[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 120 (Thursday, September 5, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H10099-H10101]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      ISSUES CONFRONTING CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Bonior] is recognized for 60 
minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BONIOR. Mr. Speaker, I would like to address a series of issues 
this afternoon. Last month we watched the Republican Convention, and 
Bob Dole called it a success. I think that convention was probably more 
remarkable for what was not said than what was said. In 4 days' time, 
there was no mention of the Contract on America; there was no mention 
of the Gingrich revolution; there was no mention of the freshman class.
  Mr. Speaker, from what I could tell, the Speaker himself spent the 
convention in the witness protection program. He was not available, he 
was not seen.
  Four years ago the Republicans said ``Read our lips.'' Two years ago 
they said ``Read our contract.'' This year they said, ``Please don't 
read our program.''
  The Republican platform was written by the folks who put together 
what we have been arguing about rather vociferously over the past, oh, 
I would say a year and a half, the same folks that put together the 
Medicare cutting and the education slashing and the Medicaid dicing and 
the environmental chopping program that we have been trying to repel 
here in the Congress.
  Now, my colleagues may not want to talk about it, but we remember and 
the American people remember, they remember Medicare, they remember the 
Speaker saying he wants Medicare to wither on the vine. They remember 
my friend Dick Armey saying Medicare was a program he would have no 
part of in a free world. They remember Bob Dole bragging about his vote 
against Medicare back in 1965.
  The Gingrich think tank newsletter, which was issued, the first one I 
believe, volume 1 of that newsletter, had this banner headline: ``For 
freedom's sake, eliminate Social Security.'' I will repeat that again. 
Mr. Gingrich's own think tank in their first, I believe it was their 
first, newsletter that they published had this headline in their 
newsletter: ``For freedom's sake, eliminate Social Security.''
  So you not only have an attack on Medicare, we have an attack on 
Social Security.
  Now, what is so devastating about this is that we are talking about 
programs that affect a portion of our population, a rather huge portion 
of our population, that is on a fixed income. I quite frankly did not 
realize how fixed that income was until a study was released by the 
Department of Labor that showed that 60 percent of the seniors in this 
country have incomes of $10,000 a year or less. That includes their 
Social Security and any annuity that they may have.
  That is quite remarkable, when you think that that large a segment of 
the American population with that relatively meager income would be the 
target on two of the programs that provide the foundation for their 
income, Social Security and Medicare, of our new Republican majority.
  Senior citizens will remember, Mr. Speaker, the fact that they were 
arrested when they came here to protest cuts in Medicare. They were 
arrested in this Capitol. Two hundred seventy billion dollar cut in 
Medicare, they will remember that, in order to take that, put it in the 
pot, and use it for tax breaks that primarily went to the wealthiest 
individuals and corporations in our society.
  They will remember the double premiums, the raiding on nursing homes 
and those regulations that were established to get rid of the abuses in 
nursing homes in our society, and doing away with that entirely in the 
budget bill that my colleagues on this side of the aisle presented to 
us.
  I will say also that the American people will remember the cuts in 
education, the biggest cuts in the history of this country in 
education. Tens of thousands of kids, they tried to kick off student 
loans. One million kids kicked off math and reading programs; 48,000 
kicked off Head Start; 23 million kids eliminated from the DARE Program 
and the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program. That is the program that 
teaches our kids to say no to drugs, to say no to gang violence. It 
teaches them the values that are necessary for them to lead a healthy 
and productive life as children and as adolescents.
  All of these things were attacked, and we stood up, we said no. The 
President said no and vetoed these bills. We had the support of enough 
Members to make sure that those vetoes were not overridden. So I think 
the American people are going to well remember the rather sorry and, if 
I may take it a step further, pathetic record of this Congress with 
respect to education. The seniors will certainly remember this 
Congress, this Republican-led Congress' efforts with regard to Medicare 
and Medicaid.
  And if you are interested in the environment, which is the future, it 
is what we have, what we really have borrowed, we have no right to 
despoil, that we pass on to our children and grandchildren, hopefully 
in the form of clean air and clean water and unspoiled lands, the 
American people are going to remember this Congress going after the 
environment. Twenty-five percent cut to the environmental protection in 
this Congress in their budget bill; efforts to stop EPA enforcement and 
Superfund cleanup; efforts to stop going ahead with safe drinking water 
programs.
  We have drinking water problems all over the country now. In this 
city it is not recommended that you drink out of the tap. There are 
places all over the country where that is the case because the water is 
not safe. The reason it is not safe is because parasites are getting 
into the system, parasites like cryptosporidium that got into the 
drinking water system in Milwaukee. One hundred four people were killed 
because of that; 400 became seriously ill.
  These problems are about us around the country, and we need to do 
something to upgrade these systems. They do not last forever. Once you 
build them, there are no assurances that that road or bridge or sewer 
system or water system is going to be there. You have to maintain it. 
You have to refurbish it. You have to replace it.
  But what happened in this Republican-led Congress? They voted to 
slash the funding to do those things, to stop raw sewage dumped into 
our drinking water, which is a big problem in my own area. We have been 
working to make sure that Lake St. Clair, which is the lifeblood of the 
Metropolitan Detroit Area with respect to water and fishing and 
recreation and many other things, is severely ill. We are trying to 
upgrade the sewage systems in the Metropolitan Detroit Area to make 
sure that that lake survives and is used in the productive way that it 
has historically been used.

