[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 105 (Wednesday, July 17, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H7773-H7777]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          MORE ON REFORM WEEK

  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, I appreciate the time and wanted to say 
first of all a couple of things about the, and I am not going to call 
it a debate, my friends from the other side of the aisle who would 
yield 1 minute and then go off on a tirade. I do not think that is 
quite a debate, but then again I am not from their districts.
  But I want to point out one thing, Mr. Speaker. The Clinton 
administration came to office, and they have been in office for 3\1/2\ 
years. They enjoyed 2 years of majority rule in the Senate and in the 
House. During that period of time, campaign finance reform was not 
passed. I have heard that Phil Gramm was the problem.
  Who controlled the Senate during that period of time? Obviously the 
Democrats did. If they are going to bring in partisan politics, then it 
certainly stands to reason it should have passed under their watch the 
first 2 years.
  I know this, Mr. Speaker, because I worked with Tillie Fowler and 
Peter Torkildsen on a campaign finance bill that we introduced as a 
freshman class.

                              {time}  2215


                announcement by the speaker pro tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. If the gentleman from Georgia would suspend, 
the Chair would remind all those assembled that it is inappropriate to 
discuss individual Members of the other body or action or inaction they 
may have taken with regard to legislation.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I understand that, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate that 
point.
  Let the record be clear that the Senate and the House were controlled 
by Democrats for the 2-year period of time. The House Republicans have 
been working on campaign finance reform on a bipartisan basis for some 
time now, and one of the issues that we are trying to get bipartisan 
support on but we cannot is the issue of soft money and the practice of 
unions and big union PACs to participate in elections and not even to 
have to report that money even though it is spent on behalf of a 
candidate. They can come into a district and spend under the label of 
soft money, an independent expenditure of money on ads, money directed 
toward the incumbent Republican, almost unlimited, and there is no 
check on that.
  True campaign finance reform would account for all political money, 
not just the reportable money, and I hope that we do get some Democrats 
who are willing to stand up to the big union bosses. I know that they 
are raising $35 million on behalf of Democrat candidates right now and 
Democrats are somewhat very reluctant to take on such a cash cow, but 
it would be great if they would.
  Just to give Members some idea, AFL-CIO in 1994 spent $804,000 on 
Democrat congressional candidates, 99 percent of their contributions. 
The American Federation of Teachers spent $1,053,000; 99.3 percent of 
their total contributions went to Democrats. The American Trial Lawyers 
Association spent 94 percent of their campaign contributions on 
Democrat candidates, $1,759,000. The Human Rights folks spent 96.5 
percent of their money on Democrats. That is $470,000. The Community 
Action Program spent 96 percent of their money on Democrats, $42,000. 
The International Longshoreman's, $300,000, which was 96 percent going 
to Democrats. The IUE, this is some other union, I am not sure which, 
$204,000, 100 percent going to Democrats. The International Union of 
Bricklayers, $143,000 going to Democrat candidates, 98.9 percent of 
their entire budget of contributions. The National Education 
Association, $1,968,000; 99 percent of it going to Democrats. And one 
more, the UAW union PAC, $1,914,000, 99 percent going to Democrat 
candidates. I would say if you want true campaign finance reform, this 
has to be included in the formula.
  Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Massachusetts wanted some time, and 
let me yield to him.
  Mr. MEEHAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, I was just going to make the point that the bipartisan 
bill, which I have been working on with Chris Shays and with Linda 
Smith, would in fact limit, in fact the first provision is to abolish 
PAC money. The second fall-back provision because of constitutional 
problems is to limit PAC's to $1,000 per primary, $1,000 for general. 
And there are 21 Democrats on that particular bill so I think the 
characterization of Democrats is inaccurate.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Reclaiming the time just a minute with the intent of 
yielding back to you for further explanation, does your bill also limit 
or eliminate independent expenditures, such as those that have been 
targeted

