Congressional Record, Volume 142 Issue 94 (Monday, June 24, 1996)

[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 94 (Monday, June 24, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H6694-H6699]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

THE FAMILY LEAVE ACT LAID A FOUNDATION FOR THE FAMILY INVOLVEMENT ACT

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for recognizing me, and I
first of all take the floor and say how very, very sad I am by the
passing of our colleague, Bill Emerson. This is a man who cared very
much about hunger issues and nutrition issues, and he will be sadly
missed because those are not great power issues. You can imagine,
hungry people do not have political action committees and they are not
really involved in the great power process. So they have lost a friend,
and we have lost a friend, and my deepest sympathy goes to their
family.
Now, I wanted to talk a bit today about what is going on in
Tennessee, which I think is very exciting. Vice President Gore and his
wife Tipper, and the President and Mrs. Clinton, are all in Tennessee
doing a family reunion. They are doing a family reunion where they are
calling families together and continuing the dialog of what can
Government do to make family life a little less stressful. A lot of
people say we do not have the values anymore for families. We have
those values. We have those values. The problem is the whole society is
pressing down on families so hard that it is very hard for a family to
sustain itself. So the question is, Is there anything that can be done
for a little relief?
Mr. Speaker, one of the things that I am doing with the gentleman
from Connecticut, Senator Dodd, and that they will be talking about
today in Tennessee is to extend the family medical leave concept that
we passed 2 years ago. The family medical leave that we passed 2 years
ago gave families for the first time the right in the workplace to have
unpaid leave upon the birth or adoption of a child or a critical
chronic illness of a member of the family. Because the President and
Vice President listened so well and many others have been listening so
well to what families have said, they have said this family leave has
really been a salvation for them in many cases.
So, Mr. Speaker, we are introducing a bill to lower the covered
companies down to 25. If you have 25 or more employees, we think you
should be covered by family leave. Right now, it is up at 50. We
think that experiment worked so well, and we had a whole year of
hearings all around America so that we are now ready to make the next
step and lower it. That will be a very, very exciting thing and we hope
that we can get that passed.

Now, the next part, now we are talking about parental involvement
leave, because what so many parents tell us is that they want to be
more involved in the child's education, but where they work they cannot
take the time off. So this would give each parent a couple of days of
unpaid leave a year where they could participate in the child's
educational advancement. You know, all sorts of corporations give
schools machinery, equipment, computers, and that is all wonderful. But
they will tell you they are so understaffed that unless they have
people who know how to use them and can help them, they do not do much
good.
So we are saying let us work together with corporate America to find
a way where we also allow employees who are in the work force to be
able to take a couple unpaid days of leave and invest it in their
child's education. We have study after study showing that any child
does much better in school if the parents are interested, if the
parents are involved, and if the parents are tracking along. We
desperately need to allow people that option. One of the things that
has troubled me, imagine, project yourself 100 years into the future
and suppose we are going through some of the surveys we now see in this
country. We see survey after survey showing that the average American
will tell you if they get up in the morning and their child care has
fallen apart or their spouse is chronically ill that they feel much
safer calling their employer and lying about that. They feel much safer
if they call their employer and tell them that the car broke down,
rather than the truth. Now, 100 years from now, they are going to dig
us up and say, ``What did they do, worship these cars? I mean, they
care more about their cars than children, spouses, family members.'' I
do not think so.
But the same thing also goes with what we see these surveys talking
about what a person says if they want to go to the child's school to
participate. How many will tell their employer that? Very few. Most
people will say they feel much more comfortable saying they are going
to play golf. Now, going to play golf is more important than going to
participate in your child's school? I do not think most Americans think
it is more important, but they think that their employer will not be as
apt to dock them if they say they are going to play golf or they are
going to play tennis or they are going hunting, rather than they are
going to the school.
Mr. Speaker, what kind of craziness has happened that the values that
we all feel in our home, in our kitchen, around the kitchen table, the
things that pull us into our family and pull us into the institutions
they want us to participate in, that somehow we do not feel that we are
able to talk about those out in the work world without being condemned,
without being punished or without having our career on the line?
Something is really wrong.
So family leave began to work on that and now we are going to have a
parental involvement act that really is just like family leave. It is
not paid, so you are taking a penalty to do it. Very few people can
have very many unpaid days. But at least a couple times a year you
could do this if you wanted to do this and not worry about having to
use sick days and not having to make something up or whatever.

