[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 2 (Thursday, January 4, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H132]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              LEAST PRODUCTIVE, MOST DESTRUCTIVE CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Moran] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MORAN. Mr. Speaker, yesterday we ended the first session of the 
Republican revolutionary Congress. We heard from a lot of folks that 
are typical of revolutionaries, full of self-righteous zeal, people who 
firmly believe that the end justifies the means, people who are almost 
wholly intolerant of other people's point of view. But let us look 
inside that first session of the last Congress to see what it actually 
accomplished.
  When we do, we have to come to the conclusion that yesterday marked 
the last day of the least productive, most destructive session of 
Congress in our Nation's history. Despite all of the promises, all of 
the rhetoric, we have virtually nothing to show for it.
  I will not go into all the quotes from the various commentators and 
news sources and experts from both Republican and conservative think 
tanks alike. They all concur. Loads of rhetoric, loads of promises, 
virtually no performance. I do not have a fancy chart. I have just a 
little Xerox copy that tracks the bills from previous sessions of 
Congress. It used to be that we enacted about 450 bills a year. The 
last time the Republicans controlled Congress, it dropped to 250 bills. 
Then it goes along until this last session of the Congress we ended 
yesterday, and it drops off the cliff.
  It looks like the 1929 stock market crash. There is only one bill 
really in that whole Contract With America that has actually been fully 
enacted called the Congressional Accountability Act. Do you know what? 
That bill was passed by the previous Democratic Congress. It was held 
up by the Republicans in the Senate. So we passed it again. This time 
it got through the Senate and signed by the President. There have been 
two other bills, the Unfunded Mandate Act and Paperwork Reduction, both 
of which the President wanted.
  So that is what we have to show for it.
  One of those promises that was made in the Contract With America, if 
the Republican leadership had kept it, we never would be in this 
position. It would not be the most destructive Congress in our Nation's 
history. If the Congress had made good on their promise in the Contract 
With America to pass a line-item veto, the President today would have 
been able to delete all those extraneous ideological, inappropriate, 
nongermane provisions in the appropriation bills that have been sent to 
him. He could clean up the mess, clean up those appropriation bills, 
enact them and we would be finished with this. Every one of them could 
have been enacted.
  Of course, they would not have been enacted in time. After 10 months 
of wrangling, almost exclusively between the Republicans in the Senate 
and the Republicans in the House, we were marginalized. They could not 
agree among themselves. By the end of the last fiscal year and the 
beginning of this fiscal year, when those appropriation bills had to be 
enacted, one had been sent to the President. Do you know which one it 
was? It was the legislative branch appropriations bill to fund the 
Congress itself. Thank God President Clinton vetoed it. Imagine if we 
were the only ones who were funded; none of the rest of the Government 
but we have taken care of ourselves.
  That line-item veto, which was promised in the context of so much 
rhetoric, is tied up in a conference between the Republicans in the 
Senate and the Republicans in the House. Let us move it out of 
conference. Send it to the President. The President could take it. 
Clean up the appropriation bills. We could open up the Government and 
get back down to the business of governing. That is what we ought to 
do. Instead, we are stuck with a new session of Congress that again 
will be the least productive, most destructive session of Congress in 
our Nation's history.

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