[[Page H7774]]

by the AFL-CIO to the tune of $35 million?
  Mr. MEEHAN. The U.S. Supreme Court has just recently ruled that one 
cannot limit the independent expenditures in these races. But what we 
do is require more accurate recordkeeping so that we know where the 
money is coming from and where it is going.
  One of the difficulties with campaign finance reform is the U.S. 
Supreme Court decisions which make it impossible to limit independent 
contributions.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Reclaiming my time for a minute, I understand that and 
I think that is a good point. Let me ask the gentleman this, though, in 
terms of individual union members who are not necessarily buying the 
big labor union Democrat embrace, should they not have the right to 
know where their dues are going? For example, here is a union, the 
Democrat-Republican Independent Voter Education Committee. I am not 
sure which union this is, maybe the gentleman can tell me. But just the 
name, Democrat-Republican Independent Voter Education Committee would 
lead me as a rank and file union member to think that my money was 
going everywhere when in fact $2,131,000 went to Democrats which 
represented 97.8 percent of the entire expenditures. Clearly that is a 
Democrat PAC. It would be fair to tell the people who have to 
contribute where their money is going.
  So my question is, do you support that worker contributor's right to 
know clause, which we have been working very hard with in our campaign 
finance reform to try to get in there?
  Mr. FARR. May I respond?
  Mr. KINGSTON. I yield.
  Mr. FARR. I think that every worker has a right to know where their 
contribution is going. I do not think that your provision is the one 
that I support because it does not apply equally to corporate as well. 
A PAC contribution is a PAC contribution. It is a check-off system, 
whether you work for a corporation or whether you work for a union.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Reclaiming the time for a second, I agree with you 
absolutely. PAC contributors, people who work for banks or insurance 
companies or manufacturers, they should know also because clearly some 
of those PAC's are lopsided, also.
  Now, none of them are as lopsided as the labor union PAC's, but I 
mean, for example, even NRA and tobacco PAC's, the tobacco PAC's gave 
more to Democrat candidates in 1994 than they did to Republicans. NRA 
is on like maybe a 60-40 split. I do not have the number with me but I 
did look at it. I truly believe anybody who contributes to a PAC needs 
to know to the dollar where that money went. So I am in complete 
agreement with you on that.
  Mr. MEEHAN. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KINGSTON. Yes.
  Mr. MEEHAN. I just ask the question, why do you think big tobacco 
decided to stop contributing more to Democrats and retool their efforts 
contributing to Republicans after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans 
took over?
  Mr. KINGSTON. That is a good question. Reclaiming the time, this is 
the way I understand it as a student of campaign finance reform. In 
1972, when PAC's started because of the large, individual contributor, 
the gentleman may remember the man, he was in the life insurance 
business, gave over $1 million to Richard Nixon's campaign, and one of 
the reactions were to have PAC's and PAC's were originally supposed to 
be a campaign finance tool, a way to get around the influence of a guy 
who can write a million-dollar check. And so what happened is that 
PAC's, people thought back in the early 1970's, would be ideological, 
and the gentleman knows there are some that are truly ideological. For 
example, a lot of the women's group PAC's they will give to a pro-
choice candidate who has no chance of winning, whereas a lot of the 
pro-life groups hold back and want to make sure that they are winning.
  Let me even take that back. I would say the abortion PAC's are more 
ideological. The business PAC's are absolute pragmatists. They do not 
truly have an ideological philosophy except their own special interest. 
So what they do, and the gentleman knows well, they contribute to the 
majority, and a lot of those tobacco contributions that have come in 
have come in because they best against the freshmen who knocked out 
incumbents, and the first thing that happens, as the gentleman is well 
aware of, is PAC's that bet on the wrong horse try to make amends early 
on in the game and that was part of the thing that was going on.

