[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 53 (Wednesday, March 22, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H3550-H3553]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              TERM LIMITS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] is 
recognized for 23 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.


                           the welfare issue

  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, I just was going to talk tonight about 
term limits. I wanted to respond very briefly and share with the 
gentlewoman who is here from Washington State some views on the welfare 
issue.
  I cannot help but respond on the question of the block grants that 
have 
[[Page H3551]] been talked about all evening by members of the Democrat 
Party and the minority, how they think that if we block-grant money for 
child nutrition and other welfare programs to the States, to let the 
local governments and the States decide how to spend this money in 
detail and specificity, that somehow all of this is going to mean 
something terribly harmful to children and to others. That is just 
nonsense.
  Just like with the crime block grants, just like with any other block 
grant program, where we pass the money back to the States, it seems to 
me the Republican Party recognizes, and I think the American people who 
really think about it do, that government closest to the people governs 
best and knows best. Washington is not all wise. The Federal Government 
is not all wise.
  But there have been people who were in power for 40 consecutive years 
in the United States House of Representatives who stand on the other 
side of the aisle and come to the well person after person tonight to 
talk about why Washington knows best and what great harm is going to 
occur because we let the money go back to the States and to the local 
governments to decide exactly how to use it, and within the framework 
of the parameters we give them, they have got to use it for child 
nutrition, in the child nutrition area, they have got to use it for 
certain specified reasons in welfare, for assistance to those who 
really are deserving of it.
  Why should we in Washington be dictating all the minutiae, running 
the program, doing it in these old-fashioned ways with entitlements 
where we know lots of people on welfare today are abusing that system 
and will continue to abuse it?
  The worst case of all, of course, is the situation
   of the illegitimate mother and welfare mother whom we have heard 
about many times over who gets on the system and stays on it for year 
after year after year.

  And with that, just for a couple of minutes with the time we have 
got, I yield to the gentlewoman from Washington. I think you have got a 
great illustration of Sally, I believe you call her.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. If it were not so sad, you know, Sally is a 
happy name. I have known Sallies who were happy, but the Sally I am 
going to talk about is not happy.
  Sally is 18 yeas old, but you know, Sally is probably the reason we 
are in the welfare debate today, because America's people sent a group 
of us here and said, ``Change welfare, change the system.''
  Sally, when she was 15, did what a lot of little girls do. They 
thought if they got out of their home and got a baby, got in their own 
place, that they would be happy, because they would be independent. And 
Sally saw a couple of other girls in the housing close to us do that, 
and she thought that looked good. She had not seen the misery yet.
  But you know, once she got pregnant, and she did know how to get 
pregnant and how not to get pregnant, she got into that housing, and 
about when she was 16, and she got scared, and I think the interesting 
thing about Sally is you go visit Sally, is she was brave, and then 
scared, and she was still a little girl, and all I could think about 
was this little girl out on her own by herself under the name of 
compassion with this baby. If she had not been pregnant, we would have 
put this little girl in a foster home or group home, if she was unhappy 
at home, but because she was pregnant, we put her out in tenant 
housing.
  You know, that tenant housing, that group housing, is not always the 
nicest place to be. It was not for Sally. You know, Sally got scared. 
Before I knew it, Sally had a guy shacked up with her. He was not 
young. He was in his twenties. Still Sally was still a kid.
  But, you know, once they are out there, there is nobody to watch. She 
felt safer. You could not convince this little kid it was not going to 
be a good life, because she felt safe with him, and not too long, Sally 
had another baby, and Sally is 18, and this guy is gone.
  Now, Sally, there are over 500,000 Sallies we have identified, and 
this bill is about Sallies. Sally is
 going to be on welfare over 10 years average. Actually many Sallies 
will be on most of their lives.

