[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 126 (Tuesday, August 1, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H8148-H8153]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


              TRAVEL EXPENSES AT THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of may 

[[Page H8149]]
  12, 1995, the gentlewoman from Washington [Mrs. Smith] is recognized 
for 40 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from 
Ohio [Mr. Hoke].
  Mr. HOKE. Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentlewoman from 
Washington yielding so I could finish what I tried to start earlier 
with respect to just talking about some of the problems that have been 
exposed in the Department of Energy and Secretary O'Leary's travel. 
What I was saying before is that the Secretary has demanded that 23 of 
the DOE program offices each advanced moneys from their program budgets 
to pay for at least two of the invited delegation members on a trade 
mission to South Africa. These are for non-DOE employees. In many cases 
those moneys are then reimbursed back, not to the program departments, 
program offices, but directly to the Secretary of Energy, and the GAO 
has come out with a report that indicates the impropriety of that and 
that that is not the way that the program money is supposed to be 
spent. I am going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
  The per diem cost on this trip that is coming up August 18 for 6 days 
where there are going to be some 47 people going on this trip, the 
total cost of this delegation's trip is $700,000. Now there are 35 
individuals planning to go to South Africa separately from the official 
delegation from the Department of Energy, 28 in advance, 7 separately. 
This is down, by the way, from 51, Mr. Speaker. There were going to be 
51, but apparently, due to some criticism that has been levied from the 
Congress, it is down now to 35, and they are going to go for and 
spending at least 2 weeks in the country in advance doing advance work 
for reasons that are not completely clear. That raises the overall cost 
of the mission to approximately $1.2 million.
  Well, what is wrong with that? Well, first of all, let us look at the 
justification that the Secretary has made for a previous trade mission. 
She claimed that she has gotten $19\1/2\ billion in business for U.S. 
firms as a result of that. Almost all of these claims were based on 
memoranda of understanding and letters of intent, not on actual 
contracts. Actually the DOE has not provided any accounting that shows 
that there are actually signed contracts, and frankly it begs another 
question, and that is would these firms have made these agreements 
otherwise? Would they not still have gone to contract this business? 
Would they not still be interested in creating these relationships? I 
would certainly think they would.
  Second, the DOE inspector general conducted an audit of two of 
Secretary O'Leary's previous trade missions and found problems with 
respect to managing the cost of DOE international travel and recouping 
the costs associated with non-Federal passengers. Let me give you what 
the four suggestions were from the Inspector General, the IG.
  First, prepare formal procedures for acquisition of international air 
services including a clarification of responsibilities for all 
interested parties.
  Second, implement full cost-recovery policy for non-Federal 
passengers as provided for in 10 C.F.R. 1009.
  Third, establish a procedure which insures that the Department 
collects passenger air fares before the trip occurs.
  Fourth, establish accounts receivable for non-Federal
   passengers on the India and Pakistan flights and aggressively pursue 
collection of air fare costs from those passengers.

