[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 203 (Monday, December 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S18796]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ORDER OF PROCEDURE

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I know the chairman is on the floor and 
prepared to enter into debate or discussion, whatever. There may be 
Members opposed to the conference report. If they would like to speak, 
we would like to have them come to the floor and do that. As I 
understand, we are not able to get a consent agreement on when the vote 
will come. We hope it will be tomorrow morning.
  I know today is a holiday, so there will be no votes today, and I 
know that tends to increase the absentee rolls.
  In any event, I am going to recess subject to the call of the Chair, 
and we will stay in touch with the chairman of the committee. If there 
are those who desire to speak on this matter, they can certainly be 
able to come back into session very quickly.
  Before I do that, I will say the President has now vetoed this 
morning the Interior appropriations bill and the VA-HUD appropriations 
bill. What he said to the 133,000 Federal workers who are covered by 
the Interior appropriations bill is, ``You can't come to work.''
  What he said to the 293,000 Federal employees that are covered by the 
VA-HUD bill is that ``You can't come to work.'' And later today, I 
understand he will say to 194,000 Federal workers who are covered by 
Justice, State, Commerce, that, ``You can't come to work.''

  With the stroke of a pen, all of these Federal employees could have 
been back to work today. They could have been back to work yesterday or 
the day before and we would not have had a shutdown for that many, 
because he has had the bills on his desk.
  I always said until the Congress sent him the bills, we had to share 
the blame. But he has had these bills and he has vetoed them with some 
of the usual rhetoric coming from the White House these days, 
surrounded by little children saying we were about to endanger the 
lives of millions of children with the toxic waste dumps and all the 
exaggerated rhetoric they can think of in the White House. The result 
is that people, Federal employees, right before the holidays, are not 
going to be able to go back to their work because of President 
Clinton's veto. That is all it is. He had the bills. He could have 
signed the bills and the people would have been working and assured 
nothing would happen until the end of the fiscal year next October.
  So I am disappointed that President Clinton is again playing politics 
instead of looking at the policy. It seems to me that he is making 
matters more and more difficult. He refuses to talk seriously about a 
7-year balanced budget which most Americans would like to accomplish, 
and now he is vetoing appropriations bills which would put Federal 
workers back on the job because he said the cuts are too deep.
  Again, it is the same old deception: Scare the American people, scare 
the children, scare the senior citizens, scare the veterans, tell 
everybody the sky is falling in, do not talk about the balanced budget, 
do not talk about the fact we would lower interest rates 2 percent. It 
means you would pay less for a student loan, a car loan, farm loan, 
machinery loan, whatever.
  These are the advantages of a balanced budget over 7 years. That is 
why Republicans are insisting, because we believe most Americans, 
regardless of party, want us to balance the budget. In fact, most do 
not understand why it is going to take 7 years. They would rather do it 
in 3, 4, 1, or 2 or 5 or 6. But we have agreed on 7 years. The 
President has agreed on 7 years.
  But ever since he agreed on that some 27 days ago, he has been 
backing away from it, confusing the American people with different 
numbers and different scenarios. I really believe unless we can 
accomplish something serious by Friday, it is probably not going to 
happen this year.
  I am not in a position to announce the schedule for the balance of 
the year, but the balance of the year is about here.
  New Year's Eve is not far off. I assume we will be here because we 
have a number of items we would like to take up. We do want to get to 
the budget agreement yet this year. I do not believe it will ever 
happen unless the President--who is the President--exerts the 
leadership and calls the majority leader of the Senate and the Speaker 
of the House of Representatives and asks us to come to the White House 
and sit down, without staff, without press, and say, OK, let us work 
this out, let us agree to some parameters, the three of us, and let us 
have other people come in and put the details together. If he would do 
that, I think we can probably make some progress.
  We have waited now for several days. The President certainly could 
find a telephone when he had a problem with Bosnia. He knew how to 
reach a lot of us. I wish he could use the same determination when it 
comes to balancing the budget.

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