[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 169 (Monday, October 30, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H11384]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT ON LOBBY REFORM AND GIFT BAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Doggett] is recognized during 
morning business for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, today is the time for this House to act on 
lobby reform and a gift ban for Members of this House. It is not only 
today that I have offered those remarks, because today we take up the 
legislative branch appropriations bill, but it, in fact, was the first 
day of this session that many of us urged the House to reform itself in 
an attempt to pass lobby and gift ban reform on January 4 from this 
very spot, and yet the next day, Speaker Newt Gingrich had this to say 
of the effort. He described it as ``an astonishingly narrow and self-
destructive act.''
  With that background, we proceeded once again in the spring to 
attempt to reform this House and the way it handles itself both with 
regard to lobbies and with regard to gift bans. The Speaker responded 
again in a preadjournment news conference, saying, ``We have not had 
the mental energy and the time this summer to do anything about this 
issue of ethics and gift ban and lobby reform.''
  Apparently the Speaker has still not been able to muster the mental 
energy. Apparently he still suffers from great mental fatigue, because 
although the Senate referred to this Speaker's podium on July 26 a 
lobby reform act, reforming and rewriting the legislation that had not 
been significantly reformed since the year of my birth, 1946, that bill 
has been sitting and is sitting at this very moment at the Speaker's 
rostrum from July 26 to today, July, August, September, October.
  That is, indeed, super fatigue, I suppose. I would not think that it 
takes a considerable amount of mental energy to simply be able to go 
through the act of referring the bill to a committee so that it could 
be studied. But Speaker Gingrich, perhaps referring back to his 
suggestion that reform was a self-destructive act, has not been able to 
muster the energy to even refer the bill.
  It is little wonder then that Gerald Seib, writing in the Wall Street 
Journal this past month, had this to say, ``The new Republican leaders 
of Congress have flat out blown it this year in one area, cleaning up 
the political system.'' Then he refers to Senator John McCain, who 
played such a significant role in the 98 to zero victory for lobby and 
gift-ban reform over in the U.S. Senate, where there is still a little 
bipartisanship when it comes to cleaning up the place. He says the 
signals that the House will not get to the gift ban this year makes 
Senator McCain worry that his Republican House colleagues may have 
developed a tin ear that will prevent them from making reforms that are 
in their own political interest in the long run. ``I detect over there 
a kind of heady environment that maybe is not as sensitive to public 
opinion as you would think.''

  Indeed, that is what has happened here, because our Republican 
colleagues, rather than join us in a bipartisan effort to clean up this 
House when they had an opportunity to do that on January 4, voted 
``no'' against gift-ban reform. When they had an opportunity to do that 
on June 20, on a vote on this floor, they voted ``no'' against gift-ban 
reform of the very type of character that their colleagues in the 
Senate would vote to approve unanimously only 1 week later. On June 22, 
a third time, they voted ``no'' when the issue was gift-ban and lobby 
reform, and then on September 6, you would think after Speaker Gingrich 
and his colleagues had had significant time to rest up over the August 
recess, no, they voted ``no'' consistently again one more time against 
gift-ban and lobby reform.
  So it was that last Wednesday, on October 25, many of us thought 
there would finally be an opportunity to address this issue once again, 
when the legislative branch appropriations was here on the floor of the 
House. But instead, the Republican leadership jerked that bill off the 
floor, afraid that real reform might occur. What did we get instead of 
an opportunity to vote on the issue of gift-ban and lobby reform? We 
got a press conference on Friday which represented simply more hem, 
hedge, and haw when it came to reforming this House, the possibility 
that there might be action by November 16, but the suggestion that they 
did not want to adopt what the Senate had done on a bipartisan basis; 
they wanted to strengthen the bill.
  How do they proposed to strengthen it? Well, they are considering an 
exemption for the golf caucus. That is their form of strengthening. I 
suggest that strengthening by exemption is the equivalent to the 
leadership by example we have seen when it comes to cleaning up this 
House. We have had, instead, the same timekeeper on that kind of reform 
that the House Ethics Committee has used with reference to the ethical 
complaints against the Speaker: Wait, wait, wait.

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