[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 77 (Thursday, May 30, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H5740-H5741]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         WELFARE BILL THEATRICS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Doggett] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, the theatrics in which the majority leader 
engaged in the few minutes before the closing of this Congress tonight 
again provide America an indication of what is wrong with this 
Congress.

[[Page H5741]]

  The majority leader, you will remember, outlined a schedule for next 
week, and he conveniently omitted one piece of legislation from that 
schedule. This particular bill will be considered on a day when most of 
the Members of Congress are not present here in Washington. This 
particular bill will be considered under a procedure that limits debate 
to 40 minutes, with no amendments, and it can be actually defeated by 
one-third of the Members of this body.
  This bill, the majority leader finally conceded, has not yet even 
been written, much less discussed and considered by a committee in 
Congress and presented to the American people for their debate, which 
is the normal approach in a democratic society.
  Now, this particular bill is not a bill to name a post office in 
Podunkville after Dick Armey or to declare National Apple Pie Week. No, 
this particular bill deals with a subject that most Americans are 
concerned about, and that is our welfare system. It is a welfare system 
that is broke, that is not working for the taxpayer, quite clearly, but 
it is also not working for the people that it is designed to benefit.
  I know that those of us on the Democratic side, from our unanimous 
vote in the last session of this Congress, expressed our view that we 
want to place an importance in welfare reform on work, on the value of 
work, on teaching the value of work, on helping families that have been 
torn apart get back into the work force and provide for their families. 
But if anyone would have thought we would deal with such a serious 
matter with the kind of stunt that we saw tonight, the notion that this 
Congress would take up a matter of such importance without any real 
debate, without the Members even knowing what was in the bill.
  We did have one gentleman who thought he knew something about the 
bill. We learned that there were 97 line item vetoes by the Governor of 
Wisconsin in this bill. Under the debate procedure, we will have less 
than 30 seconds per line item veto to consider this.
  One would think that this is, as I asked the majority leader, just 
another example of his very strange sense of humor; that this stunt is 
all a joke. But one who thought that would not have observed the way 
this Congress has been conducted for the last year and a half, for it 
has been one stunt after another like this that has created the 
greatest failure of any Congress in recent American history.
  It all started last year when these Republicans decided that they 
were going to provide a tax break for the richest members of our 
society and make those who were now on Medicare pay for it. And so they 
set up a series of secret task forces, and those forces were out there 
figuring out how much more they could hike premiums, how much more they 
could increase the cost of health care for our seniors, all to provide 
tax brakes for those at the top of the economic ladder. And they did it 
all in secret, and then they came out here and presented it as 
essentially a ``take it or leave it'' plan, originally to our Committee 
on the Budget and finally to the House.
  It is the same kind of extremism that caused this Government to be 
shut down last year for weeks at a cost of $1.5 billion. Frittered 
away. Totally and completely wasted American taxpayer money by these 
folks in their Government shutdown fever.
  It is the kind of political theatrics that instead of coming in a 
sensible bipartisan moderate way to see how we change this welfare 
system and make it work and change this Medicare system and make it 
work better.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. DOGGETT. I will not yield at this time. Perhaps at the conclusion 
of my remarks.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I will be happy to yield back to the gentleman.
  Mr. DOGGETT. I thank the gentleman for his comment. In fact, what I 
would like to do is to have an opportunity to yield and discuss and 
debate at length this whole subject of welfare reform instead of 
handling it in the same shabby way that the Republicans did Medicare 
reform last year, which was designed to provide those tax breaks for 
the people at the top of the economic ladder and make those people on 
Medicare bear the cost of those tax breaks.
  Now we are going to approach this other tough issue in our society 
that needs to be attacked in a bipartisan way to try to get at the 
heart of making welfare work and making it work fair, but to do it in 
this kind of fashion, when even the Republican Members do not know what 
is in their bill, is the kind of extremist approach that America has 
rejected.

  I think that it is time for this Congress to get down to business in 
a true Democratic spirit, not in terms of party but in terms of a 
process that does not come around with the kind of arrogance that we 
have seen here tonight, of saying we will present you something and you 
can take it or leave it, because that kind of approach is not going to 
produce any legislation.
  That is why this Congress has nothing to show but political rhetoric 
and nonsense and wasted taxpayer money for most of the last year and a 
half, because these folks have not been interested in trying in craft 
legislation in a bipartisan way to deal with the true problems of this 
country. They have been interested in scoring political points.
  They do not care next week whether one welfare mom goes back to work, 
because they are not interested in jobs for welfare moms. They are 
interested in protecting their own political job, and America is going 
to see through this kind of nonsense.

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