  Well, those four steps have not been taken. There does not appear to 
be any plan to reimburse the program offices that fronted the money for 
the South Africa trip. In fact, this has been the problem with previous 
trips, the previous trips to India and to Pakistan. As the money being 
transferred was properly authorized and appropriated by Congress, I 
find it extremely troubling that funds that have already been obligated 
are now being redirected without any congressional consultation or 
approval. While it would be easy to dismiss that as an oversight by 
DOE, unfortunately there is a long history of congressional concern 
regarding DOE's reprogramming practices.
  And lastly, Secretary O'Leary has proposed a substantial 
reorganization of DOE, and that is to her credit. I would eliminate DOE 
completely, but she has proposed a substantial reorganization of DOE 
with significant numbers of Federal jobs being eliminated, and at the 
same time it seems extremely strange that the Secretary is mounting an 
extensive international expedition with already strained program 
offices bearing the burden of the costs.
  According to the L.A. Times, Mr. Speaker, the Secretary has spent 
more on her travels than any of her Cabinet colleagues. She stayed in 
higher-priced accommodations using more expensive flight classes and 
more expensive with the very, very high-security details as a result of 
that. Secretary O'Leary is always accompanied by large entourages on 
these trips.
  Now the last thing that I want to do, and I guess my main concern in 
sharing all of this, and I do not want to use up any more of the 
gentlewoman's time, and I appreciate her giving it to me, is that it 
seems to me there is a real problem with respect to an abuse of the 
travel accounts at the Department of Energy, and somebody has got to 
blow the whistle. A senior DOE official provided me with the graphics 
of a T-shirt that Secretary O'Leary was going to distribute to each 
participant of the South Africa trip that was created at the Department 
of Energy on a Department of Energy computer. I understand that they 
have been working furiously all day to vet or to purge the computer of 
this work so the graphics would not show up, but it was designed and 
was going to be created and purchased at taxpayers expense. I think 
that it appears now the Secretary's office has canceled the T-shirt 
order, and, if I have anything to do with that, I am glad of that.
  Obviously creating some T-shirts that look like a rock concert is not 
the issue. The issue here is that there is an arrogant and flagrant 
abuse of taxpayer dollars with respect to travel expenses at a time 
that those programmatic moneys are being taken out of the area that 
specifically insure the safety and the safeguarding of our nuclear 
programs in the Department of Energy.
                              {time}  1900

  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. The gentleman is making an example that is 
pretty flagrant, but people around America see these things. They live 
and they see and they hear their neighbors talk about these things, and 
I think it makes sense, then, when we see the polls that we just saw 
that came out in the last few days, a bipartisan pollster took a poll 
on the confidence in government, and, basically, we flunked. Seventy-
five percent of the people do not trust government, whether it be 
politicians or whether it be these agencies. They see things like this 
and they feel robbed.
  We have to do what the gentleman is doing. We have to dig it out, we 
have to make it public, and we have to change the old ways.
  Mr. HOKE. What is unfortunate about this is that this was shared with 
me by a top official in the Department, and now they are scrambling 
like crazy. They are probably watching this very broadcast and saying, 
``Oh, my goodness, what will we do next?'' What they have done is 
purged their computers. They have canceled the orders. I think that is 
great, but they will try to hang one DOD staffer out to dry, cover the 
whole thing up, and claim the Secretary knew nothing about it and had 
nothing to do with it, and that this was strictly the idea, 
independently, of one person. I thank the whistleblowers in our 
Government.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has really 
brought into focus what we wanted to talk about tonight, and that is 
confidence in government.
  There are several Members of Congress that have been working on 
building confidence in government now for several weeks, in fact, clear 
from last December, when many of us were elected, and we have this 
knowledge that people do not trust this place of Congress because of 
the practices, and yet we watch us do so many things. The people have 
watched us do so many things. At first, we opened up hearings that have 
never been opened. We stopped proxy voting. That is where a Member 
sends a pile of votes and lets 

[[Page H8150]]
someone else vote for them. Good representation, is it not? We 
decreased the size of staff here so people are not drafting legislation 
that have very little to do with it and then policymakers come out here 
and run somebody else's legislation.
  Mr. Speaker, we also got the amount of cost of this place down, and 
yet the poll comes out and 75 percent of the people still do not trust 
us. I think it is because every day there is a new report on a trip one 
Member took to one warm place in the middle of winter, or a gift that 
they received, or a report on something like the sugar lobby, about who 
got the most money from the sugar lobby, or, last week, the report came 
out on who got the most money from the tobacco lobby, always assuming 
if we vote a certain way, we voted that way because we got the money.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, that is clearly not true with everyone on every 
vote, but it is awfully hard to keep a straight face and convince the 
American people that the money is not connected to the vote.
  We resolved finally, a group of us, that we would have to draft 
something that was clean, honest with the American people, honest with 
the incumbents that are here, treating them with respect, but that 
worked, and we drafted the Clean Congress Act, 2072. At first, we tried 
to reduce contributions from special interests, but everyone said why 
leave anything? Then we tried to raise contributions for individuals to 
balance, and they said, ``Oh, good, now the rich control campaigns.'' 
It always came back to one basic
 premise: We needed to get groups out of D.C. and close the checkbooks; 
literally stop any checkbook from being opened in Washington, DC., and 
drive the campaigns back home.

