[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.

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