{time} 1415

I think we need to continue this dialog with America's families to
find everything we can find to see what other kinds of things like this
we could do just to give them a few tools to lift some of the pressure
they are feeling up off their shoulders.
When I talk to the average American family they tell me they feel
like one of those hamsters in a wheel. My kids used to have hamsters
when they were growing up, and in the cage there was a little wheel and
the hamsters would run and run and run and run, and they never got out
of the wheel, obviously. I think families feel that way. They run
faster every year, they are more exhausted every year, and they are
still at the bottom of the wheel. I think it is because families still
have the same values their families had but they feel they are in a
society where they will be penalized for expressing those values or
trying to act on those values.
Well, if that is true, we are in real bad shape and the No. 1 goal of
this Government should be to try and make sure that you will not be
penalized for expressing and acting on those values. Anyone who thinks
a car is more important than a child, I want to talk to them.

[[Page H6695]]

Now, the other thing that just came out, too, was the fact of child
support enforcement. We are hearing all this stuff about welfare
reform, welfare reform, welfare reform. Very important. But when we
still only see about 18 percent of child support enforcement, as that
report showed last week, we are still not making much of a commitment.
For the parents that are supporting their children, obviously, they get
very angry with the other parents who cast their children off like they
are a used up can of pop and refuse to pay. Obviously, they do not want
to have to pay for their kids and someone else's kids that they walked
away from.
On the other hand, we have to be very concerned about those young
people because they are our country's future. Are we afraid to talk
about the common good anymore? And the common good is certainly that
all young people get all the education their ability and desire drives
them to want, because they are certainly going to be better citizens
and then our country is going to be a better place.
So I think making parents more reponsible, and I think the parents
that have taken responsibility ought to be very angry with the parents
who will not take responsibility. Now, we cannot force them to live
together but we can certainly force them to pay and make that family as
economically whole as possible. It is startling to me that we force
children to have that welfare stamp stamped on them because some adults
do not want to take economic responsibility for children that they
participated in bringing into this world.
One of the prime values that we should talk about here is the fact
that we have not done a good job doing that because they do not want to
make adults mad. The kids do not vote but the adults do vote, and they
are afraid they will make the adults mad if they make those adults
become responsible parents and pay their child support.
So I would hope that families would also be talking about that today
at the family reunion, because I think an awful lot of us, again, are
very concerned about what that survey will look like 100 years from now
when somebody recognizes that 97 percent of the payments get made and
only 18 percent of child support payments were made.
Again, do we care more about cars than our children? If we do, we
really are lost souls, and if we really do, then we may as well forget
it for the 21st century because those children are the primary
stockholders in this next century, and if they are not ready and if
they are not prepared and if we are not getting them ready and
prepared, then we have really given up on the future.