  PACs had a good original purpose, but they have been perverted from 
the very beginning from their purpose. We find that what happens now is 
the very best people come here, often running against those that got 
their money from PACs. A lot of freshmen did this year. They get here 
and they have had a PACs spending war, because the incumbent they 
challenged was funded by PACs.
  Mr. Speaker, these Members get here with debt. They are here 80 hours 
a week. They get to go home to their home district maybe on the 
weekend, because we vote the rest of the week, and we throw everyone 
into a system of paying off debts with PAC money and then we turn 
around and we have a new opponent that is raising PAC money, and so it 
goes, and so it goes.
  Good people come here with good intentions, and it is like swimming 
in a polluted lake. We just do the best we can with the system we have. 
We decided to drain the lake. We realized that most people are in the 
middle of a campaign right now, and that campaign started the day after 
most of us were elected, with often our prior opponents announcing they 
were running against us again and they started raising PAC money to get 
us out of office.
  We cannot lay down our arms in the middle of a war. That would not be 
bravery, it would just be stupidity. We do say that at the end of this 
campaign cycle, we want everyone to disarm at the same time and send 
the campaigns home. Do not take money from anybody outside our State. 
Groups can organize still, even put together their groups and call them 
PACs, they just cannot give money to Federal candidates. We want to 
drive campaigns home.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to show you just a couple of charts that show why 
it is so vital. It used to be PACs played a little bit in the race, to 
let some of the groups that had a little more trouble become a part of 
the political system. Over the last 10 years especially, however, we 
have seen an elevation of PACs that totally excludes the individual and 
leaves the individual as a minor player instead of a major.
  The total PAC contributions have gone from right at 80 million, less 
than 80 million in 1984, to 132 million this last campaign cycle. This 
is just to the House, not the Senate. If you start looking at what 
people started raising in January to pay off debt, especially these new 
Congress people that ran against PAC kings and queens, who raised 
millions before they even filed against them, they are paying off debt. 
They have to clean up their old campaign, and they are facing a new 
person who is adding to that level, too.
  Mr. Speaker, some will say let us just change the numbers and leave 
it here; let us continue to get money from groups and just change the 
numbers a little bit, or from larger individual contributions. I will 
tell you, however, to look at what it does. Incumbents get over 53 
percent of their money from PACs. That is not including the wealthy. 
That is just PACs. Excuse me, 43 percent; 53 percent from individuals. 
Not quite half and half. 2\1/2\ percent or so from parties.
  Challengers, on the other hand, have to raise over 80 percent of 
their money from individuals. That sounds pretty good to me, if it was 
on both sides. In PACs, they get 11 percent. Now, do you wonder, and it 
is no wonder, that challengers have had a tough time getting through 
these doors? The fluke of last year
 was the people getting fed up. Will they stay fed up to that level? 
Probably not. They get weary.