  Had you guys kept the majority, there is no doubt the money would 
have stayed with you on that.
  I agree, let us fix it. Let us have more worker right to know, 
contributor right to know, and let us get into it. There is plenty of 
room here for finance reform.
  Another thing that I am interested in, and I believe the gentleman is 
too, is making sure that the money comes from the district. I think 75 
percent of the money ought to come from somebody's individual district. 
But we are willing to settle on 50 percent plus $1. But that is more to 
your side than our side.
  Mr. FARR. The difficulty with your plan is you have no limits. If you 
are concerned about PAC contributions influencing, whether they be 
labor PAC's or business PAC's or whatever the ideological framework of 
a PAC may be, you put no limits on them, none, absolutely none. We put 
limits, we say all right, candidate, if you are going to run with a 
limit on yourself, then you cannot take more than one-kind of your 
money, $200,000 maximum from a PAC and no PAC can give you more than, 
in a 2-year cycle, $6,000. That is what you are missing. You are 
missing this sort of idea of putting any kind of limits on an 
individual.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Reclaiming my time, I agree with that and I know you 
are supporting the one-third limitation. I would support that.
  In my race generally I am well under that. Let me give the gentleman 
some live true-to-life examples, Members of your party. I will share 
this list with you. I am not going to tell their names at this point. 
This one here is one of your leadership, $77,000 from PAC`s, $281,000 
from individuals. Seventy percent PAC contributions. Here is another 
one, 80 percent from PAC's, $229,000, $63,000 from individuals, or 16 
percent.
  Going through your list, here is one who is in your leadership, 
$753,000 from PACs or 78 percent and $167,000 from individuals, or 17 
percent.

  The list goes on and on. I could tell the gentleman, as a 
conservative Republican, I would love to limit this because I think it 
would help my party a lot more than it would help your Members.
  If you want to be partisan about it, and I am not trying to be, I 
know the gentleman and I are both trying to clean up the system.
  Let me yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. FARR. In response to your question, if I knew you were going to 
bring your list, I would have brought my list. I think there is 
probably a list of similar sorts with your leadership as well. The 
point of the fact is this is not about what has occurred in the past 
because we are trying to clean that up. We are trying to put some 
limits on it. You cannot put limits on a bill that, frankly, the 
Committee on Rules has just reported to the floor. Your leadership's 
bill does not reform campaign finance.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Well, there are a lot of things that are not in that 
bill. My freshman class bill that we introduced in January 1993 reached 
a lot further. The gentleman's freshman class bill when he first came 
here or the bills that the gentleman worked on reached further, also. I 
think that what we are trying to do is get this done, maybe plank by 
plank.
  There is a big debate when it comes to campaign finance reform: Do 
you have a big bill that is a delicately stacked thing that you know 
winner-take-all, and if it goes down, you get nothing, or do you do 
piece-by-piece and does it take years to accomplish?
  Before I was in Congress, I was in the State legislature. Just about 
every year we had a campaign finance bill. We always had to add to it, 
we always had to tighten it up, and I would say over a 10-year period 
of time, there have been dramatic changes in the Georgia campaign 
finance laws. So I have seen it both ways where you try a big, 
comprehensive bill, then it falls flat, then I have seen the smaller 
bills. I am not going to tell the gentleman

[[Page H7775]]

one is better than the other, but we have got to get, as you know, a 
lot of folks on the other side to pass it.
  We have got to get the President to sign it. We have got to get 218 
votes here. We always want it to be bipartisan.