So those are all the things going on down in Tennessee, and there is
another little piece that I would like to talk about, the other little
piece about what happens with Medicare, what happens with Medicaid, the
raging debate that has been going on in this body about Medicare and
Medicaid. What does it mean; where are we going; how come it is so
partisan; can we not get some kind of consensus?
I have thought and thought and thought about what could I say, what
could I say that would try to bring it down and then all of a sudden,
voila, I came across Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood, I
think, tells us more about what is going on in the Medicare-Medicaid
debate than anything I can think of.
Let me go back and start so I can try to make some sense out of this.
We all know that we have to make adjustments to Medicare and we have to
make adjustments in Medicaid because no one ever guesses exactly what
kind of premiums should be paid, how many people are going to be sick.
Our best guess is sometimes off, so we tinker here and we tinker there.
That has been going on since they created the system, that is what
should go on, and that is what should continue to go on. But some
people use those reports to say, OK, this is it, it is going off the
cliff, kill it. Well, I do not think we should kill it. Other people
say, oh, we did not mean kill it, we are just trying to fix it, trust
us.
That is where Little Red Riding Hood comes in, because if you
remember Little Red Riding Hood, the great pictures are of grandma
dressing up like the wolf, or the wolf dressing up like grandma. I got
that wrong, did I not? We have the wolf, who sneaks into grandma's bed
clothes, climbs in the bed, and then what happens when Little Red
Riding Hood comes in? Well, it is not too surprising; the wolf jumps
out and she sees who it really is.
My question about Medicare and Medicaid is when the Republicans have
voted against Medicare when it was started, said they did not like it,
said they would like to have it wither on the vine, and I could give
you hundreds of quotes, do you then trust them to fix it? Is that not
the equivalent of the wolf putting on grandma's clothes and getting in
bed? That is certainly how I see it. If for years they have railed
against it, not thought it was a good idea, and now they say, trust us,
we want to fix it, that is no different than the wolf putting on the
little hat, crawling under the bed covers and getting ready to jump out
at Little Red Riding Hood.
So we must make sure we do not become Little Red Riding Hood. This
all sounds so esoteric, and I hope none of you ever have to go through
what I have gone through to really feel it, but a couple of weeks ago
my mother fell and broke her hip. Now, my mother has never used
Medicare. She has been under Medicare, she is in her eighties, but she
has never had to use it, she has been very healthy, nor has my father,
but all of a sudden she broke her hip. When a woman in her eighties
breaks her hip, we are talking about expensive procedures. We are
talking about long-term rehabilitation. Never have I been so happy
there has been something such as Medicare, because I think my very
proud mother would be absolutely devastated if she had to go through
the breaking of the hip and then also the asking of her children for
money to help her recover. This is devastating enough to her to have to
be on her back for a while, but this is going to cost a lot of money. I
think since she has been paying in for tens of years or decades,
probably she will just be gradually getting it all back, but,
nevertheless, in prior times, before we had Medicare, the family would
have been in crisis trying to figure out where to get the money so she
could get the proper care, and that is just to something that we want
to enter the equation at such a traumatic time.

Now, there is no question my brother and I would do everything we can
to try and protect our parents, who have been so wonderful to us, but
we are not rich, and the way medical bills run, I will tell you,
luckily my mother is not in that bad a shape, but all of a sudden I can
visualize how somebody could have something happen where very rapidly
my brother and I could have been out of all of our resources within 6
months to a year. That is not at all impossible under the system and
the costs of our wonderful medical care that we have.
So people need to think about that. And as we talk about Medicare and
Medicaid, let me constantly stipulate, of course we have to constantly
work to fix it, but we also have to make sure that it is still there,
that fixing it does not mean killing it. That, I think, is very
critical.
When we look at the other health care issues that we are talking
about, this bill that we are hoping to get through that Senator
Kassebaum had introduced, which is very important, it says that you and
I, this is not Medicare, this is not Medicaid, you and I can transport
our insurance with us; we can be guaranteed that we can get it no
matter what our physical state is, and so forth. That is very
important. But one of the things that they are trying to do to ruin
that, the reason we have not been able to take it up, is another
variable.
Imagine a pool of water. That is how we want health care to be, a
pool that we are all in, just like my mother and father were in a
Medicare pool for years and years and years and never drew a dime. It
is a pool where everybody is paying in and, hopefully, no one gets
sick. But if they do, you are sharing the cost in the pool and that is
how you hope to keep the premiums down.
Well, what the Republicans want to do is lower a ladder into that
pool so the healthiest people and the wealthiest people can climb out.
Normally in a swimming pool if you are climbing out, the water goes
down. But let me tell you in an insurance pool, if you let the

