[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 165 (Tuesday, October 24, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H10638-H10639]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           GINGRICH BOOK DEAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller] is recognized 
during morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, once again we are confronted 
in the press with reports of violations of House rules with respect to 
our Speaker of the House, Speaker Gingrich. That is the bulk sale of 
his books to organizations that have connections to the Speaker and 
have been supportive of the Speaker or in fact have contributed to the 
Speaker in the past.
  We saw, unfortunately, in the past when the Speaker engaged in this 
same activity, he later had to resign from office for this 
transgression of House rules. The suggestion here is because the 
commission is somewhat smaller, therefore it is right. No, it is not. 
The house rules prevent that.
  This is the second time in a matter of a week and a half where 
revelations have again appeared in the press suggesting that the 
Speaker's political action committee, GOPAC, was more deeply involved 
and involved earlier in Federal campaigns and campaigns for Members of 
Congress and trying to change the majority in Congress before it was 
authorized to do so.
  The New York article that was published a couple of weeks ago 
outlines exactly what took place in communications between GOPAC and 
members of the Republican Party. So where are we?
  We are a year later. What is an ethics committee and a chairman of 
that ethics committee doing that continues to try to manage the 
investigation and to manage the spin and to manage the flow of 
information to Members of Congress, to the press, and to the public 
rather than engaging in an investigation. A year later, when witnesses 
still have not been called, when documents have still not been 
subpoenaed, and information has not been gone through that is relevant 
to this information, according to the popular press.
  What we need, what this House needs and what this House deserves and 
what the American people deserve is a full-blown independent 
investigation, not an investigation managed by Members of the Speaker's 
party who are indebted to the Speaker politically in this House or for 
their daily activities in the House or to their districts. What we need 
is an investigation, as the Speaker called for for the previous 
Speaker, and that is an independent counsel. As the Speaker said of the 
previous Speaker, if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to 
fear.

  What this House cannot tolerate and what Members of this House cannot 
tolerate and what the public should not tolerate is the continued 
efforts to try to manage this investigation, to get past the Contract 
With America. Then they wanted to manage it to get past the Medicare 
fight. Then they wanted to manage it to get past reconciliation. Then 
there is a question of whether the Speaker is going to run for 
President. Will the revolution continue?
  Those are all interesting. Those all my be consequences of the 
Speaker's activities and the consequences of this investigation, but 
they are not reasons of which an independent investigation should be 
forgone.
  We are talking about the most powerful Member of this House, 
obviously one of the most powerful politicians in the country, one of 
most powerful people in line of succession to the President of the 
United States. The suggestion is somehow that we are going to manage 
and we are going to change the nature of the investigations that this 
Congress is engaged in in the past when it has to unfortunately 
investigate one of its own. That is that you have to eventually get to 
an individual, an independent counsel.
  Apparently the ethics committee has arrived at this conclusion after 
a year of seeing that they could not properly handle this 
investigation. So now what they are trying to do is to manage the 
charter of the independent counsel, to suggest that he can only go down 
road A, but he cannot go down road B, he 

[[Page H 10639]]
can only go down so far on this path of evidence, but he cannot go down 
too far. He cannot stumble across things that may come up in the nature 
of that investigation.
  If they had done that to the independent counsel in the Espy case, 
they would have never discovered Jim Lake and his scheme to provide 
illegal contributions to a Federal candidate.
  That is the nature of an independent counsel, to be independent and 
as free to go as far as the facts and the truth take that individual; 
not as far as the facts and the political realities of the political 
debts and the political obligations take that investigation, but as far 
as the facts and the truth take that investigation.

                              {time}  1245

  The time has come for the chairman of the Committee on Standards of 
Official Conduct to admit they cannot do a job that will satisfy the 
needs of the Members of this House of Representatives in terms of 
telling their constituents that we have a different way of doing 
business, that we have a different way of handling congressional 
ethics, that we have a different way of handling the transgressions of 
those ethics because it is now Speaker Gingrich, as opposed to Speaker 
Wright, or it is not Speaker Gingrich, as opposed to 9 or 10 other 
Members of Congress, that had independent counsels. Let us meet the 
standard that Speaker Gingrich has set our for the House, and that is 
an independent counsel.

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