  What is even worse is what is going to happen to her kids. Sally's 
little kids are only going to see, unless we can find some way to get 
her out of welfare and onto her feet, all they are going to see is her 
mom who goes to a post office and picks out a check and does not work 
for it. That is what we have to do with this welfare bill. That is why 
I like the welfare bill we are working on, because it would not have 
put Sally on the street. It would not have given her money.
  It would have taken care of her and foster care, if she needed it. It 
would have encouraged her to stay home, but I bet Sally would not have 
gotten pregnant to begin with.
  Now that Sally is there, we have to do something to help Sally, and 
this is a tough love for Sally. Sally is scared. She is going to stay 
there unless we figure out a way to say, ``Sally, you are just going to 
stay here so long, and you are going to get off.''
  That is what I like about what we are doing. I like the child care 
supplement. I like the idea the health care going on so she can get 
off. Mostly I like the idea that says, ``Sally, you have got 5 years 
total. You are going to work on it. You know, your kids get big enough, 
you're going to have to go to work. But there is an end.''
  And I think the best thing we can do for Sally now that we have 
trapped her on welfare by an unfeeling system is to help her off, and 
so I wanted to share Sally tonight with you, because I think what we 
have gotten into is numbers and rhetoric, and the people sent us here 
to fix the system that they know has trapped people in welfare.
  Do you know that most of them start as teenagers? Over 50 percent 
that are now on welfare are kids, and if we do not stop that level, 
then they grow up, and they stay on welfare, and they are on long-term 
welfare, not the safety net, but that safety net becomes a spider web, 
a trap that holds them and literally sucks the very lifeblood out of 
their life and destroys their children.
                              {time}  2320

  Mr. McCOLLUM. Well, now how does the Republican bill that we are 
offering out here, welfare reform, very briefly in your judgment change 
this for Sally?
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Well, for right now, now that Sally is 
there, she probably wouldn't be there to begin with under this bill 
because we wouldn't give her cash assistance and put her in her own 
home.
  We would tell the States, she is a kid. Treat her like a kid. She 
gets pregnant, help her. Help her at home. Do whatever. And if her 
parents are needy, make sure you supply medicaid, medical care for her, 
food, but don't put her out on her own.
  But now that Sally is there, under this bill we get done amending it, 
she will have the ability to get child care to help her get back on her 
feet while she is starting to go to work. She will get health care 
ongoing. And Sally again will know for certain that she can't stay on 
forever.
  One thing I found with these young girls, and I have worked with 
several, is they get out there and they lose all their self-esteem. 
They just believe after a few years there is nowhere to go. And it is 
awful hard each day to want to go out, but if they know they have to, 
that is going to make a lot of difference.
  It will mean that they will see hope as they are pushed out a little 
bit, but we will carry them out and help them out the door of poverty. 
And that is what we will be doing for Sally, a compassionate hand up 
and a little push out as we bring her back into freedom from the 
poverty and slavery of welfare.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Well, far from being anything radical, the Republican 
proposal actually is a common-sense approach to trying to correct a 
very bad deficiency in the welfare system that has allowed the Sallys 
of this country to continue down a hopeless road, and a hopelessness 
not just for themselves but for the offspring that they produce who 
then become a part of the welfare system.
  It seems for those who want to criticize this, they offer no real 
meaningful alternative. I cannot hear on the other side of the aisle in 
all the rhetoric tonight anything more than wails of, hey, you guys are 
bad guys. Somehow you are going to, by trying to correct this problem 
for Sally, do some gosh awful evil out there.

[[Page H3552]]