[[Page H6696]]

healthiest people climb out of that pool and get a special deal and you
let the wealthiest people climb out of that pool and get a special
deal, then the water; that is, the insurance premiums, they are not
going to go down, they are going to go up.
So if we allow the MSA's to go through, which is the equivalent of
the ladder letting the healthy-wealthy people escape from the pool, we
will have some guarantees that do not mean anything. If you have a
guarantee that they have to sell you an insurance policy, that sounds
wonderful until you find out that they can also charge you $3,000 a
month and you do not have the money. You have a guarantee that does not
mean anything.
I have a guarantee I can buy a Rolls Royce. The only problem is I do
not have the money so it does not do me any good. So we do not want the
pool to be decimated of the healthiest and wealthiest or we will end up
with something that does not work. So think all of the health care
issues have to be kept in that context or we get very lost.
There is another issue that a lot of us would like to talk about,
too, and that is what will happen in this campaign year. I guess it is
no secret, most people know that I will be leaving after 24 years at
the end of this year, and I am very saddened about what I have seen
happening in campaigns. I think they have gotten so much worse than
when I first ran.
When I first ran they were so much more issue based. They were fun.
They were not the big sleazy fights that we see. And the money, the
money is unbelievable. When I first ran, my average campaign
contribution was $7.50. Hello. Do you think anybody running for
Congress has an average campaign contribution anywhere close to that?
Of course, after my 24 years I am now up to about 50 bucks, PAC's and
all, so I have not evolved very far. But let me say the big money that
is swirling around out there, I think, tends to taint the whole thing.
Anybody who believes someone gives you thousands of dollars because
they believe in good government, it really does not pass the straight
face test. I think they want access, and I think they probably want
something more than good government, probably something that affects
them very directly.
So when I see the big bucks going into it, that have really skewed
it, when I see it has moved from an issue base to a very personal type
of base when you try to destroy people one-on-one, and when I now see
more and more people trying to do independent expenditures and the
candidate says these independent expenditures are whirling around out
there running TV ads and they can savage anybody, the candidate can
always say, well, gee, I do not know, they are just spending hundreds
of thousands of dollars in my name, but I have no control over them.
Gosh, I am so sorry they are so savage and awful, but I have no control
at all.
Now, are we in this democracy just going to surrender to that or are
we going to do something about that? Is there anything we can do about
it? I am so tired of Americans throwing up their hands and saying
nothing we can do. It just gets worse and worse every year, and so more
and more Americans say, well, I am not even going to vote.

{time} 1430

First of all, this House hopefully is going to have reform week, and
I do not think we can call it a reform week unless we do something
about the big bucks in campaigns, about the soft money, about
independent expenditures. If we do not deal with that, we may as well
forget it. That is because I feel so strongly that money is tainting
this process and makes it look more and more like it is nothing but a
coin operated legislative machine. If you do not have the coins to put
in, you do not get the legislation out. Period.
So the average American feels very sold out. I feel so strongly about
that one day we went to the top of this dome and had a sold sign that
we walked around with, because even I feel like we are getting sold out
on our priorities and what we should be doing. Hopefully that reform
week that is coming up will deal with that issue. That is the key
issue, that is the core issue, and that absolutely must be dealt with.
There is something else that every American can do. I was in
Minnesota this weekend and ran into a person campaigning for their
statehouse who put out a very simple, fair campaign code. If people all
over America did this, we could really change our democratic process to
be something we are proud of again. Is it not kind of embarrassing, the
whole world is now saying, we like your possess, we want to be a
democratic process. We are saying that is fine, but do not come see
ours because it kind of stinks. We do not like it anyone. It does not
pass the smell test.
So this wonderful young woman out in Minnesota had come up with just
simple four little points. Her first point was, I will take full
responsibility for all brochures, advertisements, and press releases
done by my campaign. That is fairly simple, is it not? The candidate
takes responsibility for anything their campaign does. So they cannot
stand there and say: My press secretary did it; my campaign manager did
it; my counselor did it. No, no, no, no, no. You take responsibility.
And if you take responsibility, this means that, if something goes out
from your campaign, you bloody well better have seen it and, if you did
not see it, you still take responsibility.
It is the captain of the ship principle, simple, easy, and very
important. She also says that the second point should be people talking
about they should tell the truth. They should not distort
or misrepresent votes taken by either side. I think that is terribly
critical and very simple, again, to enforce.

