[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 58 (Wednesday, March 29, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H3966-H3967]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              TERM LIMITS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, what was the final vote there? Do any of my 
colleagues know? 227 to 204? So our brilliant Speakers prediction was 
right on the nose almost. We got way in the high 80's on the Republican 
side of the aisle and let me see, let me do a little arithmetic, 205 
Democrats in this Chamber, the oldest party in America, Andy Jackson, 
great tradition, and, yeah, they did not give us enough here to get 
through.
  OK. Do we not already have term limits by way of elections? Well, 
obviously not when 90 percent of all the incumbents in the House and 
Senate who wanted their seats back got it. Forty-two people did not 
even have an opponent. I guarantee you that number will not be that 
high on November the 5, 1996. Particularly if this great oldest party 
in America puts up Clinton, we are not going to have 42 unchallenged 
seats. The goal of the Grand Old Party is to have no unchallenged seat 
in the United States of America comes 1996 election year.
  Number two, is it hypocritical for anyone to advocate term limits who 
have already served longer than that? 
 [[Page H3967]] Now, they were throwing around a lot of false figures 
here. I have announced that I am in my last term. Nobody gave me credit 
for that all during the debate. I served 6 years, had my seat chopped 
in four parts because they could not find a candidate, including 
Gregory Peck's son, to whip me twice, the most expensive race in the 
history of the House. I raised over $2 million, he raised over $1.5 
million in 1980, then, bingo, they cut my seat up.
  I said to President Reagan, ``What do you think I should do?'' He 
said, ``Bob, there is a Democrat liberal down there in Orange County 
and don't you guys call that Reagan country. Why don't you go down 
there and knock him off.'' So I did and I said I would only stay for 12 
years because one of the most arrogant things I heard here all night is 
that in each district in America, and some compliments went back and 
forth, each district has found the greatest statesman or stateswoman 
that that district was ever going to produce in American history.
  Well, I can tell you something, in every district in America there is 
a woman, there is a man, there is
 a retired military person, there is a sharp young man or woman just 
out of college that would like to serve for 6, 12 years, get it over 
with and then go in the private sector and create jobs and carry that 
government experience with them the rest of their life.

  Has it ever occurred to anybody that since Jeremiah Dent left the 
House there is not a single admiral or general over in the other body 
and only Sonny Montgomery in this House, and then people complimented 
all the World War II people in this House. I have watched Watergate 
babies, pro-Sandinista, pro-Hanoi demonstrators try to knock off all 
our World War II people in this majority party and take their 
chairmanships away from them. So where was the respect factor for World 
War II veterans there?
  Then it was inherent on both sides of the aisle, arguing against term 
limits that somehow or other the process is not broken. If this process 
is not broken, how do we get into bloody $5 trillion worth of debt this 
coming September? Every man, woman and child, every newborn baby on 
September 20 of this year and every man or woman about to meet their 
maker owes $20,000. Just how did that happen, if this process is so 
wonderful?
  And we are the greatest assemblage of statesmen and women that this 
Nation has ever seen. No, I loved it when our dynamic Speaker said this 
will be H.R. 1 next year.

                              {time}  2145

  Look, folks, here is the countdown watch. I may market these later in 
the year if I can get it through the Committee on Ethics. Here is the 
countdown watch. I do not like that backward running watch. I am an 
analog guy. I want it to go the right way, clockwise. Here is the 
countdown. Here is Clinton taking a little tumble there and it says 587 
days to the election day. My wife has one that is 76 days longer. Her 
watch counts down to the inauguration, January 20, 1997, 587 days. And 
if the American people give us the White House to sink it up for the 
first time since I was too young to vote, and we have the House and the 
Senate and the White House, as Eisenhower had in January of 1953 when I 
got sworn in that same week into the Air Force, you are going to see 
amazing things happen in this country. The gentleman from New York [Mr. 
Solomon], one of our finest Congressmen, was saying in the cloakroom 
after the vote, imagine, imagine, he said, if we get the White House, 
and hold the House and Senate, what we can do for this great country of 
ours. Faith, family and freedom. That should be the focus of this 
House, and that freedom means liberty from big, oppressive taxing-
taxing, spending-spending government. $5 trillion, term limits, maybe 
in the next Congress. God bless you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for those 
5 minutes.


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