[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 10 (Thursday, January 25, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S368-S370]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SENATE BUSINESS
Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, tomorrow is the drop-dead date for
Congress on how we will keep the Government going. In addition, the
deadline is fast approaching on honoring the full faith and the credit
clause of the Constitution. I say not only to the people of this
country but to people all over the world that we intend to honor the
debentures you hold, and we will pay you interest for helping us
finance our debt.
I have never really felt that when push came to shove, there would be
any question about whether or not we would extend and raise the debt
ceiling. There still is not. I feel sure this will happen. If it does
not happen tomorrow, as it should, it will certainly happen by the last
day of February. To do otherwise would be the height of
irresponsibility. So I am not really worried about that, and I applaud
some of the comments I have seen by Mr. Armey and Speaker Gingrich on
that subject.
Now, tomorrow, as I understand it, the Senate will vote on a
continuing resolution to keep the Government afloat until March 1.
Also, I understand that the continuing resolution will fund most of the
programs not covered by enacted appropriations bills at 75 percent of
the fiscal year 1995 funding level or the lower of the funding levels
provided by the fiscal year 1996 House or Senate appropriations bill,
if that level exceeds the 75 percent funding level. However, programs
funded pursuant to the HUD-VA bill and State, Justice, Commerce bill,
will be funded at the levels provided in their conference reports.
Programs funded pursuant to the third bill on which we have a
conference report, namely Interior, as I understand it, are going to be
funded instead as if the Interior bill did not have a conference
report. All the agencies funded in that bill will have to live on the
lower of the House or Senate bill, or 75 percent of what they got in
1995.
Mr. President, tomorrow when the debate on the continuing resolution
begins, I hope somebody will be able to tell me why we are treating the
programs funded by the Interior appropriations bill differently. I do
not like that. I see no reason not to treat Interior the same way we do
HUD-VA, and State, Justice, Commerce.
Second, at some point tomorrow there is going to be a motion made by
the majority leader to adjourn the U.S. Senate until February 26. I can
tell you categorically that I do not intend to vote for that motion. It
is almost as unfathomable to me why we would leave here, with all this
work undone, until February 26, as it is why we want to shut the
Government down all the time around here.
I have been here 21 years and things have happened here in the last 3
months that, in my opinion, are not only unfathomable and
unexplainable, but inexcusable. We are supposed to be here to govern.
We are not supposed to be here making sure all 100 Senators and all 435
Congressmen, get their way. I think it was Longfellow who said one
time: ``You better be careful about what you pray for because you might
get it.'' You have 100 Senators here and everybody is saying if I
cannot have my way there will be no way. Governing is the art of
compromise. There are strong feelings on that side of the aisle and
this side of the aisle on hundreds of items.
I did not get my way on the space station or that sucker would have
been dead a long time ago. One hundred billion dollars squandered. And
we say we need more money for education?
Congress has provided $7 billion more for the Defense Department than
the administration requested. ``We don't
[[Page S369]]
want the extra 20 B-2's. It is true you only put $500 million in for 20
B-2's, but what is the total cost down the road? It is $30 billion. We
do not need them. We do not want them.'' Many times, when I used to
come out here if I was opposing something in the Defense bill, Members
on the other side of the aisle, who are prone to vote for every single
dollar for defense no matter what it is, would say to me, ``You are
opposed to this but the Secretary wants it, the President wants it, and
all the Chiefs want it.'' So it would sail through here like a
firestorm.
Now I raise that issue with Members on the other side and I say: The
President does not want it, the Secretary does not want it, and the
Chiefs do not want it. Why are you putting it in here? And they answer:
What do they know? What do they know about building ships on a
noncompetitive basis? What do they know about 20 B-2 bombers that we
say they need and we do not care if they say they do not want them?
You see, if this were a perfect world and we had more money than we
knew what to do with, I might not complain. Mr. President, 22 B-2
bombers and they would not dare fly one of them in Desert Storm for
fear it would get shot down and that would kill the B-2 program, so
they just did not fly them. They would not even let a B-1 fly over in
Desert Storm for fear it would get shot down.
Why am I concerned about that? Because I believe in balancing the
budget with compassion and with a concern for the future of the
country.
When it comes to education, the people of this country have
invariably reported in the polls they would pay more taxes if their
children got a better education. Some of us here labor in the vineyards
of education. Some of us try to keep the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities afloat because we
believe culture is important. What has the majority done? They whack
both endowments by 40 percent. So if there happen to be a few children
around who are interested in opera or drama or art or anything else,
and they need a few bucks from the Federal Government--forget it. Then
you wonder why people act uncivilized. Why are people so rude? Most
people who are leaving here--and in record numbers--do not say it in
those words, but everybody knows that, perhaps not the principle
reason, but one of the reasons is because civility no longer exists
here. What a tragedy.
So, what are we going to do to improve civilized conduct? Cut every
single program that has as its intention to enhance the understanding
of the importance of the culture of the Nation, the importance of
civilized conduct and civility, man-to-man, woman-to-woman, and so on.
They say the mining industry in this country can take billions of
dollars' worth of gold, silver, platinum and palladium off lands that
belong to the taxpayers of this country and not pay one dime for it
while we cut Medicare and Medicaid and education and the environment.
Corporate welfare is too nice a name. I call it corporate ripoff.