She also thinks that it is very important that each candidate do the
following: No. 3, ask groups that support you to follow the same rules
and take responsibility for what they say. For example, if I were a
candidate and someone came to me and said, we really like you, Pat
Schroeder, we are going to go out and spend $200,000 in advertising in
your name, I would say to them, you can do that, that is wonderful, but
you only do it on these rules. I must sign off on what you say. There
will be no misrepresenting of votes. It must be truthful. And I am
going to take responsibility for what you do. If you do something that
is out of line, I am pulling the plug.
How simple is that? Imagine what could happen. This woman is amazing.
She is handing it out all over Minnesota and asking people to sign it.
I just picked it up. I thought, what a great idea. It is Yankee
ingenuity at work. Everybody sits around bemoaning the fact that
campaigns get worse and worse, and here is someone who has done
something about it. Yankee ingenuity is back.
So I hope every American starts redefining Yankee ingenuity campaign
by campaign by campaign across this great country. Because heaven only
knows, I know very few people who will stand up anywhere and say, we
are so proud of our democratic process and the level of civic debate
going on among the candidates. Let me tell you, it is so helpful, you
go to see civic debates, you go to these community debates and you come
out and really understand the issues. They are great forums.
Do you know anybody like that? If you do, I want to know where they
are. I travel around this country a lot, and I found people saddened,
their heart is broken by what has happened, by the civil discourse, by
the constant lowering down and dumbing down of the whole political
process.
I think we have a change to take it back. It is only going to happen
if we do it campaign by campaign individual by individual. The act of
omission is as bad as the act of not doing it. So you really have to
get out and do something. You cannot just sit back on the bench and be
a backbencher.
I just wanted to share that, too. If there is anyone frustrated, and
I know there are a lot because I hear from them all the time, this is a
great chance to move out, start putting down those principles, saying
to candidates, please, you should sign these agreements. You could even
have some political science groups or whatever oversee them, police
them or whatever. But if we do not reclaim this process, we are in
trouble. I think everybody knows that.
Now, one of the other things that I wanted to talk a bit about today,
too, is what has been happening with women. I was very excited to see
what

[[Page H6697]]

