[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 179 (Monday, November 13, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S16971]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            A BUDGET PROMISE

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, in the middle of last week, at the 
suggestion of one of my colleagues from Washington State in the House 
of Representatives, most of the Washington congressional delegation and 
several Members from other States in the country began a campaign to 
allow people in the United States to speak out in a tangible and 
dramatic fashion their desire that we stop coming up with excuses and 
pass a budget which could promise a balance to the American people.
  We wanted individual citizens throughout the country to be able to 
say we have loaded enough in the way of debt on the backs of our 
children and grandchildren and that it was time to stop, time to chart 
a new course of action. The way in which we proposed to do this was to 
suggest to each and every individual in the country that he or she, if 
she wished the President to sign a balanced budget bill, should send 
the President a pen, a pen like the one I hold here in my hand, or, for 
that matter, a No. 2 pencil, or, in the case of the very children who 
will be saddled with the debts that we have run up in the past and that 
this President insists that we continue to run up, even a crayon. We 
suggested any writing instrument, in other words, Mr. President, except 
for a red pen, on the ground that there was a sufficient amount of red 
ink in Washington, DC, already.
  This announcement took place on Wednesday of last week. On Friday 
afternoon I was present at radio station KVI in Seattle, a talk radio 
station, which had not much more than 24 hours earlier taken up this 
call and had suggested sending those pens either directly to the radio 
station or to some two dozen drop-off points throughout western 
Washington.
  By the time I reached the KVI studios, there were already huge piles 
of envelopes containing pens--some without notes, almost all with 
return addresses, some with short notes to the President--stacked on 
the table surrounding the microphones in the studios. They numbered in 
the thousands, produced simply by that single radio station.
  Others in the State of Washington have taken up the cause. This 
morning the National Taxpayers Union held a news conference attended by 
myself and by the junior Senator from Georgia and my colleague in the 
House of Representatives, together with one of these radio talk show 
hosts, to ask that this cause be taken up by other radio stations 
across the United States. If those stations have anything like the 
success that we had, there will literally be hundreds of thousands, 
perhaps up to five digits, of pens delivered to the White House, each 
and every one of which asks the President to sign a bill. No more 
excuses, no more deferrals, no more putting off to next year what we 
should do this year, but a set of laws, a set of changes and directions 
that will clearly promise us a balanced budget no later than shortly 
after the turn of the new century.
  It is ironic, I believe, that we should have to insist that the 
President of the United States do this because when he was a candidate 
for President, Mr. Clinton promised to balance the budget in 5 years. 
He abandoned that promise on being elected. And by the beginning of 
this year, 2 years after being sworn in, he submitted a budget that 
would never be balanced, in fact, a budget that would never have 
deficits of less than $150 billion a year.
  Later, he said perhaps he could do the job in 10 years, then 9, then 
briefly 7, now back to 10, but that he could only do it if he were 
allowed to set the assumptions, to play with the statistics, so that 
balancing the budget would become an easy task without any significant 
changes in spending policies in the United States, a tactic which has 
been used briefly by Presidents, both Democrat and Republican, with 
unsurprising results--increasing rather than decreasing budget 
deficits.
  In addition, the proposal which we have been debating today, the 
reconciliation bill which will come before this body before the end of 
the week and be sent to the President before the end of the week, does 
much more to keep the President's original promises than simply to 
balance the budget, as important and difficult as that task is. It also 
keeps the President's promises, since abandoned, to provide a tax cut 
for middle-income Americans, and it will also keep the President's 
promise, to which he continues to give lip service and little more, to 
end welfare as we have known it.

  It is over a bill that will carry out these promises of the President 
of the United States that all of the current furor takes place.
  Rather than to promise to sign that bill, the President has committed 
himself to vetoing it. As of the moment at which I speak, he has vetoed 
one of the two much more modest interim measures that would allow him 
both time to veto that bill and to discuss with Members of Congress 
what alternative approach to the same goal he would adopt without 
causing the Government of the United States to come to a halt.
  I am not sure precisely what the consequences of this course of 
action will be. Two bills, one of which has already been vetoed by the 
President and one of which is likely to be passed here later today and 
vetoed before the evening is up, will cause a certain degree of 
disruption. A veto of the reconciliation bill, a repudiation of the 
President's three promises, will, I suspect, cause somewhat more in the 
way of disruption because it will be the last of a series of actions on 
the part of the President that belie his promises and commitments as a 
candidate in the early days of his Presidency.
  So far, the President has been unwilling, in any rational and 
thoughtful fashion, to discuss these goals. So far, he simply says he 
will not even begin to discuss them until preconditions are met which 
guarantee that he will never have to discuss them seriously. I suspect, 
however, that as has been the case so frequently in the past, once the 
shoe begins to pinch, the President will be willing to discuss this 
serious question, and I believe he will find Members on this side of 
the aisle willing to discuss everything with him except for the 
underlying premise that we must come up with a realistic method of 
balancing the budget. Once that principle has been reached, we can 
reach an agreement and the President can use one of those hundreds of 
thousands of pens to sign a balanced budget.
  Mr. President, I 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. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are in morning business, is that 
correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct, with time limits of 10 
minutes.

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