.
Mr. President, throughout the whole debate, the other side has
brought up one red herring after another, one amendment after the
other. It was advertised that the effect of these amendments would be
to protect somebody--a veteran, a Social Security recipient, a child.
It was almost shameful in the manipulation of the language, because, in
effect, any set-aside would have made the whole effort moot.
In other words, if you had a balanced budget amendment, except for--
it does not matter what name you put on it--then what would have
happened from that date forward is every spending proposal that is more
than we have would amend the exception. It would have made a nightmare
out of whatever area of the law they tried to protect. They were not
protecting it. They were putting it in harm's way. Whether it was
veterans' or children's programs or Social Security, to set anything
aside would have put it right in front of the pressure to spend and
spend and spend with abandon. Every spending bill would have amended
the exception. And so the whole exercise would have been absolutely
moot. There would have been no reason to even go through the debate in
the Nation if it was nothing more than a charade.
To those innocent bystanders who looked at that, it may have appeared
as if they were trying to be protected. But I am here to say--and there
are many with me--that they were actually being put in harm's way,
because it would have been the route by which all spending occurred. It
would have made a nightmare of any area of the law that was the set-
aside.
Furthermore, I would say this, Mr. President. This Nation--well, let
me put it another way, Mr. President, in the form of a rhetorical
question. Have any of us ever known an individual or a family or a
local community, probably more specifically a business, that was ever
able to take care of its employees, its needs, its health, if it was
financially crippled? Is Orange County better off today? No. Is a
company that is pushed into bankruptcy able to take care of its
employees, or are its employees facing a pink slip? Is a family that
has spent too much on the credit card, bought a house that was too big,
are they going to be able to send their children to college?
Well, obviously the answer is no--no for the individual, no for the
family, no for a local community, and no for a business.
It is also true for a nation. No nation--no nation--that is
financially destabilized can care for its security, either
internationally or domestically. And every citizen of our country who
is concerned because they are involved with a Government program, they,
more than any other, should ask for and demand a financially healthy
country because, without that, we will never be able to take care of
the veterans or the children's programs, or an individual on Social
Security. First, and foremost, we must be a healthy nation at home.
Mr. President, I yield the floor to the distinguished Senator from
Idaho.
Mr. CRAIG addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, let me thank my colleague from Georgia for
those extremely valuable words and astute observations to the problems
we face as a country today as it relates to the issue of our Federal
budget, our debt, and how that gets handled and what we intend to do
here as a new Congress, as a new Senate, to try to resolve that issue
for the American people.
One of the sets of figures that I think comes to mind to me most
often as we try to deal with a balanced budget and a resolution of this
phenomenal debt structure that we have created over the last 30 years
are figures that go like this: $829,444,000 a day additional debt--
additional debt. That is almost the size of my State's entire operating
budget for 1 year. We are now just a little over $1 billion in the
State of Idaho. And this is one day's debt for the Federal Government.
That is $34,560,000 an hour.
I mean, you and I, Mr. President, cannot envision that.

[[Page S3443]]

We really cannot comprehend it. In fact, that is part of the problem
we suffer from, that we cannot understand the magnitude of the problem
that we are creating here on an hourly, daily, monthly basis.
Now I have asked for this special order for 1 hour, so I know that
costs $34 million. But 1 minute is $576,000, and 1 second is $9,600. It
truly is beyond the ability of this country and our people to
understand.
Mr. President, oftentimes we reduce things that we understand to what
we can see or envision. We know that a car costs somewhere in the
$20,000 to $30,000 range today for a certain type, and that houses cost
so much. You can drive down the street and say, ``Look at that house.
That house is about a $200,000 home, or a $300,000 home.'' The average
human can comprehend that. They can say, ``Boy, I cannot afford that,''
or ``I can,'' or ``That is within our budget.''
But can the average human comprehend $4.8 trillion, and what it takes
to generate that or to pay for it? Or to begin to deal with it in a
rational way? We cannot, as a country. Yet, every year here, first
showing up on the budget sheets that we call the Federal Government, of
$3.2. That is not $3.20, but that is $3.2 billion--but it is just $3.2,
just a list of figures. It does not make a lot of sense.