                              {time}  2300

  And I overheard you say earlier tonight one of the big problems is 
everybody is an expert, because the way he or she won his or her race, 
they believe is the absolute for everybody.
  Mr. FARR of California. I, like you, served in a State legislature 
for 13 years and was very active in campaign finance reform in the 
State of California. It is a very complex system. You have 6,000 local 
governments in the State besides the 58 counties and the State 
legislature, and your are dealing with an awful lot of campaign filings 
and technical process.
  Unfortunately, you cannot reform campaign financing piecemeal because 
it has so many different versions. It has amounts of money that people 
can give, whether they can give them to a candidate, whether they can 
give them to a party, whether they can give them to a PAC, whether they 
can give them to a national party.
  So just the individual giving money, how much, how often, whether 
each of those organizations, a PAC, how much money they can give, what 
they have to report, in California you still have what we call 
corporate contributions to campaigns. You can give either an in-kind 
contribution. You may be a corporation that has a lot of telephones 
and, therefore, on election night you can give your office for people 
to come down and make calls. Under Federal laws you cannot do that.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Reclaiming my time, I want to say normal PAC's cannot 
do it, but union PAC's can do it. And union PAC's provide manpower, 
whereas banks or a Chamber of Commerce, they cannot. In terms of the 
lopsidedness, in terms of a big union PAC, it is incredible.
  I also want to throw out something that I consider campaign finance 
reform. Many Members around here do not, on both sides of the aisle, 
mostly on your side, which has to do with Federal Government agencies 
lobbying.
  I served with you on the Committee on Agriculture last session and 
this session moved over to the Committee on Appropriations. I can tell 
you, Mr. Farr, anybody who thinks Federal Government agencies do not 
lobby has never served on the Committee on Appropriations because that 
is all they seem to do.
  They come up to our office, they have money for conferences, they 
have money to fax themselves around their offices and so forth. I 
believe a key portion and one of the stumbling blocks in balancing the 
budget is the fact we have agencies who are feeding out of the 
taxpayers' trough and they do not want to have finance reform that 
would stop them from lobbying.

  Maybe this is more in the lobbying category, but, see, I would still 
consider it under that general topic of cleaning up the House.
  Mr. FARR of California. Well, I think we have to address lobbying 
reform separately from campaign reform. Lobbying reform is essentially 
people who make their living there in Washington, whether it be on the 
public payroll or the private payroll, trying to convince Members of 
Congress that their opinion is the right one.
  I frankly believe that lobbying is good. I do not think that lobbying 
is bad, because these are complex decisions that we have to make, and, 
as the gentleman knows, we need to have all the information that we 
possibly can, both sides, pro and con, and, fortunately, people are 
supposed to be independent after getting all that knowledge.
  We know the decisions are complex. A lot of it deals with minutia and 
the only way we can get a grasp on it is listen to people who have 
vested interest in it. That does not mean because they come see you 
that they have our vote.
  I think if we are to address campaign and lobbying reform, we have to 
do it, but we have to do it in such a way that it does not cut off 
getting good information to make a tough decision.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I agree with the gentleman, and I agree it certainly 
can be done. Having again served in the State legislature, I would say 
that the State agencies also lobby, some more than others. For example 
social service agencies I think lobby a lot more than something like 
the natural resources or the fish and wildlife agencies in the State of 
Georgia. And that kind of model, where we do see two different 
agencies, one that is very aggressive, one that is passive but there 
with good information, but you as the legislator had to initiate the 
conversation as opposed to fax machines and working networks and 
conferences, and so forth, and bringing people into town and so forth 
like that. I just think that that should be part of the process.
  I would love to have campaign finance reform and lobbying reform, 
because I think they are twin sisters. I think it should be one bill. 
Now, I have learned, there again going back to piecemeal, you have to 
take what you can get passed. So there has to be a practical side to 
it.