is happening in the Olympics. We are seeing young woman from America
move out in astronomical numbers. They are really looking like they are
going to do very well for this great country, that there are going to
be a lot more medals not just by our young men, who have always been
there, but the women are claiming more and more and more every single
year. So we are very proud of them.
I am particularly in awe because, being 55 years old, when I grew up,
there was no such thing as title 9, which comes from this great Federal
Government. There was no such thing as title IX. So we had no gym,
really. We had a few gym classes, yes, but I mean they were nothing.
The biggest thing was you were afraid that they would have a fire drill
in the middle of your gym class and somebody would see you in your
stupid gym suit and you would die of embarrassment. As a consequence, I
really have no sports at all.
When we played basketball, they thought women were so frail that we
could only dribble twice and we could not cross the center line. You
can imagine what exciting games those were. If you can only dribble
twice and could not cross the center line, it was like boring. But that
is where we were. It was always interesting they never thought women
were too frail to scrub floors, but they thought we were too frail for
sports. You could scrub floors somehow but, if we stood up and engaged
in sports, I guest they thought we would faint.
So title IX said that all the educational institutions that receive
any kind of public money had to provide the same sports and educational
opportunity for women that they did for men. As a consequence, many of
our young women in the schools participated in sports and found they
had all sorts of talent. This country has gone on to develop that
talent. We are going to see them showing those talents that we will all
be cheering on in the Olympics.
So why am I saying this? What is the big deal?
Well, the big deal is we have an affirmative action bill in front of
this Congress that can undo title IX, that could roll it all back, that
could put the women back out of the gyms and the sports programs and
push them back out of a lot of the educational programs they have been
able to involve themselves in. That I think we want to think about a
very long time. There are any number of other things that that
affirmative action bill would do. It just kind of guts everything that
was done from the 1960's on.
It is done in the name of things that we all want to agree with. It
says, well, you know, we really should be a color-blind society. And
they are right, we really should be a color-blind society. But let me
ask you, Americans, when we have got this terrible rash of church
burnings going on and black churches, how can we say we are there yet?
How can we say we are a color-blind society? I do not think we can,
when this awful act is going on that we are all trying to end.
I could give example after example after example. So people say what
we want ourselves to be but we have all sorts of empirical evidence
that we are not there yet. What these programs were about was to try
and open doors for people and help get them over some of the barriers
that have been artificially put up in front of different groups because
of their gender, their religion, their race, their ethnic background,
whatever it was.
If America is going to really allow everybody to develop to their
full potential, then you cannot allow artificial barriers to be put up
in front of people all over the place so that you prevent them from
being able to develop. That is just about how simple it is.
So I am hoping very much that we do not see this bill come to the
floor, but we are very apt do see it come to the floor and in the heat
and passion of the moment, with all the current flowing the other way,
I am afraid we will have all sorts of folks run to pass this bill. And
once it gets implemented about 5 years from now we will suddenly
realize we overreacted.
The problem with politics right now is to stand up and talk about
reforming something is not an applause line. If you stand up and say,
we are going to blow it up, hey, there is an applause line. You find
that over and over and over again. We are tired of affirmative action,
we do not like it, blow it up. Well, everybody would say, hey, the
world has changed since it went into effect.
There should be some changes and modifications, let us talk about
those. And let us bring it into the 1990's. But let us not blow it up
because we are not there yet. We have moved from point zero to maybe 50
percent, maybe 60 percent. We could have a debate about where it is, so
let us fine tune it and figure out where we go; but let us not blow it
up, and see if we cannot go back to where we were when we began the
whole process.
I think almost every single thing you think of that we have been
dealing with in this last year and a half fits under that same
category. You may think people have gone too far with environmental
regulations. But if you say, then let us talk about that and let us
figure out where they went too far and let us figure out what we do
about that instead, nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear just
blow it up. Let us do away with them. We do not want them. I think that
goes way too far.
So I guess my plea is for how do we lower the level of the discourse
and how do we roll up our shirt sleeves and get on with the hard work
of trying to reform things, to fix things, and to put them back
together again rather than to just continue this inflammatory rhetoric
about how I hate government more than you hate government. No, you do
not, I am going to go out there and blow it up even harder than you are
going to blow it up.