   Mr. Speaker, they kicked a lot of old-timers out. Sorry old-timers 
listening on the screens, but last year they put in new blood. Should 
the new blood have to swim in the polluted lake? We advocate no, and so 
we are asking the American people to join us. We are going as a 
delegation to the United We Stand Conference next month, or this month, 
on the 12th. We are presenting the challenge to the Nation through that 
group.
  This group is organizing around the Nation. We have pulled in other 
good government groups and grass roots groups all over the Nation, and 
we are raising the voice of the American people. If you want to raise 
your voice with the American people, whether you are Members in your 
offices or others listening, join us in supporting 2072, but at least 
become a part of the voice. If the American people do not speak out and 
say this is enough, then it will be the same next campaign, and the 
next campaign, and we will build a new generation of PAC kings and 
queens.
  I would like now to yield, Mr. Speaker, to Charlie Bass of New 
Hampshire, a gentleman who is also moving in this area, working on 
campaign reform, and I think you have a plan to try to move campaigns 
back to the State, too.
  Mr. BASS. I thank the gentlewoman from Washington [Mrs. Smith] for 
yielding to me, and I want to commend her for the courageous effort 
that she has made as a freshman Member of Congress to swim against a 
tide of incumbency.
  I said many times during my campaign last year that there are really 
three parties in Washington, Republicans, Democrats, and incumbents, 
and the incumbents is the largest party of all. I think on November 8 
many of us who did not take any significant amount of political action 
committee money showed that we can make a difference here in 
Washington. As one of those new Members of Congress who is here today, 
and proud to be here, I want to create a Congress that the American 
people can be proud of, a Congress that is elected by people and 
supported by people from Members of Congress' districts.
  I also want to commend the gentlewoman for standing up here tonight 
and bringing to the American people the need to reduce the influence of 
special interests, to require that campaign funds come from a 
candidate's own district. I am here tonight to discuss with you, also, 
an idea I have thought about for many years, as one who has sponsored 
legislation in my own home State to limit campaign spending overall, to 
limit the influence of special interests in my own home State, and to 
establish, among other things, a legislative Ethics Committee to limit 
independent expenditures.
  Mr. Speaker, I feel that we ought to be returning some of the power 
to qualify Federal offices to the States, and it is my intention in the 
coming week to send out a ``Dear Colleague'' letter to my friends 
asking them if they would be willing to join me in an effort to repeal 
the provision of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which preempts all 
State and Federal regulations for Federal officeholders.
  The effect of this repeal would be to give States, such as New 
Hampshire or the State of Washington, or, for example, the State of 
Indiana, which currently has a law on its books that says that anyone 
who contracts with the State cannot contribute to candidates, 

[[Page H8151]]
or lobbyists cannot contribute to candidates. If that is what the 
people in Indiana want to do, they should be able to do that.
  We are in a Congress now that says that we ought to give States more 
rights. We have a new attitude here that says that local control is 
better. I feel that the people and voters of New Hampshire or any other 
State in this country should be able to set the qualifications and 
determine spending limits, determine other limits, as long as they are 
more stringent than the Federal limits, and enact those laws and have 
them apply to candidates for Federal office.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I understand the gentleman 
intends to distribute that this week. That means all the Members 
listening would have a chance to take a look and sign on. I know that I 
certainly will look at anything seriously and get it moving that 
returns power to the States and gets those campaigns back into the 
streets of the States where we come from instead of the side rooms or 
the side cafes and rooms around this place.
  Mr. BASS. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman would yield back, nothing 
that I would envision by repealing this preemption provision, which, by 
the way, is only three lines long, would in any way affect any laws we 
made here in Washington to restrict the influence of political action 
committees and so forth. It would allow the States, however, to go 
farther than anything we decided to do here in Washington.
  Let me point out that in a State like California, and my colleague 
here is from California, lives in the State of California, and they 
have different conditions, different populations, different numbers of 
Members of Congress, a larger delegation and different demographics, it 
may be different from Alaska, where there is only one Member of 
Congress in a huge and rather less populated State, or my home State of 
New Hampshire.
  We established campaign spending limits in New Hampshire. I think we 
were the first in the country to do so after the Buckley-Valeo case in 
1972, which outlawed campaign spending limits, and now other States 
have adopted. Vermont, I think, Arizona, and other States. I think 
these new laws should apply to Members of Congress as well as State 
officeholders. They do, in effect, apply in a de facto sense because 
nobody has challenged these new laws.
  I think if we were to repeal the Preemption Act, then we would allow 
the States to have more control over the people they send to Washington 
and not center all the control of the Federal election process in one 
place, Washington, DC. It is time we turned that trend around, and I 
thank the gentlewoman from Washington for yielding to me.
                              {time}  1915