And yesterday, and for the last 5 weeks, we have tried to begin to
turn that corner, to bring it under control, to begin to define it, to
work with the American people to understand it, and to say to them that
this debt structure of over $18,000 per American citizen is going to
get under control because it does mean something and it does have
impact.
There has been a variety of approaches to control it. But my
colleague, who has just joined me on the floor from Arizona, while he
has been an outspoken supporter of the balanced budget amendment and
has brought about a lot of the energy behind that in the House and now,
of course, here in the Senate as one of our leaders with the team that
worked to deal with this issue over the last several weeks, has also
focused on spending reductions and spending controls, because that is
really what it is all about.
If we balance the Federal budget in 7 years, we have to set a course
of spending controls. Stay within our limit, stay within the ability to
control, and to meet the target 7 years out in 2002.
At this moment, let me turn to the junior Senator from Colorado, or
excuse me, from Arizona, for his comments on this issue and others that
he might wish to address.
Mr. KYL. I thank you. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Idaho.
He and I served in the House of Representatives together when he was
a leader in the fight for the balanced budget amendment there. He
carried that fight right over here to the Senate, and was one of our
leaders in attempting to obtain passage of the balanced budget
amendment this year. I predict that he will be one of the key figures
in securing its passage sooner or later.
It has been a pleasure for me to be of assistance to him and to bring
with me from the House of Representatives an idea actually which I
brought from my own home State of Arizona to achieve a balanced budget
by spending limits rather than by raising taxes. That is what I wish to
talk about today.
Mr. President, if I could call time out for a second, the Senator
from Idaho mistakenly referred to me as the junior Senator from
Colorado for a moment, and I know exactly why. In the background, there
was a deafening noise just a moment ago of loud applause for the junior
Senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, for his declaration
that as of today, he is a proud member of the Republican Party, and
will be a Member of the Republican Senate cadre. We are looking for a
place to put his new desk on this side of this Chamber.
Mr. CRAIG. Will the Senator yield with that? We will find a place to
put that desk.
Mr. KYL. And I suspect any others who may wish to join Richard Shelby
and Ben Nighthorse Campbell in joining us on the Republican side.
Mr. President, we welcome these friends--former Democrats who are now
Republicans--not only because they are friends and we need their help,
but because their decision to join the Republican Party in both cases,
as they said, was, as in Ronald Reagan's old phrase, a decision not to
leave the Democratic Party, but because the Democratic Party had really
left them.
We have many friends here who proudly serve in the Democratic Party
and uphold its traditions. From our point of view, one of those
traditions is being willing to spend too much of the taxpayers' money.
People like Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Richard Shelby and Paul Simon
from Illinois and others who remain in the Democratic Party have
finally said, ``We do not want to do that anymore. We have to balance
the Federal budget.''
It has not been comfortable for a Democrat to support us in that
effort. The President of the United States was very much in opposition
to the balanced budget amendment, and as the Senator from Georgia said
a short while ago, we can probably attribute the defeat of the balanced
budget amendment yesterday to the lobbying of the President of the
United States. Five or six Democrats who had previously cosponsored and
voted for the balanced budget amendment--Democrats--decided this time
not to support it.
I think that handful of Democrats in support of the President,
obviously, are the ones who will have to answer to the American people
when the questions are asked, who defeated the balanced budget
amendment.
But today is another day. We have to move on. We are going to move
forward as if the balanced budget amendment had passed and as if we are
going to balance the budget by the year 2002. We will do it with or
without the balanced budget amendment. It will be harder without that
constitutional limitation.
Yesterday's defeat of the balanced budget amendment, I suggest, is a
call to arms. The ballot was lost, but the war rages on. The balanced
budget amendment will ultimately pass--maybe later this year, maybe
next year, or perhaps the year after. But it will pass because the
American people demand that it pass.
