[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 54 (Wednesday, April 24, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H3806-H3810]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2030
                   A VICTORY FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] is recognized for 60 
minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

[[Page H3807]]

  Mr. KASICH. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to come to the floor tonight to 
essentially say that in my judgment, the American people have won a 
victory in the negotiations between the Republican House and Senate and 
the President of the United States. In fact, I want to just take a 
moment to congratulate the Republican Members of this Congress who 
decided early on that we wanted to have a comprehensive program to 
balance the budget and give Americans some of their hard-earned money 
back, reversing the tax increase that the President imposed in 1993.
  As you know, Mr. Speaker, there have been intense negotiations going 
on in the area of discretionary spending. Discretionary spending is the 
kind of spending we must approve on a year-to-year basis, the only 
spending that the Congress actually must vote on.
  As we are all aware in this body, there has been a debate going on in 
terms of the level of discretionary spending, or the spending we 
approve each and every year. That is separate from the spending known 
as entitlements, where if Congress did not even show up, spending would 
go up automatically.
  When the President vetoed our balanced budget bill, he killed all 
efforts to reform and return the entitlement programs back to the 
communities and towns all across this country, where Americans could 
begin to design local solutions to local problems and save money, so 
that we can save the next generation and end the problem of stagnant 
wages and begin to solve the problems of job insecurity.
  The entitlement side of this is something that we have not yet been 
able to lasso in, because the President is opposed to returning these 
entitlement programs to the American people, so that we can design them 
using local solutions to local problems at lesser costs.
  But the one area where the President was forced to sit down and 
negotiate with us in order to keep the Government of the United States 
on its day-to-day efforts at being run, was the appropriations process, 
that spending we must approve each and every year.
  In the announcement that is currently being made, it is very, very 
clear that the Republicans had won a tremendous victory from the 
standpoint that we will have the most dramatic change in that 
discretionary or year-to-year spending that we must approve since World 
War II. The people of this country should know that the Republican 
budget set spending limits, and we said that we wanted to reduce 
Washington spending.
  As everybody knows, this has been an ongoing debate between us and 
the administration, and I am here tonight to make the case, the clear 
case, that saving $23 billion in spending in the fiscal year 1996 
appropriation bill is historic; that in fact our children will look 
back upon the passage of this bill as a significant step forward 
towards balancing the Federal budget and bringing real change to this 
city. In a nutshell, Mr. Speaker, the $23 billion is, frankly, again, 
the most significant change that we have seen in this city since World 
War II.
  In fact, many people said, ``What have the Republicans gotten from 
their revolution? Have the Republicans really been able to achieve 
anything?''
  I would argue that after only 17 months of holding office, we have 
been able to deliver and will deliver here tomorrow, a bill that will 
allow us to go forward, save $23 billion, and make that giant first 
payment, that giant first down payment on guaranteeing that we will get 
to a balanced budget, that we will empower Americans, that we will give 
them some of their own tax dollars back so they can spend money on 
their children.

  Now, we went through a whole variety of programs that are actually 
eliminated. Mr. Speaker, tonight I can show you at least four pages of 
programs that have been excised, eliminated, cut, and we hope 
ultimately to take some of the dollars we saved in these programs and 
give these dollars back to the American people in some tax relief, 
after all, it is their money, and/or apply some of this money to saving 
the next generation or some of this money to balancing the budget so we 
can bring about lower interest rates.
  Now, could we have done better? We sure could have. There are a 
number of programs here that the Congress of the United States will 
continue to fund, and programs that the Congress of the United States 
does not want to fund. Let me talk about one of them, the Goals 2000 
program. That is a program that is being run in this city to try to 
tell our mothers and fathers across this country how our children are 
doing at learning.
  Frankly, I do not think that the mothers and fathers that I know who 
have children in school across this country need to call the Department 
of Education to ask a bureaucrat, who does not even know what time zone 
they live in, whether their children are learning or not. But yet the 
Goals 2000 program that keeps power in this city, in the hands of 
bureaucrats, and denies the full determination of whether children are 
learning, denies mothers and fathers the opportunity to solely decide 
whether their children are learning, has been denied to them.
  I will tell you that the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, 
whenever he has somebody that wants to be part of this revolution to 
downsize government, will put mothers and fathers back in charge of 
evaluating how their children are doing in school. But we have a 
President, an administration, that has fought day after day after day 
for higher Washington spending and more control by Federal bureaucrats.
  But we do not just want to focus on what we did not accomplish, 
because, frankly, what we have accomplished will be that one underlying 
sentence in modern history that will say that the Republican Congress 
was able to stand tall and was able to put the children of this country 
and the mothers and fathers who are worried about their economic future 
today first.
  This bill that we will bring up tomorrow will represent the most 
significant change in the day-to-day spending habits of the Government 
of the United States since World War II.
  I now would like to yield to the chairman of the Committee on 
Appropriations, the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Livingston], who has 
done an outstanding job on this bill. It has been a pleasure for me to 
be able to work with him as the chairman of the Committee on the 
Budget. We have had a great and growing friendship and great and 
growing respect for the job each of us is trying to do. I would like 
him to talk about how proud he is of the kind of change that this 
Republican Congress in just a short 17 months has been able to deliver. 
I will suggest that you ain't seen nothing yet.
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. I thank my friend, the distinguished chairman of the 
Committee on the Budget, for yielding to me. I want to compliment him 
on articulating the agenda of this Republican Congress, the 104th 
Congress, which in fact is keeping its promise that it made to the 
American people when we ran.