  Mr. FARR of California. Under your scenario of piecemeal, the 
campaign reform would be piecemeal and lobbying reform would be 
piecemeal, but as you know, under each of those tents there is a 
tremendous amount of technical law that has to be developed.
  My point of it is that you are not going to get campaign reform. You 
may get technical adjustments along the way; for example, the issue you 
brought up about requiring people who contribute, PAC's who annually 
have to go through the process of committing that, that is I think a 
technical adjustment. That is not campaign reform.
  Campaign reform is really the whole comprehensive effort of trying to 
control how money comes in and how it is spent. I do not think we will 
do that unless we put limits on what people can do. Otherwise it is 
just a feeding frenzy of getting money from wherever you can get it and 
trying to influence the outcome.
  Mr. KINGSTON. There again I think it is important that people at 
least have a requirement that at least 50 percent of the money come 
from their own district, because you can be elected from one district 
and then gallivant around the globe, going to Hollywood, going up to 
New York, meeting with big labor bosses in Washington and then going 
back home and your opponent has raised 100 grand on local 
contributions, you have raised $800,000 with the Washington big money 
types, and you can spend and annihilate your opponent. You can make 
yourself look conservative, a liberal, a moderate; you can target 
women, you can target minorities, or white middle class, people with 
blue suits, people with red hair, anything you want with that kind of 
money, and that is what lopsides this thing in favor of incumbents. We 
need to level the playing field more.
  Mr. FARR of California. May I share with you the concerns I have by 
limiting 50 percent of your contributions just to your district? And I 
can probably do that and I am sure if I looked at it, I do, but it is 
not something I really support.
  When I first ran, I ran against a very wealthy individual and when I 
was interested in running for office, I did what I think everybody 
does, you sit down and say where do I start. And what do you start 
with? You start with your friends and your relatives and you write 
everybody you ever knew, everybody you went to school with. I happened 
to serve in the Peace Corps so I went and wrote all my Peace Corps 
colleagues.

  I wrote my relatives around the country and said, hey, I am running 
for public office and you know I am better than anybody because I have 
grown up and worked with you, will you help me with your initial 
contributions? And I think that is where everybody every candidate 
starts.
  What disarms them is if they cannot do that and only the person who 
has a lot of money, a person of wealth, and by the way we limit the 
person----
  Mr. KINGSTON. Hold on 1 minute. I want to reclaim the time and I want 
to admonish you. Have you ever read Robert Mitchum, who wrote 
``Alaska''? Have you ever read any of his books? He always starts at 
the very beginning, and I am interested.
  But I do have something else to talk about, and so I want to say if 
you can quickly get to the point, I would appreciate it, so that I can 
talk about this other issue.
  I do also want you to acknowledge the fact you guys did not yield us 
any time, and I do want you to remember that.

[[Page H7776]]

  Mr. FARR of California. I appreciate your allowing me to dialog with 
you.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I had to slap myself on the back since you are not 
volunteering to do it.
  Mr. FARR of California. I appreciate your allowing us to have this 
colloquy. Without people talking, sometimes it is kind of lonely in 
this chamber. But my point is limiting raising that money in your 
district will put the advantage on a wealthy person versus a person who 
really has the passion to run for office, and I think we should be very 
careful before we do that because you do not put any limits on what a 
wealthy person can spend. Our bill does. It says you cannot contribute 
more than $50,000 of your own money.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Well, now, the bill that I have cosponsored with the 
gentleman from Tennessee, Zach Wamp, which is a bipartisan bill, does 
put individual limits on there. We do not want anybody or any 
organization to have undue influence.
  Taking your situation and saying you have to take money where you can 
get it. The other problem is, though, if there is going to be 
influence, and if influence and money are related, should that not be 
district driven rather an outside interest driven?