  We are not about that. You are as compassionate a person as I have 
heard out there tonight, and I know you are.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. The American people know this makes sense. 
They know it makes sense. They sent us here for change.
  With all you are doing on term limits, I feel they sent you here to 
continue to beat the drum for term limits in spite of the fact that you 
get beat up on it occasionally. You fought for it real hard. Tell us 
where are we at tonight and how did we get where we are and what is the 
hope for term limits?
  Mr. McCollum. I would like to do that a little bit. I would certainly 
be glad to share with the gentlewoman. I know you have had the 
experience in Washington State. I have had it in my State.
  The history of term limits goes back a long way. The limited time 
tonight doesn't allow us to go all they way back into delving into it.
  I would say rotation in office or term limits was something that way 
back in the days of England was conceptualized. And when our Founding 
Fathers began to look at our Constitution and our way of government, we 
had term limits for legislators. In the original kind of Congress that 
we had before the Constitution was adopted, there were limits on the 
length of time somebody could serve.
  James Madison, who wrote a good deal of the Federalist papers we are 
familiar with, was a big believer in term limits. Somehow in the 
debates over the Constitution that got left out. And for quite a while 
in our country it didn't really make much difference, but the history 
shows that around the turn of this century we began to see careerism, 
professionalism creep into government, and we began to see Members 
serve long periods of time in the House, not just a couple of terms and 
then go home.
  The length of time that somebody had to spend in a period of a given 
year for serving in Congress stretched as we began to reach the middle 
of this century much longer than anybody could have conceptualized.
  We are now today virtually a year-around Congress. We have a very big 
government. We have a lot of things we have to do as an institution. 
Now, many of us, you and I, I guess, would like to shrink the size and 
scope of the Federal Government, and I believe over time that will 
occur, but it will never return to the days that our Founding Fathers 
envisioned where Members of Congress came perhaps here for a month or 
two at the most each year and then went back to their jobs, served 
maybe one or two terms in the House and went home again. We have long 
since passed that.
  Today I think there are some very valid reasons which have been put 
forward why so many across this country, nearly 80 percent of the 
American public, have come to support term limits. They don't always 
recognize why, but I would put them in about three categories. I don't 
know that these are necessarily in the order of importance. In fact, I 
am going to save the one, I think perhaps the most important one, to 
the end.
  One of them is the fact that we have had power vested in the hands of 
a very few people who served as committee chairman for years and years 
and years, and that power emanates to the point that they decided what 
would come to the floor for votes, what came out of the Rules 
Committee. Just a handful of people determined a great deal about what 
happened in this government of ours.
  Now, when we Republicans took over with our new majority and your 
freshman class came along, that ended in terms of the rules. We changed 
the rules of the House so that you can only serve for 6 years as a 
committee or subcommittee chairman.
  But that is not permanent. Who knows what is going to happen next 
year or the year thereafter? The only way you can permanently end the 
kind of potential problems and abuse that comes from a handful of 
people holding power for years and years and years in this Congress 
through chairmanships of committees and leadership posts is by a 
constitutional amendment to limit the length of time somebody can serve 
in this House and Senate. That is one reason.
  The second reason why I think the term limits has been a very 
important concept and grown in popularity is because of the fact that 
we have a need to reinvigorate this body with fresh faces regularly.
  Yes, we had a big turnover this time. We have had it for a couple of 
times in a row in the House of Representatives, but that has not been 
the norm over the past century, and it probably won't be the norm over 
the long haul unless we limit terms so that we can bring new voices 
from the community in here.
  And, yes, we will give up a few experienced people
   who we would like to have here, but I am confident, as I think most 
term limits supporters are, that there are literally thousands if not 
hundreds of thousands of Americans out there ready to take their place 
with creative new ideas that can give us a spark and more than make up 
for the absence of the experience we might lose with a few people who 
leave.