  Mr. HORN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I would be honored to yield to 
someone who has worked on this long before me, but been very serious 
about the battle.
  Mr. HORN. I commend you, as did my colleague, for the eloquence and 
energy that you bring to this project. It is going to take a lot of 
that and we are going to need a lot of allies. I think you are 
absolutely right. Our problem with government is too many people are 
running the government, be it the executive branch or Congress over the 
years, based on public opinion polls. They have not sat down to think, 
as the gentlewoman has, with the climate of distrust for representative 
government, which is shocking, that we have got to deal with the real 
problems. And the real problems are exactly what the gentlewoman is 
talking about: Over use of money and its influence in American 
politics.
  Now, the Republican Party grappled with this in the 103d Congress, 
and we came forth with an excellent proposal. It banned PAC's, it 
banned soft money, that money from labor unions and corporations, 
organized groups, that go to the political party to conduct 
registration drives, administration of their own operations. It also 
said raise most of the money in your constituency.
  Now, those fundamentals I think are basic, and I think most of us 
would agree with that. The argument comes, do you do it at the three-
fourths level, the majority level, or whatever.
  I had an opponent last time that raised 1 percent of his money in the 
38th Congressional District in California, and 99 percent of his money 
in the east coast, Midwest and other parts of California. I do not 
think that is good for representative government. If your local 
citizens cannot back you, why do we expect others to back us except for 
one reason, that they can get their agenda through you imposed on the 
legislative process.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I was trying to explain to one 
of the major news magazines today what was bothering me about this 
place and why I wanted to change it, and I finally came to a cultural 
issue. That sounds odd. I said I want to change the culture. The 
culture becomes centered on Washington, DC, and people do not have to 
go home after a few years, because they become a chair or they meet 
enough of the special interest groups, and the money kind of comes in 
after you are elected.
  So what this will do, if you take any versions of this, the one they 
introduced last year, eliminating PAC's, making it all come from people 
mostly in your State, or all in your State, I prefer all in your State 
obviously, but it changes the culture, because instead of us fighting 
the war here we move it back into the streets of America, the war of 
public opinion, I cannot stay here next year if I want to run for 
office if my opponents are at home raising money, and I cannot raise it 
here anymore. It will drive the incumbents back home. You will not have 
people just staying here.
  What a wonderful thing for America when America's people reclaim the 
political system. Will it not be great to see some people who have not 
had to go home but once every 2 months or so, and then for special 
things, have to go back and explain votes? I am talking about this 
whole place. I know Members who say they go home every so often. They 
have been here long enough, they do not have to do that anymore. That 
is a serious statement, do not have to do that anymore.
  Mr. BASS. Mr. Speaker, I am taken by the comments of my colleague 
from California about sources of income. I think the gentleman makes an 
excellent point. If you received 2 or 3 percent of the money from your 
district that you run on, and it is a high dollar campaign, who do you 
really represent? Who do you really represent?
  That is what is so cancerous about this system. If all the money 
comes from the Route 495 Beltway or some big metropolitan area where 
there may be some special issue, the key here is you ought to be 
accountable to the people who sent you to Washington. Those are the 
people that really count, and there is nothing wrong with that. There 
ought to be limitations on sources of income, and that ought to be one 
of the highest priorities of this Congress in campaign spending reform.
  The gentleman from California could not have done a better job in 
illustrating that. From my own perspective, I have a similar experience 
in that my opponent's funds were less than 10 percent from the whole 
State of New Hampshire, and I think that was
 made very clear that there was some question as to the quality of that 
representation. I think the gentleman, talking in his own home State of 
California, makes an equally good point.