When you get all done, what are you going to replace it with? I used
to chair the Civil Service Subcommittee, and I would constantly find
myself in that position where you knew what the applause line was but
you knew it was wrong. You knew you could get great applause from
audiences if you went out and said the Federal Government is fat, and
it is lazy, and it is terrible, and blow it up. And everybody said yes,
yes, yes, that is wonderful.
And then you would say to people, OK, now what do you want to blow
up? Do you want to blow up the Park Service? No. We like the parks.
What about the immigration service? No, we need the immigration
service. What about drug enforcement? We need them. What about the FBI?
No, we need them.
You go through the whole thing. The only thing they really wanted to
blow up was the IRS. They hated the IRS. They did not want the IRS, but
they wanted all those things that came out of it.
So I guess what all of us have to do as citizens, as we start
talking, and I hope we do in this political year, start talking about
what is our responsibility as citizens, is we have to stop wringing our
hands and shouting loudly, instead of rolling our shirt sleeves, lower
our voices and start figuring out how we come together around a table
to fix things. That is what you do in a family.
There is nothing in my house that is ever perfect. My house is
constant maintenance. My cars are constant maintenance. I am middle-
aged. I am constant maintenance. I do not blow myself up or burn my
house down or decide I am not going to drive my car because the wheel
bearings fell out last week or whatever happened this week. No, we keep
fixing it and moving on. Government is that way, too. So how that
factors in, how we bring campaigns around, how we continue on with
saying we cannot just promise people that this is the great American
dream.
They have also got to see the reality that they can get there. It is
not just a dream that can be translated into reality by having such
things as affirmative action and title IX and many of the other
programs that a lot of us have benefited from.

{time} 1445

And how we fine-tune those, make them work better, make them fit
better; all of that is terribly important. So those are all things that
I think this body and this Nation needs to reflect upon.
When you see what I see, I see people becoming more and more cynical
every single day, and I remind people of what the word ``cynic'' came
from. It came

[[Page H6698]]

from the Greek word for yapping dog, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. If you go
back and you look at Greece, the democracy that they were so proud of
in Athens that we all talked about and learned about in school, it fell
because of cynics. They just all were so angry with everything. No one
fixed anything, and suddenly it all fell from within.
And it is very ironic, as you look at history, to see so many
civilizations could come together and work so hard to make sure nobody
overcame them from the outside, but suddenly, when they started to come
apart on the inside, they could not handle it. Is that not interesting?
You read over and over in history books different variations of
people coming together and saying, ``Well, it's not that we don't know
what is wrong. We know what's wrong. We can all give speeches on what's
wrong.'' And I bet every one of us will give a very similar speech
about what is wrong: about the pressures of families, the pressures on
the workplace, the pressures on what is going on with children, all of
those pressures. We all can state what is wrong. The problem is we are
not willing to work together to fix it. We are not willing to work
together to fix it, and we want to go out and attack in full force all
of the institutions that are there to fix it, and nobody has got some
kind of debate about what replaces those institutions.

If you truly believe this Government can run without a government or
this country can run without a government, then OK, but if it does, it
will be the first. No one has--you have got to have some kind of
functioning government around which you are organized; something has to
be there.
So should it not be something that we are proud of? Should it not be
something that we all are invested in? And should it not be something
that relates to us and we relate to it?
I constantly think about the excitement of the American revolution
and how did we lost it. Think about revolutions. We were not the first
country that had a revolution. Almost every country in the world has
had a revolution at one time or another. But so often what happens in a
revolution is the guys on the outside are yelling at the people who are
in power, and they say they are autocratic, they are repressive, they
are all those things, and they probably are, but then the minute they
take over, they become more autocratic, more repressive, more, more,
more, and so it really becomes a fight over power, who has power over
the people, rather than a real revolution which changes.
But the American Revolution was different because the people who beat
the king did not insist on having power over. Remember, remember, there
were colonists who went to George Washington after the Revolution and
said to him:
``Listen, George, Forget this democracy stuff. Why do you not just be
king? We really just didn't want a king sitting on the other side of
the Atlantic, but having a king here, that will be fine. Why don't you
be king.''
Is there a politician you would make that offer to in America today?
I doubt it. But that offer was made to George, and he said, ``You
forgot why we fought this revolution. We fought this revolution about a
democracy where everybody is going to have a chance to participate and
have their voice heard.'' So he had an idea of what it was about, and
somehow we have lost the feeling for what it is all about.
It is about civics, it is about community, it is about common good,
and why we are so afraid to say those words anymore I do not know, and
it is about trying to bring them around.
And so as I mention that, let me come to my final thing. I have been
on the Committee on Armed Services for 24 years, and I have been very
honored to sit there. The end of last week I was very troubled to
realize that there were articles in the paper talking about the fact
that there is a whole new tradition apparently being developed; I never
heard of this before, and that is that the armed services are now
putting four officers in the Speaker's office. I am not quite sure why
we are putting people in uniform in congressional offices to help them
with their work. Does that mean all of us are now to get four officers
in our office or, because we are lower down, maybe we only get two. And
what are they supposed to do? Drill the staff?