  And then the third and perhaps the most important reason we really 
need to have term limits is to end this careerism I mentioned earlier. 
The fact of the matter is that only if we limit the length of time 
somebody can serve in the House and Senate will we take away what has 
become the compelling reason about this place for all too many of us, 
and that is to try to get reelected, to spend time pleasing every 
interest group, every faction, as James Madison would call it, in order 
to be sure that the next time around we will get back to coming back to 
Washington again to serve and to stay here for that length of time. You 
cannot end it altogether, but we can mitigate it by term limits and 
only by term limits.
  Now, I would like to relate this into the present situation in the 
very limited period we have. I am going to ask the gentlewoman a 
question or two about that in a minute, but in perspective from a 
Washington, DC, standpoint, I think it needs to be understood that just 
two congresses ago in the 102d Congress there were only 33 Members of 
the House of either party willing to openly embrace the idea of being a 
term limits supporter.
  In the last Congress, in the 103d, the number grew to 107. In the eve 
of what is going to happen here next week, it is certainly monumental. 
We are going to have a vote, a debate and a vote on the Floor of the 
House of Representatives for the first time in the history of this 
Nation on a constitutional amendment to limit the terms of Members of 
the House and Senate, and I fully expect us to have well over 200 
members voting for one term limits proposal or another.
  Now, I think that is truly remarkable. Now, it takes 290 to get to 
the two-thirds required in order to send the constitutional amendment 
to the States for ratification. But it is remarkable whether we get to 
the 290 or not, A, that we are just having the debate and, B, that we 
are going to have the numbers probably double or better than double who 
announce support for term limits in the last Congress to this Congress.
  A lot of that comes because of the State initiatives, like your State 
and mine, Washington State and Florida, we have, what, 22 States now, I 
believe, who have passed term limit initiatives.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington, I think so.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Tell me briefly how has it gone in Washington State, 
your home State with regard to term limits.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Term limits was passed, and we were sued on 
the congressional portion, but the rest of it for the legislature is 
going on. And it is a 6 year for the House. And, let's see, what is it 
for the Senate? I think it is three terms for the Senate.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. For the State legislature?
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Yes. Then it is for the Congress and the 
Federal also, I always say Congress and the Senate, the House and the 
Senate at the Federal level. You can tell I have been in the State 
level too long. That is a good reason for term limits at the State 
level.

                              {time}  2330

  But we passed term limits, and it became real important last year in 
our elections because the Speaker of this body that stood there for 
many years in the majority decided to sue the State of Washington over 
term limits, the people of the State of the Washington.
  [[Page H3553]] They didn't take it lightly. As you can see, he is no 
longer here. He was defeated.
  We saw him as a rock. Nobody would ever move this man. But what he 
did is show the people the arrogance of this place by suing the 
Washington State people who had passed this initiative.
  Now, we are still in court over the Federal portion, but he is out of 
office. And the people sent us with a very strong message Do not mess 
with what the people did.
  So that is probably part of the mix here that is a little bit 
difficult for some of us. Anything that does not protect our State's 
rights gives us a little bit of a problem.
  So tell us how are we going to overcome that hurdle.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. We are going to have several
   options out here on the floor next week. And while many of us are 
going to debate which one is the preferable one, a lot of us are going 
to conclude, I think rightfully so, that if we are ever going to get to 
290 and do what the public wants and have a national constitutional 
amendment that limits the terms of the Members of the House and Senate, 
we are going to have to pull together on a common bond on whatever 
emerges out of the great debate that will take place.