Last fall, a political revolution swept Capitol Hill, a revolution
fueled by the American people's anger with the Federal Government out
of control, a Federal Government overregulating, overtaxing, and
overspending. Although the American people swept new leadership into
the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday's vote
demonstrated that the vestiges of business as usual remain and that
another round of housecleaning is yet to come.
I will predict that those who stood in the way of a balanced budget
amendment yesterday will not be around when it is brought to a vote in
future Congresses. The American people will, as I said, hold them
accountable.
Our mission today, with or without the balanced budget amendment, is
to immediately begin making the tough choices about what spending to
cut and what programs to terminate in order to get the budget to
balance by the year 2002. Our responsibility is to put an effective
enforcement mechanism into place to force the Congress to begin to
prioritize, to separate wants from needs, just like families all across
America must do every day.
Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
(The remarks of Mr. Kyl pertaining to the introduction of S. 494 are
located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and
Joint Resolutions.'')
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Idaho for yielding
this time and, again, for taking a strong leadership role in the effort
to get the balanced budget amendment passed and predict that through
his leadership eventually we will pass it.
(Mr. GORTON assumed the chair.)
Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I will not make that mistake again of
referring to my colleague as the junior Senator from Colorado. I have
had the privilege of serving with the Senator from Arizona for a good
number of years, both in the House and now in the Senate, and I have
always appreciated his leadership and his energy that he puts to the
issues that he is dedicated to and certainly the spending limitation
program that he has just proposed, of which I am proud to be a
cosponsor.
We will work to prove to our colleagues on the other side that there
is a way to balance the Federal budget
[[Page S3444]] and do so in a reasonable fashion without the draconian
style arguments or comments that oftentimes come from the other side of
the aisle when they find that they are threatened with the concept of a
balanced budget. We know that can be done, and we know that there will
be tough choices to be made, but it must be done.
I would like, Mr. President, to mention another issue that I guess
the word disappointment comes to mind when I think of how it was used
over the course of the last several weeks by several of my colleagues.
And that was the issue of Social Security.
I am disappointed that every time Social Security is brought up on
the floor of the U.S. Senate, it is used as a scare tactic, it is used
to frighten dedicated American citizens who believe that their Federal
Government has an obligation to them to assist them after they have
paid into a system of income assistance known as Social Security, and
that somehow there is a devious scheme on the part of some politician
in Washington to otherwise change that commitment that is clearly
written into the Social Security law.
Mr. President, you and I and the American people know there is no
devious scheme, not at all; that you and I and others who serve in the
U.S. Senate really serve as the board of directors of Social Security,
Inc., if you will. We are the ones charged under the law with the
responsibility of managing the Social Security system.
Whether you can argue that it has been managed well or not, the
bottom line is it has never failed to meet the obligation that it has
to the citizens of this country who have paid into it and find
themselves then eligible under the law to receive the benefits of it.
Yet, somehow over the last several weeks, those who needed to create a
smokescreen or a shield to back away from their previous support of a
balanced budget amendment because of their President's pressure, or for
whatever reason, begin to raise the ugly head and the old argument that
somehow the other side was manipulating a way to change or destroy the
Social Security system.
For the last 3 years, as we have debated the issue of the balanced
budget amendment, Senator Paul Simon, of Illinois, who has been one of
the leaders and certainly the prime sponsor and then the prime
cosponsor this year of the balanced budget amendment, we have worked
with a fellow by the name of Robert Myers. Robert Myers for years was
the chief actuary of the Social Security system of the Social Security
Administration from 1947 to 1970 and then a deputy commissioner from
1981 to 1982 and 1982 to 1983. He served as executive director of the
National Commission on Social Security Reform--I mean, this man is Mr.
Social Security.
I am quoting from a letter of February of this year that he sent to
Paul Simon, when in essence he says the Federal debt is the threat to
the Social Security system, not the balanced budget amendment. If you
do not control the debt, you ruin the Social Security system and what
is he saying in essence? He is recognizing the fact that if we bankrupt
this country, Social Security checks are not going to go out. There
will not be any money, whether it is in a trust fund or whether it is
inside the general budget of our country.
