[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 104 (Tuesday, July 16, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H7650-H7653]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            A REPUBLICAN CONGRESS AND A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, it is interesting how we are hearing all 
these speeches tonight on Democrats calling for bipartisan support, and 
then all they are doing is bashing Republicans. I hardly think their 
discussions go beyond anything but political rhetoric, so I am going to 
go on to some other topics right now.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield just 
for a moment?
  Mr. KINGSTON. I will yield, but I want the gentlewoman to remember in 
her book, I am yielding, and I would love you to tell members of your 
party that Republican Members will yield to Democrats when they control 
the time.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. I will be happy to do that.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I am going to yield to you. I have got to give you my 
lecture first. You remember how it was when you were a kid and your 
parents were going to give you some money, you had to hear their story 
first.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. That is all right since the gentleman is 
kind enough to yield.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I have yielded countless time to Democrats. Then I have 
asked for the courtesy of a return, and it is so difficult to get a 
return. The gentlewoman being an outstanding Member of Congress, of 
high integrity and has the confidence of her convictions, I know she 
would yield to me. But I hope you tell some of your friends that.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman now that she has heard my 
nickel lecture.

                              {time}  2145

  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman 
from Georgia, I appreciate his admonition and your kindness as well. I 
will not take up all of his time. I would only offer to the gentleman 
it might be out of the passion of the comments being made by some of 
the Members in this well that might cause them to delay in yielding, 
but I thank him for his kindness. I simply wanted to, because I do 
appreciate his offering or extending the offer for us to work in a 
bipartisan manner.
  My Comments were only drawn from a letter from Republican Members who 
themselves are opposed to H.R. 3760, and I was offering their comments 
and not suggesting anything other than reading from a letter signed by 
Christopher Shays, Linda Smith, among others, and that was what I was 
referring to. I thank the gentleman.
  All I wanted to do was clarify that because I do appreciate the need 
for a bipartisan approach in all of the things that we do.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, if I could engage the gentlewoman 1 more 
minute here, the gentleman from Texas, speaking 10 minutes before the 
gentlewoman, went out of his way to say the Speaker Gingrich fought the 
gift ban. Well, there is not a bigger misrepresentation of the facts I 
have heard in the last 24 hours. I have been home, so I am catching up 
on my rhetoric now that I have been in Washington a couple of hours. 
But as the gentlewoman knows, the gift ban passed with overwhelmingly 
bipartisan support and it was, in fact, the Speaker's idea to have a 
gift ban which we call an absolute gift ban, as opposed to one that had 
a $10 limit on it.
  So for a Member to say that the Speaker fought a gift ban, the 
gentlewoman and I both know it is absurd. That was really the comment 
that got my attention.
  Let me yield to the gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee].

[[Page H7651]]

  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman and his 
defense of the Speaker. Let me defend my colleague from Texas, who I 
know has the highest of integrity, and would only say that I do recall 
that there was vigorous disagreement and debate about the gift ban and 
could also allow, it the gentleman would give credit to the Democrtic 
Congress which attempted to put on the floor of the House in the 103d 
Congress the Congressional Accountability Act, and in fact it was 
opposed and not passed until the 104th Congress but initially initiated 
by Democrats in the 103d. So we all can have different explanations of 
our roles in the various means of reform, and I hope that maybe we will 
at some point come collectively to realize that real reform does 
require a bipartisan approach and we will get it done.

  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, absolutely, because 
the 103d Congress, as the gentlewoman remembers, was majority Democrat, 
as was the Senate in the 103d Congress; and had the Democrat leadership 
wanted to pass the Accountability Act in the 103d Congress, it was 
simply a matter of Democrats working together.
  Now, to get back to the gentlewoman's point, it is interesting now we 
have a Republican House and Republican Senate and a Democrat White 
House and we did pass it, so bipartisanship does work.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue 
to yield, it does work, and I believe that the stalemate did involve 
Republican disagreement in the 103d Congress on congressional 
accountability, but I think we will probably never come to complete 
agreement as to whose fault, but we do agree that we do need to work in 
a bipartisan manner.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Absolutely.
  Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his 
kindness.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her 
contributions to this.
  A year ago, Mr. Speaker, we in this Congress, the 104th Congress, had 
passed 30 out of 31 parts of the Contract With America, and all of 
these were designed to reduce the size of government, to decrease 
taxes, to cut wasteful spending, to balance the budget, to have welfare 
reform and increase personal responsibility by shrinking government 
regulatory command and control bureaucracy.
  We in the House were excited about it. We had passed 30 out of 31 
parts. We knew that the Senate would grab these parts and run with it. 
And as it turned out, our friends across the Capitol in the Senate 
said, well, the Contract With America was a House promise, not a Senate 
promise, and we will get to it as soon as we have dealt with Whitewater 
and antiterrorism and Packwood.
  So with each month of deliberation, the public interest and public 
support also, Mr. Speaker, ebbed and finally to the extent that it 
appeared that the President would not even have to veto this 
legislation because he would never see it.

