[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 82 (Wednesday, May 17, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6800-S6801]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         THE PRESIDENT'S INTENTION TO VETO THE RESCISSIONS BILL

  Mr. GORTON. This morning, Mr. President, the President of the United 
States, Bill Clinton, announced that he intended to veto the 
rescissions bill, a proposal to save some $16 billion of already 
appropriated money as a modest down payment on the tremendous fiscal 
crisis facing the United States today.
  This announcement was both a surprise and, I believe, almost 
unprecedented because, Mr. President, I am informed by the chairman of 
the Senate Appropriations Committee, and can speak from my own personal 
knowledge as the chairman of one of the subcommittees of the 
Appropriations Committee, that there was no communication emanating 
from the White House and directed at the conference committee which has 
been in almost continuous session for some 2 weeks on this rescissions 
bill about the President's desires or about his bottom line.
  Mr. President, this is in dramatic contrast with conference 
committees on appropriations bills in the past, in either the Reagan 
administration or the Bush administration, in which that contact 
between the White House and the Congress was constant and in which the 
bottom line of the President was always well and clearly known to 
members of the conference.
  Here, by contrast, we had a situation in which the White House was 
almost totally silent with respect to its request about rescissions. 
The President still pays lip service to a $16 billion goal which must 
be seven or eight times larger than the goal of his original 
rescissions bill itself. But only after the deed is done, only when all 
that remains for the Congress is the formality of the approval of this 
conference committee report, do we hear, first, that it does not cut 
enough dollars from what the President describes as pork, and takes too 
much out of proposals which are of greater interest to him.
  Mr. President, a few general remarks.
  The President attacks spending on Federal courthouses, on the 
building of U.S. courthouses in various parts of the country.
  Mr. President, I have no dog in this fight. Earlier, there was a 
courthouse in Seattle in one of these appropriations bills, but it is 
rescinded in this bill. So none of the so-called pork exists in my 
State.
  And there is also criticism of a number of highway projects that were 
not rescinded. But note, Mr. President, I said ``not rescinded.'' Every 
one of these projects which the President of the United States now 
describes as pork, he signed into law less than a year ago. Last year's 
appropriations bill for transportation, for the Treasury Department, 
for GSA, for the Post Office, was signed and hailed by the President. 
Those bills had every one of these projects contained in them and more 
besides, a significant number that are rescinded in this bill. So today 
we have described as pork proposals which the President hailed last 
year and proposals which spent more last year when he signed them than 
this year when some but not all have been rescinded.
  What in the world could have happened to have changed the President's 
mind about specific projects in the course of 6 months, he does not 
tell us.
  Mr. President, as recently as about 2 months ago, when the original 
rescissions debate had been completed in both the House of 
Representatives and here in the U.S. Senate, the President said of the 
Senate proposal,

       The bill passed 99 to 0 in the Senate, and I will sign the 
     Senate bill if the House and Senate will send it to me. 
     That's how we should be doing the business of America.

  Mr. President, I think it is more than safe to say that the bill the 
President attacked today is considerably closer to the proposal passed 
by the Senate just a few weeks ago than those passed by the House of 
Representatives. In many of the very education and job training areas 
which the President now uses as an excuse to veto this bill, the Senate 
provision prevailed, lock, stock, and barrel, was accepted by the 
conferees. In several others, the compromise is considerably closer to 
the Senate provision than it is to the House provision, in some, it is 
50-50, and maybe, in one or two, it is closer to the House provision.
  But, Mr. President, a tiny handful--2, 3, 4 percent--of the dollar 
amount of rescissions fall into the categories which the President now 
criticizes.
  And, Mr. President, one more repetition of my first point. Not a word 
about this 1, 2, 3, 4 percent of these rescissions being deal busters, 
being entirely unacceptable to the President, was communicated to the 
conference committee while it was in being.
  Mr. President, is it not safe to say, overwhelmingly safe to say, 
that the President of the United States wanted to have something in 
this bill that could give him a political excuse for a veto? I regret 
to say that I believe that to be the case.
  And one more not incidental point, Mr. President: there is a part of 
this bill that the President of the United States mentioned today which 
comes very close to home. I know the Presiding Officer will remember 
the debate on the floor of the Senate here on so-called timber 
language. That vote was very close in language, of which I was the 
author, and was substituted for much more stringent House language in 
the course of the debate here in the Senate. But even our milder 
language passed only by a narrow margin.
  Briefly, the House of Representatives mandated a certain harvest 
level of salvage timber in all of the national forests of the United 
States. The Senate, in language which I wrote, did not mandate any 
harvest at all but simply freed this administration to carry out its 
own plans for salvage timber and its own plans for harvest in the 
forests of the Pacific Northwest under option 9.
  In no way did the House language require President Clinton and his 
administration to do anything that it had not planned to do. It simply 
freed what the administration wants to do, consistent with its views of 
all the environmental laws from the constant blizzard of litigation to 
which it has been subjected over the last several years.
  And in fact, as recently as a week ago, the new Secretary of 
Agriculture, who, of course, has the Forest Service under his 
jurisdiction, wrote a letter to the chairman of this conference 
committee, one of the few interventions by anyone in the administration 
with the work of the conference committee, and said, and I am quoting 
him:

       We believe that the Senate provision which directs the 
     Secretary, acting through the Chief of the Forest Service, to 
     ``prepare, offer and award salvage timber sale contracts to 
     the maximum extent feasible to reduce the backlog volume of 
     salvage timber in the interior'' offers a more responsible 
     approach than was adopted by the House.

  So a week ago this Senate timber provision was evidently acceptable 
to the administration. Now, Mr. President, the timber provision which 
is denominated by the President of the United States today as being a 
giveaway to big timber companies is the original Senate language 
amended only in minor details in a way that the administration itself 
asked us to amend it.
  I repeat, Mr. President, what Mr. Clinton now criticizes is a set of 
provisions his own Secretary of Agriculture approved of by this 
language a week ago with minor changes that they suggested themselves. 
It is not the original House language.
  Now, our Chief Executive is either ignorant of the rules which govern 
timber sales in the Forest Service or deliberately disingenuous when he 
begins, once again, the class warfare of big timber companies. Most of 
the big timber companies in the Pacific Northwest at least are not 
eligible to harvest Forest Service timber because they export some of 
the logs that they own from their own lands--the Plum Creeks, the 
Weyerhaeusers of this world are not a part of this process at all.
  Who are these so-called big timber companies that will benefit from 
this? Let me read you a couple of letters that I have received in the 
course of the last month.
  The first one is from Tom Mayr, of the Mayr Bros. Co. in Hoquiam, WA, 
a local mill in that community. I am quoting:

       Slade, you must realize that this amendment is the single 
     most important piece of legislation in over 5 years to Mayr 
     Brothers and many independent sawmills like ours. Congress 
     and President Clinton have said [[Page S6801]] that they 
     would get us timber, but there hasn't been any significance 
     sold since 1990 on the Olympic National Forest. Your 
     amendment would realize four of our 318 timber sales with 
     enough log volume to run the large log mill two shifts for 1 
     year. This would put 50 people back to work immediately.

  Or another one from one of what apparently are these huge timber 
conglomerates, the Hurn Shingle Co. in Concrete, WA, and I quote:

       It is nice to see that there is some hope for our shake and 
     shingle mill. We have not operated our mill, due to lack of 
     raw materials, since December 1993. We only operated 12 weeks 
     in 1993. So, as you and I both know, any help you can give us 
     would be encouraging. These amendments are very important for 
     our company, as a wood supply would be something that we have 
     not had for a very long time.

  These are typical responses, Mr. President, and it is that kind of 
small-town, independently owned company providing employment where it 
is not otherwise available that will be modest beneficiaries of the 
President's inadequate, in my view, option 9 and of the opportunity to 
harvest timber which has been partly destroyed by forest fires or by 
bug infestation all across the country and which, within a relatively 
short period of time, will rot to the point at which it is not worth 
anything from a commercial point of view but becomes magnificent 
kindling wood for future forest fires, fires like that which devastated 
the Northwest last summer.
  So, Mr. President, we have a Chief Executive who criticizes timber 
provisions his own Secretary of Agriculture previously approved, who 
criticizes as pork spending on public buildings that he approved by his 
signature on appropriations bills last year, and who criticizes modest 
reductions in programs he likes about which he was entirely silent 
during the deliberations of the conference committee.
  Mr. President, that is not the way in which a Chief Executive of this 
country should act. It is not responsible to the affected people. It is 
not responsive to his duty to help us to begin to work toward a 
balanced budget. It is not responsive in his relationships with this 
body or with the House of Representatives.
  I regret this politicization of the process, and I have every hope 
that if we must begin this process over again, we say to the President, 
what we said this time we mean next time and if you want cooperation, 
if you want the additional money you have asked for for other programs, 
you need to be willing to work with the Congress and stick to your own 
word in the future.
  This is an extremely disappointing message, not just to the Members 
of this body who have worked so hard on coming up with an important 
bill, but because of its destructive impact on a drive toward 
responsibility, fiscal prudence, and a change in the way in which 
politics is practiced in the United States.
  We were selected last year, Mr. President--I know this is 
particularly true with respect to the Presiding Officer--because we 
were going to do things differently and keep our commitments. We have 
done so, and we are now frustrated in carrying out the people's will by 
this action.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  

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