  Mr. FARR of California. I think that is for the voters to decide in 
your district, frankly. If they do not like where your money is coming 
from, you have to publicize it. It is a public record, and the 
newspapers pick it up the moment it is of public record. And we see 
that because our campaign reports, everybody in this House had to file 
them, and I think they become public record any day now, and you will 
see the stories all next week about where contributions are coming 
from. That gives the voters in the District an ability to decide 
whether they like what they are seeing or not.
  I am not sure that is so broken that it needs that kind of fixing, 
because I think that if you do not put limits on what the individual 
can contribute, the advantage all goes to the wealthy, and I do not 
think that is fair.
  I do not want to take any more of the gentleman's time. I really 
appreciate this colloquy with you tonight.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Well, listen, I appreciate what you guys are doing, and 
I know you appreciate what we are doing. I think that what we will do, 
as we do have these genuine disagreements on just different portions or 
sections of campaign finance reform, as long as we can identify those 
that we do agree with and keep the ball moving, then we will continue 
haggling over some of the other parts.
  And, again, that might take a while, but I believe Democrats and 
Republicans all realize on an issue like this we have to have each 
other, we have to work forward if we want it to move down the road.
  Mr. FARR of California. We have a bill on the floor, as the Committee 
on Rules just indicated, and I hope we can gain your support. Thank you 
very much.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Thank you, Mr. Farr.
  Mr. Speaker, I wanted to talk a little bit in regards to tax relief 
and economic issues and jobs. I got a call last night from a gentleman, 
a father from Pennsylvania, had two kids, and I could tell he was a lot 
like my middle-class friends back home, struggling to make the ends 
meet. And he just left a message, ``Please keep us in mind; keep 
working.''
  I think about this man. I think about the women I see that are my 
wife's friends, who are around the neighborhood raising those 3-year-
olds, those 5-year-olds. I drive the carpool every Monday when school 
is in, and when I am driving the carpool, quite often I get out and I 
talk to people. Mostly it is women. There are a few other dads, but, 
fortunately, one of the good benefits about this job is we do have some 
odd hours during the day and we are a little more flexible when we are 
home.

  I see these families struggling. They save a little money, but at the 
end of the month instead of going down to Florida for the weekend, they 
have to spend it on a new dryer, or they have a car payment, or the 
house mortgage is payable. And they can manage it, but then they want 
to do something else to the house, a little modification, or they have 
to put in a new stove or oven, or something like that, and there is no 
money at the end of the month.
  We passed a $500-per-child tax credit. If you had two kids, this 
gentleman, this family in Pennsylvania, that would have been $1,000 
more that they could have. Is that a tax cut for the rich? I do not 
think so, Mr. Speaker. What that thousand dollars would have meant for 
this middle-class man is that he and his wife could have bought a few 
more pairs of tennis shoes, a few more clothes, or maybe they could 
have gone to another ball game this summer and seen the Philadelphia 
Phillies do something. It just would have been a good thing for them.
  That was vetoed. We are going to keep working on that, Mr. Speaker, 
because that $500-per-child middle-class tax cut is important.
  Another thing that we have passed is an increased deduction for the 
home-office tax. In this day and age, with two-income families and 
high-technology, men and women have an opportunity to work at home. I 
think of Liz Simpson. She is a neighbor of mine, a friend of mine, an 
underwriter with an insurance company, and she was able to hook up by 
modem to her business and stay at home with their little boy, John, and 
their other child so that she could spend a little more time but also 
continue earning a living there at home. It gave her a lot of 
flexibility, and I am glad we increased this home-office tax deduction.
  We also had a thousand dollar elder deduction so that if your elderly 
mom or dad, because of medical or economic necessity, has to move in 
with you, you can deduct up to $1,000, again, helping that sandwich 
generation, you know the ones who have dependent children and dependent 
parents. And they are getting squeezed one more time.
  We need to do things like this for the American middle class.
  Above all, Mr. Speaker, of course we have to balance that budget. We 
are paying $20 billion each month interest on the national debt, and 
that money could be going to education, could be going to health care, 
could be going to crime prevention.

