[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.

                          ____________________