  To speak about the press a minute during this interim of time, the 
Republican Party has enjoyed probably an unprecedented in modern time 
era of public support. All the programs, everything seemed to be going 
well and in fact, 90 percent of the Contract With America passed with 
strong bipartisan support. But the press, as you know, has never loved 
conservatives, and their anti-Gringrich ferocity, their fever got to 
such a high-pitched shrill sound of indignation, and I am speaking of 
the national liberal media, that now the Speaker has to travel with 
bodyguards. He never had to before. Never changed his views when he 
became Speaker.
  What happened? Well, the press who loves to make strawmen out of 
people decided well, let us kind of set this guy up, and that is what 
has happened now. But worse than their attacks on the Republican 
Speaker and the Republican Congress, the press did something far worse. 
They simply ignored President Clinton's inconsistencies, his apparent 
shortcomings.
  For example, on June 4, 1992, on ``Larry King Live,'' Bill Clinton 
said he would balance the budget in 4 years. ``As President, I will 
balance the budget in 4 years,'' said Candidate Clinton. Well, of 
course that never has happened. And what happened when he did get a 
balanced budget? He voted it.
  On January 16, 1992, Candidate Clinton said, ``I am going to give a 
middle-class tax cut.'' He had a campaign advertisement that promised a 
middle-class tax cut. I believe the exact words were and I know I am 
real close on this, ``Hi, I'm Bill Clinton. I have a plan to get the 
economy moving again, starting with a middle-class tax cut.'' That ran 
in State after State during the Democrat primary.
  Then once elected, of course, in 1992, President Clinton passed the 
largest tax increase in the history of the country. ``Let us end 
welfare as we know it,'' another favorite Candidate Clinton promise. 
Said it over and over again, ``Let us end welfare as we know it.'' Does 
anybody ever remember that sentence being attributed to anybody else 
but Bill Clinton?
  What does this guy do when he is President? He vetoes the welfare 
reform bill that did pass on a bipartisan basis, one that our Nation's 
Governors support. He also promised to reduce the size of government. 
If you take away the reductions in Department of Defense, the military 
personnel, the size of the government has actually increased 6,000 
people.

  So I think probably the press did more harm in ignoring Bill Clinton, 
not measuring him with the same glasses or the same scale that they 
would a Newt Gingrich, a Dan Quayle, a George Bush, a Ronald Reagan. 
They let him basically get away with anything he wants to. In fact, 
there is a great book that has been written by Brent Roselle on that 
point.
  Let us compare now Congress, the 103d, which we mentioned tonight, 
versus the 104th Congress. The 103d Congress, I have already said, 
passed the largest tax increase in the history of the country. This is 
the Democrats. When the Democrats were in charge, the largest tax 
increase in American history was passed. That included a tax on our 
seniors; Social Security was hit. That included a tax on small business 
people and partnerships and small businesses, sub-S corporations, they 
got hit. On the middle-class, a 4.3 gas tax increase.
  What was another thing the Democrats did when they were in charge of 
the Congress? Tried to socialize medicine. The gentleman from Missouri, 
Mr. Gephardt, working very closely with Mr. Clinton introduced a 
socialized medicine plan that would have put 100,000 new Federal 
employees in charge of a command control bureucracy running our 
Nation's health care. This incidently would have created 59 new 
government agencies.
  Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the bureaucracy was out doing their 
thing. The EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, what were 
they doing? They were going around in government businesses and in 
private businesses trying to outlaw religious symbols in the workplace. 
Now, what do I mean by that? If you wore a Jesus Saves hat, T-shirt to 
work, if you had a Star of David necklace and you were working in an 
airline factory, that would have been considered harassment of Federal 
employees, the same way it would bringing a Playboy to work would have.
  So now we have religious symbols on the same basis as pornography by 
the Clinton bureaucrats telling businesses what to do. If you have 
scripture readings in your business, you would not be able to have 
that. If you have scripture on your wall, you would not be able to have 
that.
  What were the Clinton folks doing over at the OSHA agency? They were 
saying that if you smoked in your own house, your own property, and you 
had a domestic employee, a housekeeper, then you had to have 
ventilators in your house, and that is what the bureaucrats were doing. 
So these were the things that we saw under Democrat control of 
Congress.
  Now, what have we seen in the Republican control? Well, we have cut 
the staff of Congress by one-third. We have reduced operating expenses 
by $67 million. For the first time in history, we have put Congress 
under the same workplace laws as the private sector. We have passed a 
very tough gift ban, tougher than this Congress has ever seen. For the 
first time in over 50 years, we passed a lobbyist registration bill. We 
have also passed the line-item veto so that the President can have