  Mr. HORN. If the gentlewoman will yield a moment, the other thing you 
started on, you are quite correct, what is the cancerous decay.
  Even though these are all wonderful people, all nice people, and they 
are doing wonderful things, but when you raise the money as easy as it 
is when you are a committee chair, when you are a ranking minority 
Member, when you are in a position of influence and you come to 
Washington, as you both have suggested, and every night of the working 
week you can either go to the Democratic National Club or the 
Republican Capitol Hill Club, and you will find it $500 a clip, not 
just once a year, but now increasingly four times a year, and if you 
are a committee chair in the last Congress, Democrat-controlled, or 
this Congress, Republican-controlled, it is $1,000 a clip.
  Who is bringing those checks? The PAC people. Are they based in your 
district? No. They might have a plant 

[[Page H8152]]
there, but most of them that show up do not have a plant there, because 
you sit on the right committee that affects their livelihood, be it 
agriculture, be it commerce, be it banking and financial institutions, 
whatever it is. And so they say, if you talk to the PAC representative, 
why are you doing it, they say, gee, if I do not do it, I will not have 
access and I have got to be able to get my message over.
  That is a pretty sad commentary on representative government, if you 
have got five hundred a crack on a quarterly basis or one thousand a 
crack, in order to have access to get your message across.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. I think the point is I do not believe that 
most people just say well, you did not give me $1,000, so you do not 
have access. I think what happens is everyone thinks that. So now some 
might be playing hard ball and saying ``Do not even come see me if you 
do not bring money.'' That is the exception. The American people think 
that is how it operates.
  But it has it started to be that is they do it because someone on 
another issue might counter you, and if you do not do it, what if they 
do it, and it becomes a spending war here.
  In Washington State, when I first arrived, it bothered me there as 
much, and I was in the State legislature, as it is doing here. I 
realized they had fund raisers immediately before a session, even 
though they did not have them officially during the half year or so 
they were in session. They would have them and just back people up into 
these huge rooms and continually, several a night, raise money. They 
had office funds, which is where the gifts were put, and that is the 
money they could use for stereos and things like that, then they would 
have campaign funds. And every chair kept track of who came and who did 
not come, and it was pretty blatant there. I do not know if it is here 
or not, but the American people perceive both as disgusting.
  It took me actually 4 years of trying with the legislature, to 
finally have an initiative. I abolished office funds, removed all fund 
raising where we vote, which is what I would like to do here, stopped 
any kind of transfer of money from one candidate to another, forced the 
special interests, our Supreme Court is a little different, more 
liberal, and our Constitution is, to very small amounts of 
contributions, literally took them out of power in 2 years, and 
returned it to where grass roots candidates
 flipped the legislature to beat nearly 60 new people in 1 year, and 
there are only 98.

  So what happened is people, when they had a chance, they came in. But 
it was impossible. For 40-some years it stayed about the same. In fact, 
the Senate stayed in party control for 42 years with no change, 
somewhat like here. And what happened is the place became so ingrown, 
the staff was ingrown, it is a terrible terminology, that staff 
actually drafted bills, they became so powerful. When the Chair was 
there so long, they did not have their own ideas, so staff came in. 
They became powerful. The whole place separated more and more from the 
people.
  The moment we removed the money, within 2 years the whole place 
flipped, and a whole bunch of old-timers did not like the idea of 
running without money, and a bunch of challengers said ``We have the 
chance.'' They hit the streets in the most vibrant campaign cycle we 
ever had.
  Mr. HORN. If you will recall, a few years ago Members in this House 
were able to retire and take the campaign fund they had in their bank 
account with them. In some cases, that meant they could take $1 million 
into retirement. That no longer can be done. Congress finally faced up 
to the idiocy of that operation.
  But you mentioned these office funds at the State legislature. One of 
the things eventually we are going to have to deal with, and I am going 
to put in a bill this year on that, among other things we are all going 
to do, is dealing with leadership PAC's, where whether it be the other 
body in this Congress, or this body, regardless of party, you have 
major leaders with PAC's that they have built up. That is why some of 
them are major leaders. That is why some of them 5, 10, 15 years ago 
have been major leaders, or Lyndon Johnson in the 40's and 50's, is 
they raised the money in their State, they doled it out to the Members, 
and, guess what? The Members that they doled it out to just happened to 
vote for them when Congress reconvenes and chooses its leaders. That is 
a further influence of money that often overcomes talent.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. You, know, we saw that in the State. They 
would have these big fund raisers, and actually the special interests 
did not want to take on another incumbent, so what they would do is 
give a whole lot of money or channel from their membership a whole lot 
of money to one member who they would like to see as a chair of a 
committee or some leadership. They would then take that money and give 
it to someone else, not only for their own benefit, but to launder the 
money. So that they did not have to worry about that PAC. If they lost 
this bet on that particular raise, they did not have to worry about 
them getting mad, and they would play both sides.
  Mr. HORN. That is exactly what happens nationally as well. It is the 
old line of a lobbyist, the railroad owner in New York 100 years ago. 
He said when I am in a Democrat's district, I am a Democrat. When I am 
in Republican's district, I am a Republican. But I am always for the 
Erie Railroad.
  That is what is really gets down to. They are always putting their 
agenda first. if we do what you and Charlie Bass and I and others are 
suggesting, let us get that back to the district. Then it is the 
district's agenda, which is what representative government is all 
about.
  I found it sort of ironic, I have not taken PAC money in either the 
1992 campaign when I was first elected or in 1994. It is sort of 
humorous. Out of the blue came $20,000 in PAC money, which the campaign
 manager, my son, immediately sent back, and just explained we do not 
take PAC money.