The bottom line is if you have a busted government and a busted
country, nothing goes out; everybody is equally bankrupt or poor at
that moment. The responsibility then of this Congress is to keep a
budget under control to move it toward balance, to bring the debt down
so we can always honor the commitment of the Social Security system.
Well, it became the trust fund argument: Is it on, is it off? Is it
in, is it out? We know from past experience that you manage the system.
In 1983, Social Security needed reform and the Congress came together,
Democrat and Republican alike, not in the kind of demagoguery that I
felt I heard on this floor in the last several weeks, but we came
together united as a government to manage and stabilize the system, and
we did. Yet day after day, hour after hour, amendment after amendment,
it was the ghost of the Social Security system or the mismanagement of
it or some devious scheme under a balanced budget amendment to do so,
and, Mr. President, that is just false. It is not true and, most
importantly, the American people know it is not true.
The Senior Coalition, one of the largest organizations of senior
citizens in this country, in a recent national survey--and I ask
unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the survey was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:

The Seniors Coalition,

Fairfax, VA, March 2, 1995.
Re The American Association of Retired Persons and the
Balanced Budget Amendment.
To: All Interested Parties.
From: Kimberly Schuld, Legislative Analyst.
The AARP Commissioned The Wirthlin Group to conduct a
survey for them January 25-28, 1995 on a variety of questions
pertaining to the BBA. Since then, the AARP and the National
Council of Senior Citizens have been twisting the poll's
results and methodology to claim that public support for a
BBA is low--once Americans are told what the BBA will mean to
them.
The key word here is TOLD. The poll utilizes a series of
questions designed to lead people to a mis-informed and
generally incorrect impression of what the BBA will do.
Namely, the line of questioning implies that Social Security
and Medicare will face drastic cuts, and state and local
taxes will skyrocket as the federal faucet is turned off.
An AARP Press Release announcing the poll results states,
``* * * most Americans do not understand the potential impact
of the Balanced Budget Amendment and are adamantly opposed to
using Social Security and Medicare to reduce the federal
deficit.''
Quite bluntly, the AARP has effectively provided a
political scare campaign for those members of Congress
wishing to avoid facing their constituents with the news that
they want to vote against the BBA. We all know the arguments
against excluding Social Security from the constitutional
amendment, but the AARP has electrified the ``third rail'' to
the political benefit (is it really?) of the White House.

analysis of the aarp/wirthlin poll

The poll consisted of sixteen questions to 1,000 adults,
with a 200 oversample to adults 50 and older. The margin of
error is 2.8% at a 95% confidence level. A copy
of the questions is attached.
The poll starts off with a question about the direction of
the country and then asks:
``Do you favor or oppose a balanced budget amendment to the
U.S. Constitution that would require the federal government
to balance its budget by the year 2002?''
Favor: 79%
Oppose: 16%
The next question tests how people perceive the budget can
be balanced: spending cuts, taxes or both. This is followed
by a question on equal percentage across-the-board cuts in
every federal program.
The next two questions ask specifically if Social Security
and Medicare should be included in across-the-board cuts. As
could be expected, the respondents would favor exemptions for
both programs. A key element to these two questions (#5 and
#6) is the use of the word ``exempt''. The word ``exempt'' is
not used anywhere in the poll except in relation to Social
Security and/or Medicare. This sets up a connection in
people's minds that these programs may be in graver danger
than other government programs.
Question #7 sets up the respondent for the ``truth in
budgeting'' excuse the Administration has been spinning. When
offering people the choice between passing the BBA first, or
identifying cuts first, the poll throws in ``consequences''
associated with cuts. The connotation is that there are going
to be dire ``consequences'' to balancing the budget. This
sets up the respondent to answer question #15 (open-ended)
with a negative response on how they think the BBA will
affect them personally.
Questions #8, #9 and #10 ask about whether respondents
think it is necessary to cut Defense, Social Security and
Medicare to balance the budget, or whether the budget could
be balanced without these programs. As could be expected, the
response for cutting Defense is overwhelming compared to SS
and Medicare. The group of questions sets up a ``good cop/bad
cop'' scenario in the mind of the respondent whereby they
identify Defense as the ``bad guy as well as being reminded
which parry tends to support Defense. It is also important to
remember that at the time this poll was taken, the newspapers
and network news broadcasts were full of stories about the
Republicans wanting to increase Defense spending in the
Contract With America.