[[Page H7652]]

that same tool that the Governors, most Governors, have in our country, 
which is the power to scratch out pork from the budget. And if it is 
good for a Republican President, it is good for a Democrat President. 
So we as Republicans did give the President that tool. We have passed 
securities litigation reform. That was vetoed by the President but we 
were able to, on a bipartisan basis, override his veto.
  We are working hard on products liability legislation. As you know, 
that was also vetoed. The trial lawyers gave very heavily to the 
Clinton campaign and so the President vetoed that apparently. We have 
passed a bill to end farm subsidies, it phases out farm subsidies over 
a 7-year period of time and gives our farmers more flexibility, things 
that they need in terms of planning decisions, deciding what kind of 
crop to plant and where to plant it and how much.
  We have passed the Paperwork Reduction Act so that businesses who 
deal with the Federal Government will not have to be mired down in all 
the paperwork and redtape. We have stopped the practice of unfunding 
mandates. This is the practice, Mr. Speaker, where we would go into, 
say, my town, Savannah, GA, and the Congress would tell the people of 
Savannah, GA, or Alma, GA, or Blackshear, GA, how to run their city, 
require them to offer certain services which they would have to 
implement but we were not going to pay for, and it was nothing but a 
local property tax increase and we have stopped that.
  We also passed the telecommunications law that brings 
telecommunications law up to telecommunications technology, and I think 
some time in the very near future that our constituents will be picking 
up their phone at night, they will be ordering a movie through that. 
They will be watching that move on TV. The phone service and the cable 
television will all be offered by one company and it is going to be a 
very competitive package.
  You might be able to dial from Athens to Atlanta, GA, without long 
distance and a lot of exciting things. But probably more than any of 
these achievements, what the Republican Congress has done is stop the 
ball from moving down the field in a leftward direction. We have 
stopped the swing to the extreme left, which is what is very important.
  Now, where do we go from here? We have got a long way to go. The 
Government still is not working right. We can still do a better job. 
Our seniors are not comfortable with their retirement, their security. 
Our people still cannot walk down the street without looking over their 
shoulder, and more importantly, our children are concerned that they 
will not be able to share the American dream. I believe, Mr. Speaker, 
that both parties have a responsibility on these matters. I think that 
it is OK to address these problems without political rhetoric. Medicare 
is going to go broke, according to the trustees appointed by President 
Clinton, in the year 2002. We need to move in the direction of saving, 
protecting and preserving Medicare. I have worked on it personally very 
hard. I think that our seniors, my mother, my mother and dad, need to 
have something more than a 1964 Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan. I believe 
that they should have all the options that are out there in health care 
today, options such as a physician service network, a medical savings 
account, a managed care plan, traditional Medicare. I have confidence 
in American seniors. I have confidence that they should have all the 
choices that are out there.