                              {time}  2045

  We told them, Mr. Speaker, we wanted to reduce the cost of 
Government. We wanted to get our hands out of the pockets of the 
taxpayers so that the American family would have more money to spend on 
the welfare of their own children, on the education of their children, 
and that we would reduce the role of Government in the way of cutting 
back on the numbers of programs, on agencies and on departments. And we 
have done just that.
  The distinguished chairman of the Committee on the Budget has 
provided a road map for all of Congress to follow, along with the 
chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget, Senator Domenici. The 
two of them have worked hand in glove together to put this country on a 
firm and financially sound footing.
  And from our standpoint in the Committee on Appropriations, we have 
tried to accept their guidelines gladly and comply with their 
guidelines so that we have, indeed, been able to reap great savings to 
the American taxpayer.
  Frankly, that is where we are, Mr. Speaker. Through this great 
effort, we can now say with great pride that 6 months ago the political 
and economic gurus were predicting that in fiscal year 1996 we would be 
faced with a $200 billion deficit for this year. And what do we hear 
now? It is now $144 billion for fiscal year 1996, the same fiscal year. 
In other words, we are coming in

[[Page H3808]]

at $54 billion lower than we were expected to come in only 6 months 
ago.
  I think that is largely due to the great work of the Committee on the 
Budget, working in tandem with all of the other committees in Congress 
to comply with their guidelines, as well as our own accomplishments.
  On the Committee on Appropriations, we only have jurisdiction over 
one-third of the Federal spending in a single year, but in fiscal year 
1995, since we took office, we were able to reap $20 billion of savings 
under what would have been otherwise spent; and this year, with the 
completed package that is now being finalized back in the back rooms of 
Congress and will be voted on tomorrow by, hopefully, a majority of the 
Members of the House and a majority of the Members of the Senate, so we 
can hopefully send the bill over to the President for his signature, we 
find that we are going to reap another ``another'' $23 billion in 
savings over and above the $20 billion in savings that we got in fiscal 
year 1995, for a net total of savings in the discretionary budget of 
some $43 billion under what would have been spent had the Republicans 
not taken control of Congress on January 1, 1995.

