[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 59 (Thursday, March 30, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H4014-H4015]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      HISTORIC VOTE ON TERM LIMITS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Mr. Speaker, yesterday we held a historic vote on 
term limits. It is the first such vote 
[[Page H4015]] that has ever taken place in this Chamber. It was the 
great day for this country and for this Congress.
  The American people have wanted us to have a vote on the floor and an 
honest debate on the floor on term limits for some time. Unfortunately, 
it was not until we elected a Republican leadership and a Republican 
Congress that we were able to bring that vote to the floor.
  Now, if you read some of the reports in the papers today, it says 
that this was a loss for the Republicans. But the fact of the matter is 
that over 85 percent of Republicans supported term limits yesterday on 
final passage and almost 85 percent of the Democrats opposed term 
limits. So what does that tell you about which party is responsive to 
the American people?
  Well over 70 percent of Americans support term
   limits. They think it is time that we put an en end to career 
politicians, and I could not agree more, but the fact of the matter is 
constitutional amendments do not pass usually on the first vote. It 
took almost 20 years to pass a constitutional amendment that allowed 
our Senators to be elected by the people and not State legislatures.

  So we will be back, and it will be the Republicans once again leading 
the charge, and we will pass term limits very soon.
  I could not help, though, being amused by some of the rhetoric that 
was flying around the past couple of days on term limits. I found out 
that term limits were the moral equivalent to the Holocaust and to 
slavery.
  Now, I may be dumb, I guess I am just a little slow, I am just a 
freshman here, but I really could not piece the logic together that 
would be able to compare term limits to a holocaust that killed 6 
million Jews during world War II. Nor could I figure out how term 
limits somehow could apply to slavery, but I heard it yesterday from 
the other side of the aisle, a very novel argument. But then again, we 
have heard this before, haven't we?
  While a certain segment of this body continues to move forward with 
real ideas to change the course of America's history, to return it back 
to what our Founding Fathers intended it to be, another segment of 
liberals in this House can do nothing but scare children and try to 
scare senior citizens.
  We tried to cut out a tax break for the rich for Viacom and, when we 
did, our Ways and Means chairman was compared to Adolph Hitler. Of 
course, we cannot forget what happened last week when we tried to help 
children by cutting back on the expansive bureaucracy that is 
strangling programs so the money does not get to children but instead 
gets swallowed up by huge bureaucracies.

                              {time}  1515

  We saw everybody going around with their ties with children on it. I 
just thought that was swell but the fact of the matter is no positive 
proposal was put forward.
  We are trying to keep the bureaucrats out of our children's life. We 
are trying to go back to the type of government that Thomas Jefferson 
and James Madison and our Founding Fathers envisioned 200 years ago 
when they said the government that governs least governs best.
  We try to stay out of senior citizens' pockets, and yet to hear the 
rhetoric during the balanced budget debate, one would think that the 
Republicans were enemies of Social Security and somehow the Democrats 
were the protectors of it.
  Let me flash back to 1993 when there was a vote to reach into the 
pockets of senior citizens on Social Security, to raise taxes on Social 
Security recipients. And let me ask Members to remember back and try to 
count up how many Republicans voted to tax senior citizens' Social 
Security benefits. Let me see: zero, none. Not one Republican supported 
stealing money from Social Security recipients. It was a plan that was 
passed with full support of the Democrats and not one Republican.
   et, now somehow 2 years later, they talk down to the American 
public, they are stupid, and say somehow, OK, we went after your Social 
Security checks 2 years ago, but now we are your friends, trust us this 
time. All the while they bring forward not one idea on how to balance 
the budget.
  We are $4 trillion in debt, we are spending $4 for every $3 we take 
in. It is our children who will suffer in the end if we do not stop the 
demagoguery and start talking about real issues. That is what we have 
been doing for 100 days, that is what we will continue to do the next 
100 days, and I hope somebody on the other side of the aisle has the 
courage to step forward with real plans instead of race baiting and 
trying to scare children and scare the old. They deserve more, and they 
are going to get more from us.


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