                              {time}  2200

  I do not believe it is fair for command and control Washington 
bureaucrats to tell my mother what kinds of health care she has to 
have. I believe she should be able to keep her choice of physician, but 
she needs to have the choice of plans also.
  It is interesting, the proposal that we have offered actually 
increases Medicare from around $5,000 per person to $7,000 per person, 
and this includes new enrollees. There is no reason in the world why we 
cannot address Medicare without partisan rhetoric.
  Let us talk about the environment. I think it is very important that 
we have confidence in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, and the 
water we swim in. We need to know it is chemical free and clean. We 
need to have environmental cleanup.
  The Superfund. Let us talk about that. The Superfund now is about 16 
years old. In its history we have spent $25 billion, and for that $25 
billion we have only cleaned up about 12 percent of the national 
priority environmentally polluted areas. Forty-three cents on the 
dollar of Superfund goes to litigation. And between 1990 and 1992, the 
Department of Justice spent 800,000 man-hours on Superfund litigation 
alone.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it is time we went ahead and cleaned up the 
environment rather than enrich the lawyers. It is time to move ahead on 
it.
  On the Endangered Species Act. There is a story of a man, it is a 
true story, his name is Ben Cone. I do not think he would mind me using 
his name because it is a matter of public record. But he had an 8,000-
acre tract of timber in North Carolina. In one area of that land the 
red cockaded woodpecker came, and the value of that land in that 
portion fell from about a million to about $267,000, because with a red 
cockaded woodpecker, endangered species, you are not allowed to harvest 
timber. So automatically all that portion of his land dropped in value.
  So the question is, Mr. Speaker, what do you do, if you are Ben Cone, 
if you are the farmer? Do you clear-cut the rest of it before there is 
a endangered species on it? Do you stop your 80-year timber rotation 
and start cutting? What is he supposed to do? This is not rhetoric, 
this is real. This is real life.
  I think one of the things that our Endangered Species Act does not 
recognize is that we have a disincentive for people to encourage 
habitat enhancement that will bring endanged species to it. We should 
have such that if a private landowner gets an endangered species he is 
proud of it. Hey, I have an Indigo snake, I have a gopher turtle. You 
just come report it, preserve it, protect it. We can do this through 
some of these easements.
  We worked on a bill, the gentleman from New Jersey, Congressman 
Sexton, and the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Deal, and the gentleman 
from Maryland, Congressman Gilchrest, and I, that was moving in that 
direction. I hope, Mr. Speaker, we can get that to the floor of the 
House because we need to have some balance.
  Another issue. A very hot topic. The president vetoed welfare reform. 
In my area, we believe that it is time that people who can work be 
required to work. Our welfare reform, our system that we have now, we 
have spent $5 trillion on since 1964 and all we have done is increased 
the poverty level.
  I think it is very important for us to have a program that would 
identify the father of the baby. Because we say to young women, let me 
start with them first, if you get pregnant and you are, say 16 or 17 
years old, it will mess you your college education, it will mess up 
your high school education, you will have some problems. That is what 
we say to the girl. What do we say to the boy? Nothing. You have the 
responsibility of an alley cat. You want to get a girl pregnant, go on 
about your business, we are not going to bother you.
  I think it is important to say to the young man, in a loving way, 
that if you are get a girl pregnant you are on the hook for it just as 
much as she is.
  I have talked about the work requirement. If you are able to work you 
ought to be required to work.
  Let me talk about the legal alien part, people who come into our 
country for the benefits, people who are not here necessarily to work, 
although it is important for us to know in my area, in the rural areas, 
it is hard to find Americans who will work because our welfare benefits 
are so generous.
  I come from Vidalia onion country. If a Vidalia onion farmer wants to 
get his opinions picked, he cannot get Americans. The job pays about $9 
an hour. It is hard work, but that is not bad money--$9 an hour, Mr. 
Speaker, and you cannot get Americans to do it. You have to get migrant 
workers to do it. I am not talking about illegal aliens. I am talking 
about migrant workers.
  I think the statement here is that it is more of an indication that 
the welfare system is broken when you cannot get Americans to work than 
it is an indictment of foreigners who want to come to America because 
they are willing to work. I will say this, though, we

[[Page H7653]]

should not have permanent welfare benefits for illegal aliens, because 
when people come to our country for the benefits, they need emergency 
care, we should help them out, but then they ought to be on their way.
  Now, block grants are something that the command and control 
Washington bureaucrats cannot stand, but basically what State grants 
would do is give local welfare caseworkers options on how to care for 
children.
  Here is a true story in Savannah, GA, a welfare family. Two girls. 
One of them is 15 years old. She is in the eighth grade. The other one 
is 18 years old. She is in the 10th grade. Now, remember, 18-year-olds 
should be seniors and 15-year-olds should be in the 10th grade. The 18-
year-old has a baby, the 15-year-old does not have a child. She is in 
school and doing well. The girls live with the common-law husband of 
their biological mother. He is not their biological father.
  Now, the mother does not live at home anymore. She does not provide 
for them anymore. She does not come around because she is hooked on 
crack. The only time she has come by the house in recent months was to 
get in a fight with her common-law husband, which ended up her throwing 
ash at him and blinding him. So now he can no longer see and he can no 
longer work.
  The girls have a brother who is not by their same biological father, 
but a step brother, and he is in jail. The question is where is their 
biological father? Their biological father was killed when they were 
small children.
  This is a real case. This is a complicated case to keep up with, I 
realize, but this is not an unusual case. This is what is happening out 
there on the street today. It is a sad case. We have to help these 
girls.
  If you remember what it was like when you were 15 and 18 years old, 
it was very difficult to get through school and all the pressures in a 
normal household much less in a situation like this. But the 
caseworker's problem, and he told me personally, here you have to have 
child care, and that is one agency; then you have to have health care, 
that is another agency; you get WIC, you have food stamps, you got job 
training, you have education, you got transportation needs, and all 
these have to be handled by a different bureaucracy.
  Would it not be great if this caseworker working on this one family 
could take them from A to Z and have all their problems handled by 
himself or through one phone call, one-stop shopping, so to speak? That 
is why the block grants, which would give flexibility to the State, are 
so important, because that is all it would do.
  What are some of the other issues we need to deal with? Crime. Truth 
in sentencing. We are getting better now, but it has been that when 
people have been sentenced for 8 years or 10 years, that they have only 
served 35 percent of their time. I believe, and I know most Members of 
this body and people in America right now believe, that if an 
individual is sentenced for 10 years, they ought to serve their full 
sentence. They ought to serve at least 85 percent of that 10 years, if 
they do not serve 10 out of 10.
  We have passed a law that says if a State wants Federal money for 
Federal prison construction then their State needs to have truth in 
sentencing. That is something that we are still fighting about with the 
President and the Washington liberals, but, again, it gets our streets 
safer so that people can walk down their streets.