Questions #11 and #12 address taxes; their role in the
budget balancing process and reform ideas. This also serves
to set up negative responses to question #15. In #11, 48% of
the people believe there will have to be tax increases to
balance the budget. Then in the next question, they are asked
to declare a preference for one of a variety of tax cuts.
This conflict sets up a negative impression that tax cuts are
good and the BBA is bad because there must be tax increases
to accomplish its goal.
Question #13 throws together ``programs for the poor,
foreign aid, and congressional salaries and pensions''.
Respondents are asked how far these programs COMBINED would
go toward balancing the budget if they
[[Page S3445]] were cut. By throwing these widely divergent
programs together, the pollsters are setting up the
respondent to believe that balancing the budget will mean
higher taxes and cuts in taxpayer-financed programs.
Question #14 is the keeper. Respondents are asked if they
still support a BBA with the following choices:
Social Security should be kept separate from the rest of
the budget and exempted from a BBA because it is self-
financed by a payroll tax.
or
Social Security is part of the overall government spending
and taxing scenario, thus should be subject to cuts along
with the rest of the budget.
The results of this questions dramatically flip the BBA
support from question #2:
BBA with SS Exempt: 85%
BBA that cuts SS: 13%
Question #16 now asks:
``Do you favor or oppose the balanced budget amendment,
even if it means that your state income taxes and local
property taxes would have to be raised to make up for monies
the federal government no longer transfers to your state?''
Favor: 38%
Oppose: 60%
This question ends the phone call on a gross mis-
interpretation that dire consequences of doom and gloom are
on the horizon, all at the voter's expense. This is exactly
the type of question that re-reinforces the ``angry voter''
complex of the middle class family.
These anti-BBA results are achieved by planting the seed of
doubt slowly but surely that:
1. It is the intention of BBA supporters to cut Social
Security and Medicare.
2. It is the intention of BBA supporters to beef up Defense
spending at the expense of everything else.
3. Taxes will inevitably go up with a BBA.
4. A BBA will have a negative direct impact on families
``beyond the beltway.''
Any time a Senator, Congressman, reporter or lobbyist
starts to talk about poll results showing 85% of Americans
oppose a BBA unless it exempts Social Security, bear in mind
that the spin-meisters achieved this number by forcing the
assumption that draconian Social Security cuts are a foregone
conclusion.
Leaders from the Republican party, the Democratic party,
the Administration and the President himself have all gone to
great lengths to state that social security benefits are off
the table.
Any member of congress who contends NOW that the new
Republican leadership cannot be trusted to keep their hands
off Social Security is also implicating their own party
leaders and the President of the same un-trustworthiness.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, in a letter to me and others who fought
this issue, they polled their constituents and of them a thousand
registered voters. That survey showed a confidence level of 95 percent
that the Senate was doing the right thing to pass the balanced budget
amendment.
When people were asked if they supported the Senate's passage, 79
percent overwhelmingly said yes, but the confidence level--and this was
a Wirthlin poll, this was not just a few phone calls, this was a
professionally nationally respected polling company--found out that the
seniors of America do support a balanced budget amendment. They know of
their future and the future of their grandchildren, and they want it to
be bright. While they want their Social Security check, they do not
want to bust the future of the country and the future of their
children.
Mr. KYL. Will the Senator yield on that?
Mr. CRAIG. I will be happy to yield to my colleague from Arizona.
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, just before the Senator mentioned our
children and grandchildren, I was going to make that precise point. I
just got through with a statewide campaign. We conducted what we call
back yard and living room meetings. In every one of these meetings, the
question of the balanced budget amendment came up. Many of them were
attended by seniors. I would ask these seniors--frankly, it was a way,
Mr. President, of bragging about my two grandchildren.
I would say, ``How many of you have children or grandchildren,'' and
most of the hands would go up.
