[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 175 (Tuesday, November 7, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S16724]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      HOLD THE LINE--NO COMPROMISE

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, recently I received a letter from a 
constituent named Sue Magruder, who lives in Snohomish, WA. This is 
what she wrote:

       Dear Senator Gorton: Hold the line. If the President 
     decides to veto and the Government shuts down, so be it. We 
     don't need all this Government, and compromise is out of the 
     question.
       Please pass this sentiment on to the rest of your 
     colleagues. We want you to hold the line. Don't compromise 
     with my tax dollars because there is no more to give.

  Mrs. Magruder and her husband are small business people in the town 
of Snohomish, WA. They feel--and I think they feel justly--that they 
are overburdened with regulation and with taxes, with attempting to 
support themselves, with attempting to make both their own family and 
their community a better place in which to live. And they, together 
with millions of other Americans like them, want us to continue on the 
course that we set out at the beginning of this year--the course that 
will bring the budget into balance, a course that will remove at least 
some of the duplicative and unnecessary regulations from their backs, a 
course which will lessen the burden of taxation, which governments at 
all levels impose on them.
  They, unlike many Members of Congress, believe that the money that 
they earn is their own, and that they can be asked to give some of that 
to support common purposes. They disagree, however, that somehow or 
another everything they earn belongs to the Government, which, in its 
generosity, will allow them to keep some of it. That is a fundamental 
disagreement that they have with many Members of this body and many 
others who live and work in this Capital of the United States. They 
know that every penny the Government gets comes out of the pocket of 
some hard-working American citizen or some other person who lives and 
works at some point or another in this country.
  Sue Magruder wrote that there is no more to give. In that line, she 
was concentrating on herself and her family and her community. But at 
least an equally undesirable--no, immoral element in the way in which 
this Government has been run during the course of the last 20, 30, or 
40 years is that we spend money by the hundreds of billions of dollars 
that we are not taking directly from our citizens in the form of taxes, 
but are borrowing, at interest, and sending the bill not to the 
citizens who live and work in the United States now, but to their 
children and our children and grandchildren. That, Mr. President, is a 
greater imposition, a greater wrong done to them than can possibly be 
done by any control over the increase in spending policies, by the 
cancellation of any marginal Government spending program.
  We simply do not have the right to spend the money on consumption 
today and ask our children and their children and their children to pay 
the bill. That is the central issue; that is the central question which 
separates us from a White House that believes in the status quo and 
believes that there really is nothing wrong with the continuation of 
multibillion-dollar deficits year after year, as far as the eye can 
see. And it is on that proposition, Mr. President, that I do not 
believe that constructive compromise is possible. Once the White House, 
once the administration realizes the depth of our feeling on this 
issue, once it comes to its senses and is willing to join us in the 
goal of balancing the budget in 7 long years, on the basis of realistic 
projections, then, Mr. President, I think many things are said to be 
compromised. Many elements of the spending program can go up while 
others go down. I do not believe that there is any absolute bottom line 
after we have reached that conclusion. Under those circumstances, 
compromise will be a constructive activity. But to compromise away the 
proposition that we must stop spending more than we take in would be 
essentially wrong, would be a repudiation of the commitments that those 
in the majority made to our voters last year. Mr. President, I am 
convinced it cannot and will not be done.
  So, if I may, I will end these comments by repeating one part of Sue 
Magruder's letter:

       We want you to hold the line. Don't compromise with my tax 
     dollars because there is no more to give.

  Mr. President, that is correct and that is the line that we are going 
to continue to hold.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. 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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