  People could not believe it. There is about 35 of us in this Chamber, 
maybe with the freshman now 40, that do not take PAC money. That is 10 
percent of the House, including Members in both parties, about equally 
divided. We have got to encourage others to do the same. One of our 
problems is the Supreme Court of the United States, which might say you 
cannot ban PAC money. Those people have a right to give all they can.
  Well, I think that is personally nonsense. I think Congress ought to 
be able to cap the amount of money, either individuals give, which we 
do, and the amount of money PAC's give, which we do. Now, the question 
would be, if we are for banning PAC's, do we have to let them give just 
$1,000 at most to get by the Supreme Court. I think we also ought to 
limit what individuals can spend of their own money.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. Buckley versus Valeo is a decision that 
both at the State level, and I had one Supreme Court case against our 
initiative, and won, by the way, in our State, and they used Buckley 
versus Valeo, and there are some State supreme court decisions.
  You have to really watch that and decide whether or not this Supreme 
Court would look at it the same way, and whether they would decide 
allowing them to go ahead and organize, so you do not remove their 
ability to associate, and spend within their group, if that would 
satisfy now. Because if you look at the language, it was pretty squishy 
total to begin with. And we have a new Supreme Court. We also probably, 
to be a little safer than totally banning PAC's, letting them organize, 
work within their Members. We do not remove their ability to associate 
and we do not remove their ability to participate. That seems to be an 
easier place to be with a constitutional challenge.
  But we do have to wrestle with this, and I think we the Congress 
should set the best policy we can to clean up this place, do the best 
job we can, bring all of our ideas together, and run with it.
  Now, we are taking a plan to Dallas this month and we are taking it 
to groups all over the Nation, and we are just saying we want to call a 
truce next November. We want it to be over. We want this place to have 
no more special interest money, and we want to work on that direction. 
But so many people are coming up and saying we can make it better. And 
I think this place had better work in honesty with the American people 
and come out with something good, or we are going 

[[Page H8153]]
to face next November's election with people going, ``This Congress was 
just like the other Congresses,'' and we are not just like the other 
Congresses. We have done some revolutionary things.
  But when you throw a little dirt in the barrel, it makes the whole 
barrel look dirty, even though you know it is cleaner. It still looks 
dirty and we need to get rid of that dirt.
  Mr. HORN. You are absolutely correct, because unless we do, 
everything we do will be called into question, when it simply is not 
true. I think if we treat the voters as they are, intelligent, 
thinking, human beings, I have always found you get an excellent 
response. If you level with them, tell them what the problem is, just 
as you are leveling with them, and saying ``Look, we know it is a 
problem. We want to do something about it.''
  What galls me when I hear some of our colleagues on the floor talk 
about the gift ban, but they are taking PAC money practically by the 
wheelbarrow fulls, we ought to combine both, the gift ban and the ban 
on PAC's or severely limiting PAC's.
                              {time}  1930