  So I think when the dust is settled, and as the gentleman has pointed 
out, this is the greatest amount of savings since World War II, and 
when the dust is settled, when our children and our grandchildren sit 
there and thumb through the history books and say what was accomplished 
in that 104th Congress, they will totally disregard or totally not 
understand that some people had quarrels with the spending on one 
program, other people had quarrels with spending on another program, 
but what they will see are those bottom line figures.
  For the first time in modern contemporary history, instead of 
spending more on discretionary spending, instead of finding new 
programs, instead of finding new agencies, instead of finding new 
departments and spending what we spent last year plus an inflation 
kicker on all of them, for the first time we have cut the number of 
programs, well over 200 programs in fiscal year 1996. We have 
eliminated agencies, we have cut down on the duplication and waste, and 
since January 1, 1995, we have saved the American taxpayer $43 billion.
  That is not chicken feed. That is real savings to the taxpayer, and 
it shows the conclusion that the average vote had come to over the last 
10 years, that there was no hope for turning back the ever-increasing 
cost and growth of Government, is false. It is simply not true. We are 
scaling back the cost of Government.
  And if the President would start complying with his promises to 
reform welfare as we know it, to fix the Medicare system, as his own 
commissioners say must be done, to acknowledge the fact that many of 
our States today are in trouble on Medicaid, as we speak, and to know 
that with respect to Social Security, if you ask a large group of 
people under the age of 35, a majority of them think they are more 
likely to see a UFO, an unidentified flying object, than they are to 
collect on Social Security program, and you add that together, if we 
get the President to face up to those very real problems, we can do 
exactly what the chairman of the Committee on the Budget has 
accomplished in pushing through the House of Representatives along with 
his counterpart in the Senate, we can balance this budget by the year 
2002.
  We can do it. We all know that we can do it because we have got a 
floor plan that has been promoted and proposed and drawn up by the 
distinguished chairman and it can be done. All we need is the political 
will in the White House to do it.

  Mr. KASICH. Let me just ask the chairman, if he would, let us just 
put this in terms that Americans can understand, so when they are going 
to work tomorrow they can turn to the person next to them and say, you 
know, we thought the Republicans were not getting anywhere, but did you 
hear that they were able to cut the Washington spending and the waste 
and the abuse, and they were actually able to save us $23 billion this 
year.
  Is that right, I ask the chairman of the committee? Is there anything 
more complicated than that?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. No more complicated, and just a little bit better 
when one considers that 200 programs, each with its own good intent, 
but each with its overlapping and duplicative bureaucracy, ceases to 
exist with the signature of the President on this bill.
  So 200 programs are no longer in existence, $23 billion is saved for 
the American taxpayer, and the cost of Government is no longer rising, 
it is falling.
  Mr. KASICH. And what was the greatest obstacle, Mr. Chairman, that 
you faced in being able to accomplish this job of saving us this money?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. Well, quite frankly, the obstacles did not arise in 
the House or in the Senate, the obstacles arose and emanated there from 
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Because if we had had the cooperation of 
those good folks, it would not have taken us a year and a quarter to 
complete this process.
  Mr. KASICH. So, in other words, even though the President talks about 
his wanting to, well, he declares the era of big Government being over, 
he fought for virtually every dime of Washington spending that ends up 
in the hands of the Federal bureaucrats. He fought for this, and you 
fought against him, and this House and Senate stood tall and we 
actually were able to save the most significant amount of money for our 
children that we have since World War II; is that correct?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. That is correct. And in fairness to the negotiators 
who participated on behalf of the White House, the fact is that they 
did negotiate, we have a package, and I do hope that the President will 
sign that package. I have every reason to believe that he will. Had 
they been more obstinate, I suppose it might have been impossible to 
reach an agreement. But I am delighted an agreement has been reached.

  And one thing I will say, from the very beginning, we never deviated 
from the ground rules. The Committee on the Budget gave us our 
instructions: Stay within your budget allocations, make sure that you 
save the American people that $23 billion. If you have to raise money 
for the President on some programs, take it out of that discretionary 
pot and make sure that you cut other programs. And that is what we did. 
We took the chairman's admonition to stay within our budget caps. We 
stayed within them, and the American people are $23 billion richer in 
that they have not spent another $23 billion that they would have spent 
had we not done what we set out to do.
  Mr. KASICH. Of course, again, what the people need to understand is 
this is really the only spending that the Congress of the United States 
was forced to approve in cooperation with the President. Is that 
correct? This is the only spending where, if we didn't come to work, 
Government would shut down; is that correct?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. That is correct. And as we all remember, when this 
House passed an Interior bill, a Commerce, State, Justice bill, and one 
other appropriations bill before Christmas, the President vetoed all 
three of those bills and, in fact, the government did shut down.
  Likewise, when the Senate did not pass the Labor, Health and Human 
Services bill, frankly, that was in jeopardy of closing the government.
  But we tried that. That was done on all sides, and, frankly, nobody 
felt they came out the better for it. We had to go back to the table. 
But we couldn't override the President's vetoes and we were left with 
no choice. So the idea was to negotiate with the President and still 
reach those budget caps. We did that and we have those savings.
  Mr. KASICH. But we had to drag them kicking and screaming all the way 
to the water bucket and force them to drink, did we not?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. The President wanted much more spending.
  Mr. KASICH. Let me just say, though, and I do not want to give just a 
civic lesson this morning, but for our colleagues who are watching this 
special order, our own colleagues, the discretionary spending, this 
year-to year spending that we must approve in order to keep government 
working, is only one-third of the budget. The other two-thirds of the 
budget is interest on the national debt and the entitlement programs.
  Now, if Bob Livingston and John Kasich and Christopher Shays and 
Peter Torkildsen would not even