                              {time}  2315

  All it is doing is paying the bondholders on the national debt. If we 
balance the budget, we can bring down interest rates, which would bring 
down the cost of home mortgages and automobile payments. It would 
stimulate the economy.
  On small business entrepreneurs, do my colleagues know, Mr. Speaker, 
that one-third of the small businesses in America are owned by women? 
If they could get money cheaper, borrow money at lower interest rates, 
then these female entrepreneurs could create more jobs, expand their 
businesses, create more opportunities and in turn earn more and be able 
to spend more leisure time at home, which is very important to the 
American family these days.
  In terms of other family issues, we have got to increase security 
back home. A friend of mine called me. Obviously, I am not going to 
mention her name, but this woman was in her house. It was about 10:00 
in the morning, mid-morning, washing her 3-year-old. The door bell 
rang. She goes to the door bell. She sees somebody through the curtain 
and does not open the door and goes back to the bathroom where she is 
bathing the baby. The guy kicks in the door, comes in and rapes her. 
Does not hurt the child, fortunately.
  Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that this rapist only was sentenced for 3 
years. They caught him but he was sentenced for 3 years. I never would 
have known about the story except she called me because she was 
notified that he was getting out. They have a law in Georgia that you 
notify the victims when somebody on probation is coming. That just 
makes your stomach cringe, Mr. Speaker. This thug, this deadbeat who 
kicks down the door on a housewife at home and then only gets 3 years, 
that is why we need truth in sentencing. Mr. Speaker, it says, if you 
are sentenced for 10 years, 15 years, then you serve 10 years or 15 
years. You serve your full sentence.
  I want to say this, that when folks are in prison, they ought to have 
work requirements and they ought to have education requirements. They 
ought to be out there busting bricks. Hard work, 40 hours a week. 
Education, 20 hours a week. That adds up to 60 hours. And do you know 
what, Mr. Speaker? That is what my middle-class friends are working 
anyhow. The people who are paying

[[Page H7777]]

the taxes, they are not doing it on 40 hours a week anymore. They are 
running around doing all kinds of things. Sixty hours a week for a 
prisoner, that is nothing.
  Another case, heart breaker, a man calls me at home. His daughter, 12 
years old, was spending the night at a friend's house and was raped by 
the friend's older brother who was 19 years old. He called me, Mr. 
Speaker, because it had been 3 or 4 weeks and the police had yet to 
pick up the rapist.
  When the daughter was raped, they took her to the hospital. They got 
the fluid samples and all the necessary identifications for this 
horrible experience. Yet it was 3 weeks. The reason why it was 3 weeks, 
I talked to the authorities about this, is that the police were so 
afraid of messing the case up because of all the loopholes that we now 
have in our court system that allows trial lawyers to bend and 
manipulate the system to get rapists, 19-year-old rapists who rape 12-
year-olds, get them off because a police officer did not dot an I or 
cross a T, or the arrest papers.
  So in the meanwhile, while the police are out very carefully, 
meticulously building up a case on this, guess what? The 19-year-old is 
still driving by the house every day. The little 12-year-old who is now 
in trauma, who is now in therapy, she still sees this guy out walking 
the streets.
  We have an absurd court system right now, Mr. Speaker. We have got to 
get common sense back in it. We have got to say common sense is that we 
want to give everybody a fair trial, but it has got to be one that is 
governed by common sense, not by technicalities and loopholes.
  Justice should not be determined by money and whoever is the 
cleverest. It should be determined by what is right. So in this 
Congress, we have worked hard to crack down on criminal thugs and in 
lawsuits.
  Another problem, Mr. Speaker, that is adding to the stress of the 
middle class has to do with the fact that drugs are just going crazy on 
our streets. Earlier tonight the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Mica] had 
a chart that showed how drug usage has been going up in the last 3 or 4 
years. One of the reasons is because we had cut funding on drug 
awareness programs.
  Mr. Speaker, I have been in a lot of schools in my district, the 
First District of Georgia. I have spoken to the DARE classes, drug 
education for eighth graders and seventh graders and sixth graders and 
fifth graders, telling them what illegal drugs are all about, what the 
consequences are about.
  Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that the average age right now nationwide 
for trying marijuana is 13 years old? That is the bad news. The good 
news is, if we can keep a child drug-free until he or she is 19 years 
old, then, Mr. Speaker, they have a 95-percent chance of being drug-
free the rest of their life. So what we have got to do as families, as 
educators and as government officials and as a society is keep our kids 
drug-free until they are 19. If we can do that, they are 95-percent 
home free, and that is one of the things we have got to do.
  I believe drug education is extremely important for the youth of 
today.
  Now, in terms of the pushers, we have got to be very tough on 
sentencing for pushers. Let us get them off the street. Let us protect 
our families again.
  Health care is one more security issue that we have got to deal with 
as a society. We right now are trying to pass a bill that gets 
portability on health care. Very important for people who have job lock 
because of some situation that they can switch from job to job. My 
wife, Libby, her college roommate, a young lady named Kathy Haggard, 
was working for a bank when she discovered that she had cancer. And God 
rest her, she lost the battle. But during the period that she was 
fighting it, she went into remission for a short period of time. She 
was engaged. She, I think, was living in Atlanta and her fiance was 
living in Birmingham.