I mean I do not get this at all. If we have got all these extra
people, maybe we should downsize and save some tax money.
I have written to Secretary Bill Perry asking about this and asking
why these officers had been assigned to be workers in political
offices. One of the great things about our military is it has not been
politicized, and it has not been involved in partisan politics, and I
find it very hard to put military officers in offices of congressmen
and women and not have them get politicized in this body. Heaven
forbid. It has been more politicized than anything I have ever seen.
How you would put them in this body and have them be neutral and
nonpartisan I do not know, but I just really cannot figure this out,
and I wonder what it means in all of this discourse we have been having
about civics and community and all of that.
The initial response we heard from the military is that they put
these officers in the Speaker's office because many Members of Congress
had not had experience in uniform and they thought that this would be
helpful, and I mean I cannot figure that one out either. That one did
not print with me. So I want a better excuse. We added up the salaries.
It comes to about a quarter of a million dollars a year. That is a lot
of money to be donating.
So what are they doing? Why are they doing it? How are they
responsible to citizens in America? And is this something we want our
tax money doing? I certainly do not think I do, but I will wait until
we hear from the Defense Department and get a much more detailed
response than anything we have gotten so far. But that is troubling.
So let me finish at this point to say I hope that this Nation really
finds its passion and fire for democracy.
I think democracy is a faith. All of our Forefathers said it was a
faith, and it is a faith. You have to really believe it is going to
work because the only way it is going to work is if people really get
involved, and it is not like consumerism where you can say I do not
like those burgers so I will not buy those burgers. That works for
being a consumer, but in civics if you say I do not like politics so I
will not get involved in politics, the difference is the people who do
get involved are going to pick the leaders and the leaders are going to
make the decision for you, so you just gave up your place at the table.
So democracy is a faith because we hope all citizens will stay
involved, they will stay at the table, they work hard to become
informed with those rights. To elect and participate comes the
responsibility to know something when you do it. But how exciting. How
many people gave their lives for that great, great privilege? And how
many people on this planet go to bed every night wishing they had that
great privilege? And we have absolutely, as a nation, got to shake off
this attitude that we are in because we have a terrible attitude right
now out there about democracy and a terrible attitude about our
process.
You may have a better idea than democracy; I do not know. If you have
got one, bring it forward. But if you do not have one, get involved and
make democracy work better. Do not just sit there and holler.
I really wish that we could give people a little card every time they
voted, and you could only complain if you had the current little card
because I cannot tell you how many people come at me at a hundred miles
per hour with their mouth going and their finger going and you know
their nostrils are getting wider and they are screaming and yelling and
jumping up and down and you say:
``Well, now, did you vote?''
``No.''
And you really wonder, do you not, how could they give up that
phenomenal privilege? They want to be heard, but they do not want to
take the time to vote.
So let us think about civics, let us think about inclusiveness, let
us think about common good, let us think about families, let us think
about all the people gathered today at the table in Tennessee talking
about what could be done to help make the pressure a little less on
their family. I hope all of you think about what could make the
pressure a little less on your family, and

[[Page H6699]]

let us all put those thoughts to work, stop shouting at each other and
get on with making this great country what it should be and giving it
the legacy it should have in the 21st century. We should be leading the
world showing people how democracy works. We should be holding our head
high.

____________________