  And then let us get that package before the House and let us see if 
some of those gift ban people are quite willing to give up their 
several hundred thousand dollars of PAC money for their $50 gift ban.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. I looked at a lot of the bills when I first 
got here thinking, I do not care if they are Democrats or Republicans, 
I was a Democrat 30-some years and then a Republican after that, lesser 
time, and my husband says, ``Honey, you're not born a Democrat; you're 
not born anything.''
  But at 32 I changed. And I looked at all of them thinking, there has 
to be something good in there. I found holes big enough to fly a 747 
bound to a warm place paid for by a lobbyist in it. They were using 
them for political tools.
  I looked at one we faced on the first day. They had left trips. They 
just called them fact-finding trips, but if you looked at it, not only 
did they leave trips, they left trips for their wife or husband. They 
left trips for their staffs. Those are the big gifts. So they did not 
even deal with gifts. They had 20-some pages of exceptions, then they 
played around with whether you could eat a hot dog with a lobbyist. I 
do not give a rip if they eat a hot dog with a lobbyist. I care deeply 
about them going to Mexico to check something out. And we all know 
Americans go to Mexico.
  So they have played games long enough. The American people do not 
trust us. So we do have to come out with a package. And 2072 says no 
gifts, no trips and no money from any special interest group here, only 
people from your States.
  People are saying, why do you not just let people give you money 
here? Because lobbyists are people, wealthier people. And Bill Gates, 
bless his heart, he can give everybody here as much as we would want, 
it probably does not even affect him. So we can shift it to individuals 
and say, let us just let individuals take everywhere, go ahead and give 
everywhere, but those individuals will shift right into this place and 
instead of having lobbyists fund raisers or PAC fund raisers, we are 
going to end up with large donor, trial lawyers for certain people, 
medical for other people, they are going to move in with large, large 
checks. And the influence is going to stay here. So we have to move it 
out.
  Mr. HORN. On that very point, I mentioned the Republican bill we 
brought to the floor in the 103d Congress. We had a compromise bill 
also that we tried to get to the floor. The Democratic bill came in 
where they want the public to pay for their campaigns. The Republican 
bill came in, no PAC money, no soft money, raise most of it in your 
district. But the so-called Synar-Livingston bill, Mike Synar, then a 
Representative from Oklahoma, now suffering some ill health, was the 
leader on it with Bob Livingston, the chairman of our Committee on 
Appropriations now. And there were eight others of us that did not take 
PAC money, generally, that were on it.
  And what he did was cut PAC's down to $1,000 from their current 
$5,000 in the primary they can give you and $5,000 in the general 
election. He cut them down to $1,000, and he cut the present maximum of 
$1,000 from an individual down to $500 and felt that was par and that 
would pull back both of them, a little bit of nuclear disarmament, as 
you have been talking about. Of course, what happened was the 
Democratic leadership knew we could get that passed in the House.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. They were not real serious.
  Mr. HORN. And they would not let us get to the floor and the 
Democratic-controlled Committee on Rules refused to let us have a vote 
on Synar-Livingston. And obviously, I think we could have passed that. 
I think enough Democrats who were holding out for the public financing 
and did not like the complete abolition of PAC's would have bought that 
package. But they would not even let us vote on it.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. I think it points to the fact that many 
people here over the years know what the American people want. And they 
want this place cleaned up. But they are not real serious about doing 
it. But they want to make it look like they are trying. When I got done 
looking at all the proposals that were being floated out, so many of 
them were a game.
  I want to thank the gentleman for joining me.
  Mr. HORN. I thank you for your leadership in this area.
  Mrs. SMITH of Washington. We will work together and we will make it 
happen with the people's help.


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