  They, Mr. Speaker, could not get married because Kathy could not quit 
working for her bank in Atlanta because, if she did, she could not get 
insurance through her fiance's insurer in Birmingham. So this young 
lady sadly lost the battle to cancer. She went to her grave without 
ever being able to marry, which is, as you know, probably one of the 
most wonderful things that anybody can experience.
  And if we had portability on health care, people like that would be 
helped by it, Mr. Speaker. That is something very important.
  Medical savings accounts. Something that I am very big on, and I know 
you have worked hard on it. Medical savings accounts would allow 
middle-class people to take health care with a high deduction and with 
that deduction it would be funded through a special account, kind of an 
escrow account. And out of that escrow, middle-class people would pay 
for their kids stitches, for pediatric shots, for their glasses, the 
small things.
  And at the end of the year, the middle-class families would get the 
money out of the account and get to keep it. They could use it for a 
college education account, if they wanted to, or they could put it in 
their pocket. They could spend it for Christmas money. This is a tool 
that middle-class families need all over America, Mr. Speaker. It is 
something that we are working on, and we have got to keep working for.
  The breast cancer situation. Breast cancer now gets, I believe, it 
was a couple years ago the statistic was one out of every nine women. 
Now it is even higher than that. And we have increased funding on 
breast cancer research in this Congress. We have also expanded Medicare 
coverage to include breast cancer. It is something that we have to do 
to make sure that our mothers and our sisters are well protected, 
because so much of it, if detected early, we could prevent.
  Our colleagues, John Myers and Barbara Vucanovich, have been great 
champions on this because of personal family situations. John Myers 
brought to the Committee on Agriculture, the ag subcommittee that 
overseas FDA, this plastic looking device. It was a circle about this 
big. And he put a grain of salt on the committee table and he put this 
on it and he said, find the salt with your hands. And you could feel 
the spec.
  This was a device that would not substitute for a medical exam, but 
it is something that in their own houses women could use for just kind 
of a home breast cancer analysis. And, Mr. Speaker, the FDA fought us 
on that. They did not want to approve the device.
  I believe that American women would know that a home analysis is no 
substitute for a doctor's analysis. But give them the tool. Because not 
only could the tool detect it, but it would raise the interest level, 
raise the awareness level. And you and I know, as men, when we are over 
40, we have to start testing for prostate cancer and so forth. 
Preventative medicine has got to be part of the health care planning. I 
truly support the efforts to increase awareness of health in the school 
systems and so forth, because if we can get our kids exercising and 
eating right early, we will have less problems down the road.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to just close with this. Another thing we can 
do for the middle class is to have good education systems. We have 
increased student loans from $24 to $36 billion in this Congress in our 
budget. That is going to expand the availability of a college education 
for many middle-class kids. I think that that would be good. But to the 
classrooms back home, Mr. Speaker, we want to get the bureaucracy out.
  A school teacher in Darien, GA, told me at a town meeting recently 
that she spends 2 to 3 hours a day each day on paperwork. That is 10 
hours a week that she cannot spend teaching children in her own class 
reading, writing, and arithmetic.
  We want to take the bureaucracy in Washington out of the American 
classroom and let the parents and the teachers teach their own 
children. And we believe that that local control will help us compete 
in the world market.
  Mr. Speaker, these are some of the things that we are working on and 
have worked on and have accomplished in this Congress. We need to keep 
the commitment for the American family and for the American middle 
class.

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