  We are putting more money into drug interdiction and antidrug 
programs. I read a statistic the other day that said that the No. 1 age 
for trying marijuana now across the Nation is 13. We debate here about 
our children starting to smoke cigarettes early, and I believe that is 
a very serious problem. We cannot let our children start smoking 
cigarettes early. But let us do not forget about the 13-year-olds, Mr. 
Speaker, who are lighting up marijuana, because that is an illegal drug 
with all sorts of ramifications.
  So while we are focusing so much time on the welfare of our children, 
we better remember how important it is to have a good antidrug program; 
to have DARE programs and so forth like that.
  Mr. Speaker, all this stuff leads to some uneasiness of the American 
population, and it is something that we have got to deal with, but one 
thing that I have not mentioned up till now is the fact that all of 
this is for naught if we go bankrupt. We have a budget right now that 
16 percent of it is going to interest on the national debt. About $20 
billion each month goes to just interest. Our national debt is about $5 
trillion.
  Now, here are some interesting numbers, and this is from the February 
6, 1995, Wall Street Journal. Listen to this, Mr. Speaker: $1 trillion 
has 12 zeros to it. A trillion is a million times a million. A million 
squared. It would take more than 1\1/2\ million millionaires to have as 
much money as is spent by Congress in a year.
  Actually, that statistic is not true because this was written when 
the budget was a trillion dollars and it is now about a trillion six.
  Here is another statistic. Here is an experiment, reading directly 
from the article. What if we were to try to pay off the $4 trillion 
national debt? Now, let me pause again. Old article. The national debt 
now is about $5 trillion. But this still is a good illustration.
  What if we were to try to pay off the $4 trillion national debt by 
having Congress put $1 every second into a special debt buy-down 
account? How many years would it take to pay off the debt?
  Did you want to guess at this, Mr. Speaker? Okay, I will go ahead and 
tell you the answer.
  One million seconds is about 12 days. One billion seconds is roughly 
32 years. But one trillion seconds is almost 32,000 years. So to pay 
off the debt, Congress would have to put dollar bills into this account 
for about the next 130,000 years, roughly the amount of time that has 
passed since the Ice Age.
  I will give you another illustration, since you are begging to one, I 
can tell.
  Even if we were to require Congress to put $100 a second into this 
debt buy-down account, it would still take over 1,000 years to pay the 
debt down. So here is another one. Imagine a train of 50-foot box cars 
crammed with $1 bills. How long would the train have to be to carry the 
$1.6 trillion Congress spends each year?
  About $65 million can be stuffed into a box car. Therefore, the train 
would have to be about 240 miles long to carry enough dollar bills to 
balance the Federal budget. In other words, we would need a train that 
stretches the entire Northeast Corridor from Washington through 
Baltimore, Delaware, Philadelphia and New Jersey and on to New York in 
order to carry that much money.
  That is just mind-boggling in terms of numbers. I think one of the 
biggest problems we have with our national debt, Mr. Speaker, is that 
it is an inconceivable amount, but if we could conceive a trillion, I 
think we would be so horrified, that we as a Nation would be horrified 
into immediate answer.
  We have to balance this budget, Mr. Speaker. We have to do it for our 
kids. We have to cut out Government waste. We have to increase 
privatization. We have to increase efficiency, and we have to do it in 
a nonpartisan, nonpolitical way.

                              {time}  2215

  If you do balance the budget, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve, has testified that it could bring down interest rates as much 
as 1.5 percent. If it dropped it down 2 percent, you could save $37,000 
on a $75,000 home mortgage over a 30-year period of time. You could 
save $900 on a $15,000 automobile loan.
  These are things, Mr. Speaker, that will help the American public. It 
will do it now, and the time is now to balance this budget and to 
continue the work that we have started in this Congress.

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