  Next week, we are going to have a rule that brings to the floor three 
hours of general debate where we can talk about it like this among 
ourselves like this. It is going to bring us an opportunity to vote for 
four different options.
  There will be a base bill, which is something I have sponsored for a 
number of years. It will be known as House Joint Resolution 73. And 
that bill will propose that we have an amendment to the Constitution 
that limits the length of time Senators and House Members serve to 12 
years in each body: Six 2-year terms in the House, two 6-year terms in 
the Senate.
  And that they be permanent limits. That is, you cannot sit out a term 
and run again. Once you serve 12 years in one body or the other, that 
is it.
  There is no retroactivity to this particular proposal, and there is 
no touching of the question of whether or not the States-passed 
initiatives are to be held inviolate or whether they are to be 
disturbed by this amendment.
  Which means that the Supreme Court, which is now hearing the case 
involving Arkansas and may hear the Florida and Washington State cases 
eventually, when it makes its decision, it will make its decision.
  According to former Attorney General Griffin Bell, who represents 
both the Arkansas State issue and the Washington State issue, it will 
make its determination under the McCollum amendment free of any burden. 
Whatever they decide will be the law of the land.
  If they decide the States presently have the power to make the 
decisions that they have been making and that is upheld as 
constitutional, then the State individual initiatives will still bind 
the term limit issue. But if they decide that the State initiatives are 
unconstitutional, then the 12-year limit that I would propose would be 
a national total limit across this country. That would be uniform.
  Now, there will be three other options.
  One of those options will be an option for a 6-year term in the House 
and 12 years in the Senate.
  One of the options that will be offered out here will be to include a 
provision that allows specifically, regardless of the Supreme Court 
decision, that the States can decide under a 12-year cap for the House 
lesser limits, perhaps 6 years, eight years or whatever it might be, 
but ingrain that in the Constitution, something that is not there now, 
but that some Members really should be actually placed there regardless 
of what the court decides.
  Then there will be an effort to try to establish retroactivity, that 
is to apply term limits, whenever they become effective, to Members now 
and say if you served however many years, bang, that is it.
  Those will be the proposals.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Does this have any votes, that last one, 
the retroactivity?
  Mr. McCOLLUM. I think there are probably some, but I think the 
biggest problem is it is going to be proposed by some Members of the 
other side of the aisle who really do not believe in term limits.
  There is a good deal of cynicism out here, and the problem with that 
is that we have not really seen yet what all is going to come forward, 
but there are certain Members who really do not believe in term limits, 
and they are going to try to figure ways to be able to vote and have 
cover and hide behind that vote.
  And I think retroactivity is probably a device to do that. It is one 
that many of the term limits organizations believe is that kind of a 
device. They are very worried, I think, because they do not want to be 
criticized for being opposed to them, but they are not willing to vote 
for whatever comes out at the end.
  As you know from your experience in Washington State, no State 
initiative in the 22 States that have passed term limits has had the 
retroactive feature. And the one that did try it was your State of 
Washington, and the voters defeated that, and you came back with one 
that was not that way.
  I would like to wrap up by pointing out something that I think is 
important, particularly to my proposal on 12 years.
  I personally do not think that it is good and healthy to have the 
length of time the Senate serves and be limited to different from what 
the House serves. I think it will make the House an inferior body. I 
think it will make it a weaker body vis-a-vis the Senate.
  So I think whatever we determine, whether it is 12 years or 6 years 
or any other number of years, the Senate and the House should serve the 
same number of years. That is true because of conference committees and 
a lot of other reasons.
  I also think that 6 years in particular is too short a period of 
time. We need people who are experienced in this body in order to serve 
as chairmen of committees, And we need people who can be in leadership 
who have had some experience here. Otherwise, you do fall into the trap 
the critics of term limits say, and that is that there will be staff 
who will dominate that place.
  I think there is a call and a good reason to say when we have finally 
decided with a constitutional amendment that goes to the States that 
three-quarters have to ratify a constitutional amendment on it, that at 
that point in time we really should have uniformity. It should be the 
same throughout the country at that point in time.
  Although my version of this amendment that is proposed out here today 
would still leave open the opportunity for the Supreme Court to decide 
that there could be a hodgepodge out there, it is unlikely in my 
judgment that that side will come out. If the proposal that is being 
offered that will give the States an absolute right to make that 
decision were to be adopted, then forever it would be ingrained in the 
Constitution that we would have a hodgepodge of some States having 6-
year terms, some 8, some 12.
  I personally believe, and I think a lot of people do, that it does 
not make good sense, and it is not good government. And it is the 
Federal Government's responsibility to make this kind of decision, just 
as we did with the 17th amendment when we decided direct election of 
U.S. Senators was preferable to the old system of electing those 
Senators through the State legislatures, even though there were those 
at that time who debated the issue who wanted the question of elections 
left to the State as a States' rights matter.
  Ultimately, the States do decide any constitutional amendment. Three-
quarters of the legislatures have to ratify. That is States' rights. 
Once that is there, once they have decided, it seems to me that the 
best bottom line is whatever they do decide.
  The key thing, though, is we are going to get the first-time-in-
history vote on term limits out here next week. All of us who support 
term limits, regardless of our view on the variations, ought to vote 
for the final passage, and we ought to encourage people to help get 
this movement going and pass the word that we are really going to have 
the vote and, by golly, whoever is for term limits ought to be here for 
the last word when the final version, whatever it is, is left standing 
at that point in time.




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