[[Page H3809]]

come to Washington, along with the rest of the Congress, that spending 
goes up automatically; is that correct?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. Automatically.
  Mr. KASICH. Two-thirds of the budget is on automatic pilot going 
through the roof, threatening the future of our children, threatening 
economic security for every American today, and denying the American 
people a right to run their own programs with their own money, using 
their own judgments in their own communities.
  We cannot force the President to sign a bill to give us those 
reforms, can we?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. Absolutely not. And I would point out to the 
gentleman, as he well knows, that the formula around here in Congress 
in the old days was very simple: We spent that much on that many 
programs. We need more programs, we will create several new programs, 
and we will throw in an inflation kicker, and for good will we will 
throw in a few more dollars on top of that.

  So we were always spending more and more and more and more money. And 
then, all of a sudden, something funny happened on the way to the 
polls, Republicans took control of the House and the Senate and we have 
reversed that trend. We are now spending less and less. $20 billion of 
savings in fiscal year 1995 and $23 billion in 1996.
  Mr. KASICH. It is just a shame that we cannot get or enter into with 
him the process that forces us to reform those entitlements, is it not?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. Well, if the President had signed the bill that you, 
Mr. Chairman, pushed through this Congress, frankly, we would be well 
on our way to a balanced budget by the year 2002. The fact he vetoes it 
makes me very, very frightened when I look at that chart that I have 
been showing around recently that shows that big red portion 
representing interest on the debt, which is so large that within a year 
or so it is going to exceed what we spend on the defense of this 
Nation.
  We will spend more money just paying off the interest on our 
borrowings of past years than we will spend on the defense of this 
Nation. That is a frightening thought. And if that trend continues, our 
children will either have to pay extraordinary taxes to have the 
benefits at all and still will probably have to pay high taxes.
  Mr. KASICH. But I would say to the gentleman, that staying within the 
blueprint that the Republicans laid out, you have achieved a major 
piece of that. If we were to achieve the other pieces of that 
blueprint, we would not only be able to balance the budget in the 
conventional terms in which we define it, we would also return an awful 
lot of power and money and influence to the American people and all the 
cities and towns across this country. We would guarantee a bright light 
at the end of this tunnel for our children so that they will have a 
beautiful American legacy, we would be able to give tax relief.
  And, you know, in 1993 we raised taxes. The President says he raised 
them too much. What we are trying to do is cancel out those tax 
increases, frankly. And if we could just get the rest of this job done 
the right way, we would make for a better America, wouldn't we?
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. So much so that we would also get the government out 
of competition for American dollars. We would cease to borrow money. 
And if we could cease to borrow money, that means interest rates would 
come down, and by Alan Greenspan's estimates, the chairman of the 
Federal Reserve, come down as much as two full percentage points, which 
means two points off the cost of your mortgage on your house; two 
points off the loan you use to send your kids to college; and two 
points off the loan you used to buy your car.

