[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 2 (Thursday, January 4, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H145-H146]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TYRANNY OF THE URGENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Bartlett] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I did not come to the Congress 
until I was 66 years old. There is some advantage in coming here at 
that age. If you come here younger, if you have spent much of your life 
here, I think that you miss some opportunities, some insights into 
relevance, time and perspective and things like the tyranny of the 
urgent.
  Let me give my colleagues two examples from my past. I had the great 
privilege of working for 18 years in several different capacities for 
the military. In one of those capacities, I was working, for part of my 
time at least, out of the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. There we had the 
responsibility for two things: One was for supporting the fleet. When 
they had problems with their life support equipment, with oxygen 
equipment and so forth, we had to go out to make sure that those 
problems were fixed. We also had the opportunity, the responsibility 
there for developing new equipment that would be better, that would 
have less problems, and we would have to spend less of our time going 
out to support the fleet.
  This was an excellent example of the tyranny of the urgent. When we 
had a call from the fleet that was an urgent problem and we had to go 
out to address it, the really important thing that that facility was 
charged with doing was developing new equipment so we would not have 
those problems in the future. But the tyranny of the urgent frequently 
got in the way of developing the new equipment.
  In 1954, in another experience, I was coming back from California 
from teaching medical school there to teach medical school here in 
Howard University. I was in the middle of Missouri with my family with 
young children and a 1941 Cadillac and a big trailer on the back that 
had in it all of my worldly possessions. A tire blew out on the 
Cadillac and the trailer turned over. I stood on the road there in the 
summertime in the hot sun in Missouri, and I thought, gee, if you put 
yourself 10 years in the future from this and look back, this is not 
going to be a big deal. It was not. I did step back, and really, as I 
look back on it now, it was not a big deal.
  Let me apply these two things to our partial shutdown of Government 
now. We must be very careful that we do not permit the urgent to take 
precedence over the important. The really important thing now is that 
we balance this budget. We have an urgent problem with a partial 
shutdown of Government. There has been enough talk from both sides as 
to how we got there from my perspective and I think the perspective of 
most Americans, the President has failed to keep his promise to submit 
a balanced budget.
  You cannot negotiate, you cannot negotiate when there is only one 
budget to negotiate. He needs to submit a balanced budget. The urgent 
thing is somehow to get around this problem, but the way to get around 
that is not to have another continuing resolution that is going to take 
the pressure off to do the important thing. And the important thing is 
to balance this budget.
  I was talking about the time and perspective. If we put ourselves 
down the road 10 years from now and look back, nobody hardly is going 
to remember this partial shutdown of government. But they are going to 
remember and they are going to thank us for holding tough and balancing 
the budget. We must be very sure that we have a perspective of the 
relevance of what we are doing. We must make very sure that we do 
not permit the tyranny of the urgent over the important.

  Our constituents understand that. I had a letter during our first 
brief partial shutdown. It was the kind of letter that just about 
brought tears to your eye. It was a Federal worker who said he did not 
know he was going to get paid when he was furloughed.

                              {time}  1715

  He said he was probably going to lose $500. But that was a small 
enough price to pay for what this balanced budget would do for his 
children and his grandchildren.
  Here I have some constituent opinions from phone calls from five of 
our constituents. We have had many, many like this. This one is from 
Hagerstown, MD, the Federal employee who was furloughed, but he thinks 
that I should stick with the Republican plan to balance the budget.
  Here is another one. These are parents of, and these are from 
Flintstone, way out in western Maryland. They are parents of five 
children and grandparents of 11, and he is disabled, but they want the 
Congressman, their Congressman, to vote only on a balanced budget. They 
are proud of what we are doing for them here. They want me to hang 
tough.
  Here is one from New Market, MD. Keep the Government closed. This is 
a Federal worker with 22 years of experience in the Federal Government. 
He says, ``Don't buckle, stand fast.''
  Here is another one from Ellicott City, just south of Baltimore, just 
north of here, a furloughed Federal District employee. He wants the RGB 
to stay the course.
  Another who congratulates on our budget stand: Do not support a 
continuing resolution.

[[Page H146]]

  Our people understand better than we do the real important thing here 
and the relevance of what we are doing. They want us to stand firm, 
stay the course, balance the budget.

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