I saw a report the other day, Mr. President, that said only 14
percent of the people in this country pay any attention to what is
going on in Washington. That is the reason I can stand here and scream
my lungs out day in and day out about this mining law of 1872, where
the American mining industry has ripped this country off for billions
and billions and continues to do so while we sit here and argue about
how much we are going to cut education and the National Endowments for
the Arts and the Humanities.
Mr. President, hundreds of millions of dollars were cut from
environmental protection. A British philosopher once said there is
nothing more impossible than undoing something that has already been
done. When you kill somebody you cannot bring him back to life. And
when you rape and pillage the environment in a permanent way, you
cannot bring it back.
What are we doing? We are cutting the legs right out from under the
people who enforce the environmental laws of this country, which over
the past 25 years have increased the ``swimmability'' and the
``fishability'' of the lakes and rivers of this country. And there is
not a sober person in America who does not want to continue that.
Finally, Mr. President, I want to be supportive of the President. He
mentioned just about everything in his State of the Union Address that
I care anything about. I applaud his stand for saying we can balance
the budget without destroying everything we hold dear. We do not have
to assault the elderly, we do not have to assault the poor, and we
certainly do not have to assault the children of this country in order
to get a balanced budget.
If you made me king for 10 minutes, I will produce a balanced budget
in 7 years that does not do any of those things. However, it now
appears that the White House and the majority party may be in the
process of agreeing on the inane, crazy idea of cutting taxes. I will
solve all of the problems of the balanced budget. You just give up on
that tax cut.
I would say both to the President and to the Speaker and the majority
leader, if you absolutely insist on a tax cut, at least wait a year or
two until this whole thing fleshes out and we find out. Is it going to
work? Once you put the tax cut in place, everybody knows you will not
ever take it back.
So when you put the tax cut in place 7 years from now, CBO's estimate
is that there will be $254 billion in savings to the Government just in
interest cuts alone. That may turn out to be zip, zero, nil. But the
$200-plus billion in tax cuts is already gone.
So why does not the President or Senator Dole say, look, it is an
oxymoron to say we are going to cut taxes and balance the budget. We
tried that, you know, back in 1981. What did we get out of it? We got a
$4 trillion increase in the national debt. But people have forgotten.
The majority of the people in this body were not here in 1981 when we
did that. They do not remember, so I am reminding them.
I want it put on my epitaph that I was one of 11 U.S. Senators that
voted no on the proposal that claimed it would raise defense spending
by 100 percent and cut taxes and balance the budget. People in Arkansas
are taking a pretty big hit these days, but I can tell you one thing:
People down there have enough sense to know that that one will not
work.
So, Mr. President, I look forward to tomorrow and what I hope will be
a civilized debate, an intelligent debate, and one that will say, do
not put the farm bill on this. That is a nonstarter. Pass a clean debt
ceiling bill. What we ought to do is adopt a clean continuing
resolution to keep the Government going until March 1, and we ought to
pass a debt ceiling limit so that people in the world, not just in the
United States--bear in mind, of the $5 trillion national debt, almost
40 percent of it, a third of it, is held by foreigners.
The people in this country and the people in Congress may think this
holding the debt ceiling hostage is cute and funny, but the Japanese
and Germans do not think it is funny. When they hold a U.S. Government
bond that is supposed to return them 6 percent interest, when it comes
due they want their 6 percent. They do not want all of this mickeying
around about who is holding who hostage in the U.S. Congress. The very
thought that we might falter in the payment of our interest on U.S.
Government obligations is absolutely Byzantine.
Just to talk about things that have happened around here that you
have never seen before and hope to God you never see again, here is a
farm bill that the chairman of the Agriculture Committee in the House
could not even get out of his committee. He is chairman. His own
Republican membership reneged on him. It was brought up in the Senate
just for talking purposes but not to be voted on, because everybody
knew that it would be beaten soundly in the U.S. Senate. Called
``Freedom to Farm,'' it never got out of the committee in the House,
never passed the House, never passed the Senate, never was even
considered by the Senate Agriculture Committee, and they talk about
putting that thing on the continuing resolution tomorrow?
The farmers of my State want something definitive so they can go to
the bank and borrow money and plant their rice and their soybeans. But
they do not want that sucker, and nobody else does either.
So why do we not extend existing law for 1 year and put the fears and
the apprehensions of the farmers of America at ease?
[[Page S370]]
Mr. President, I am going to vote against the adjournment motion
until some resolution of this farm program is made, and the rice
farmers of my State, who produce 40 percent of all of the rice in this
Nation, have some certainty. The first thing you know--as my colleague
said in the press conference this morning, Senator Pryor--you keep
messing around so they cannot plant their rice, and the next thing you
will know we will lose all of our world markets for American rice. We
have squandered $1 to $1.5 billion mickeying around one-upping each
other.
In closing, Mr. President, let me repeat. The people of the country
last year had a right to be angry. They were angry for all kinds of
different reasons. I will not presume to know precisely why everybody
voted the way they did. They were not voting for chaos. They were not
voting to see how much havoc we could create and impose on innocent
people. They wanted changes. They did not want to see the Government
dismantled. They did not want to see the Government shut down and leave
the country defenseless, almost anarchistic.
So tomorrow I hope will be an interesting and enlightening and
sensible debate. I hope when we leave here tomorrow night, if and when
we do, that we leave with a pretty good feeling that we finally have
begun to recognize each other's feelings about this and have finally
begun to get our act together and reassure the people of the country
that we are not really just a bunch of bickering children up here.
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. BUMPERS. 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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