                              {time}  2100

  Significant savings to the American people, if only the Government 
would stop borrowing in order to conduct its business year after year.
  Mr. KASICH. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman if he would stay 
for just a few more minutes. I would like to yield to the gentleman 
from Connecticut [Mr. Shays], a member of the Committee on the Budget 
who has felt passionately about the need to attack these problems.
  Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, as I was hearing both of the gentlemen, both 
chairmen of this new Republican majority, I just kind of stood in awe 
thinking of the fact that the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Livingston] 
was the fifth ranking Member of the Committee on Appropriations. This 
new Republican majority said that we wanted the best and the brightest 
to take these positions. They were given that assignment. I was 
thinking what a thankless task it has been for them.
  There is not a Member that has not been disappointed with certain 
parts of the hard decisions that they have had to make. I just wanted 
to come personally and thank my colleague for the extraordinary job he 
has done as the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, the 
chairman who has actually had to make cuts in budgets.
  We slowed the growth of Medicare and Medicaid but we still allow them 
to grow significantly. But you actually said, we are going to spend 
less dollars next year than the year we are in. And you are doing 
exactly what we intended to do. We wanted to get our financial house in 
order and balance our Federal budget. We want to save our trust funds 
for future generations. And most importantly, we want to transform this 
social and corporate welfare state, this caretaking society into a 
caring opportunity society. And I just wanted to thank you for the work 
you are doing and to celebrate the fact that it has been a long and 
arduous journey, but you have done it.
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments. 
I just know that he is one of the foremost among us in this House and 
empathizes with the hardship that the American family faces every day. 
Whether it is a two-parent family or a one-parent family who is 
struggling to raise his or her or their children, in this environment 
they have got to work maybe more than one job a day and they are 
struggling.
  When the Government takes, continues to take that bite out of their 
pocketbooks and send the money to Washington because they say that 
Washington can spend their money better, those folks intuitively know 
that that is not true. They know that they have to balance their books, 
and they know that, if their expenses exceed their income, that they 
are going to run into financial trouble and possibly even legal 
trouble. Those people that run small businesses and large businesses as 
well know that at the end of the year they have got to balance their 
books or at the end of the month they have got to balance their books. 
Their income has to match their outflow.
  Mr. Speaker, they just cannot understand that since World War II, the 
American people, the U.S. Congress has only balanced its books, I 
think, three times, three times. Otherwise we have been spending more 
than we receive, and we borrow the difference and just say, well, let 
our children pay the bill.
  Mr. KASICH. Mr. Speaker, let me just say that it is in my judgment 
even more than about just adding up this column with this column. 
Frankly, Americans for a significant period of time now believe that 
their hard-earned tax dollars are going to programs that do not make 
sense, programs in this city, run by people addicted to Washington 
spending, who do not do it with a sign above their desk that says, this 
is not your money.

  In other words, the American people believe the people in this city 
are not good stewards of their hard-earned pay. They are sick and tired 
of sending money, power and influence to this city, a city that has 
been proceeding on a course that is bankrupting this country and at the 
same time not solving the problems that we have.
  Do my colleagues know what I think Americans are saying? Let me do 
it. Let me keep my money in my community. Let me have my influence 
back. Let me have control of my neighborhood.
  Mr. Bureaucrat in Washington, I do not really need you in my 
neighborhood. Frankly, I wish you would just stay in Washington and let 
me run my own neighborhood.
  What you have delivered to us, Mr. Chairman, is a new process. You 
have given us a new paradigm. That new paradigm is that this city 
counts less and people out across this countryside count more. This is 
a response to what the American people have wanted in this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I will suggest that, if we had not stood on principle, 
if we had

[[Page H3810]]

not made the fight that we have made, we would have lost this. It would 
have been business as usual. Did we get everything we wanted? Of course 
not, because we have a crowd downtown that does not want to put people 
back in charge of their neighborhoods. But we are going to fight for 
it. We are going to fight for it on this. We are going to fight for it 
on welfare. We are going to fight for it to give our senior citizens 
choice on Medicare. We are going to give people their tax dollars back. 
And we are going to save not only the future for our children, but we 
are going to guarantee economic security today for the American family. 
You cannot have it with runaway Washington spending and debt and 
bureaucracy and standing in line.
  This does not get it all done, but that sure delivers a very strong 
message and accomplishes a great deal. And you, sir, should be very 
proud of what you and your committee were able to achieve.
  Mr. LIVINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, we could not have done it without the 
cooperation of both the gentlemen who have addressed me.
  I just want to say that the appropriations process for the 104th 
Congress is a three-act play. Fiscal year 1995 was act one. We saved 
$20 billion. Fiscal year 1996 is, and we are drawing to a closure, is 
almost to an end, and we are saving $23 billion. And we go next week to 
fiscal year 1997. With the help of the chairman of the Committee on the 
Budget and the gentleman from Connecticut and all of our other 
colleagues, I think we are going to have as much to crow about at the 
end of fiscal year 1997 or more than we do today.

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