``Well, so do I, I have two beautiful grandchildren,'' and promised
not to talk about them.
But the point I am making is that these seniors love their children
and grandchildren more than anything else in the world. And when they
talked about the balanced budget amendment and they talked about their
needs for Medicare and other expenses that they would have to bear in
their remaining years, they always came back to the point that they
wanted to leave a better future for their children and grandchildren,
and the last thing that they wanted to do was to leave a mountain of
debt for these young kids to have to pay, because they instinctively
knew that the future for these children and grandchildren will be a
lower standard of living than we have enjoyed unless we get the Federal
fiscal house in order. And so these senior citizens, consistent with
the statistics that the Senator from Idaho has just quoted, to a
person, were very much in favor of the Federal Government getting its
fiscal house in order. They understood it was not only good for them
but it was essential for the people they love most, their children and
grandchildren.
Mr. CRAIG. I thank the Senator from Arizona for making those
observations because those are the facts. That is the truth that is
shown in survey after survey. The seniors of this country among any
socioeconomic group understand the value of balancing budgets. They
came through the Great Depression. They know how tough things can be
out there when a country and a government is in trouble and an economy
has collapsed, and they know that the future of their children and
their grandchildren is at stake here. They do not want to see their
offspring go through what many of them had to go through, on literally
nothing through the course of a good many years because of a country
that was in deep financial trouble as a result of a Great Depression.
Now, I am not suggesting that a Great Depression is at hand, but I am
telling you that a $4.8 trillion debt uncontrolled and continuing to
mount moves us toward the edge of a day when there will be a phenomenal
financial reckoning in our country that could spell difficulties like
the kinds that we had in the thirties if we do not resolve the issue
now.
Let me yield to my colleague from Georgia.
Mr. COVERDELL. Will the Senator yield for just an observation?
Mr. CRAIG. Yes.
Mr. COVERDELL. I just came from the press conference where Senator
Ben Campbell announced officially that he had joined the ranks of the
Republican Party. In his address, he spoke of the financial dismay. One
of the key centers of it was the peril that he feared unless something
is done, and soon. But as he was leaving--and I wanted to leave this
with the Senator--one in the mass of reporters leaned over and said,
``Was there any particular event that crystallized your decision?'' And
he turned to the reporter and he said, ``Yes, the balanced budget
amendment'' result. And so, again, I think we see an American
responding to the dilemma that the Senator has characterized this
morning. I wanted to pass on that observation.
Mr. CRAIG. I thank the Senator from Georgia for those observations. I
have had the privilege of knowing Senator Campbell all of his public
life here in Washington. He is a man of tremendous principle, and that
kind of comment just does not surprise me at all. He is tremendously
dedicated to the issue of a balanced budget amendment, and I know he
was terribly frustrated when he saw a good many of his former Democrat
colleagues back away from their strong support over the past few years
for this issue, and we had discussed this over the last good number of
days as he continued in his strong support for a balanced budget
amendment.
Mr. President, this is an issue that now rests at the desk of the
Senate, I am sure to be revisited again over the course of the next
several months as we struggle to try to find a way, absent a balanced
budget amendment, to resolve our spending difficulties and establish a
course for the Congress in working with the executive branch of
Government to bring down our deficits and move us toward a balanced
budget.
My guess is that if we do not do that and we do not demonstrate to
the American people that we are capable of doing that, we are but a
year away or months away from revisiting the balanced budget amendment
and passing it and causing the States and the citizens of this country
the opportunity to force us to do what we should have done yesterday,
and that is to have the will and the resolve to allow the American
people to choose whether they wanted a balanced budget amendment to
become a part of the organic law of
[[Page S3446]] the land, to become a part of the Constitution.
Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. All time assigned to the Senator from Idaho
has expired.
Under the previous order, the Senator from Connecticut [Mr.
Lieberman] is recognized for up to 20 minutes.
Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair.

PRIVILEGE OF THE FLOOR

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Laura
Philips, who is an American Institute of Physics Fellow, be allowed
floor privileges during morning business on this day.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair.

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