[[Page H10100]]

  But they voted to cut the sewer grant money. I have a community in 
Marysville up in my district, St. Clair County, a huge multimillion 
dollar grant, would have been slashed, done away with, had their 
proposal gone into effect. So local sewage projects have been frozen.
  Of course, we are going to remember families because of the raid that 
they allowed, the Republican Congress, on pensions, allowed 
corporations to go in and raid pension funds of employees. That is not 
their money. That is the money of the employees. They worked for that 
money, they earned that money, and they have every right to expect when 
they retire that those pension dollars are going to be there for them, 
not siphoned off by some corporate heads to pay for expansion overseas, 
where their jobs are going to eventually go, or pay for increased 
salaries of their executives. Executive salaries already in this 
country have reached levels proportionate to the average worker 
salaries that are reaching really obscene levels.
  Back in the 1960's, the average CEO's salary was about 12 times more 
than the average worker. It steadily climbed until today it is 187 
times more than the average worker. If you go to the top 30 
corporations in America, it is 225 times more.
  And what do they want to do? They want to get in there and take the 
pension money of people who have worked and struggled to put together a 
life for themselves once they retire. It is one of the worst, inhumane, 
cruel things you can do to a person and a family.

                              {time}  1700

  There are people who work every day who take a good part of that day 
while they are working daydreaming about the day that they can retire, 
enjoy themselves, take a little trip with their family, work in the 
yard. I do not know about my colleagues, but I have too often faced 
case work in my district where an individual will wake up and the 
company is gone and their pension is gone with them, just vanished. Or 
this example: They find a little note in their mailbox that says, well, 
because your health insurance premiums have increased so much, we are 
going to deduct that from your pension.
  So they end up with virtually no pension in order to cover the cost 
of their health premiums. It goes on every day in this country. It 
affects literally thousands and thousands and thousands and hundreds of 
thousands of people. And this Congress wanted to allow corporations to 
come in and continue the raid on workers' pensions.
  I think it is important to remember this Congress shut down the 
Government twice, shut it down. I remember colleagues coming down on 
this side of the aisle into this well before these microphones saying, 
let us shut it down, let us shut it down; not understanding that there 
are some functions that the Government has to do: road service, police 
protection, military service, things that are important to the 
functioning of the country. Yet, they came down here and closed the 
Government twice.
  Of course, they tried mightily to block the minimum wage. We brought 
the minimum wage to the floor five times to get a vote to take it up, 
and we were rejected each and every time. But do you know what? On each 
vote we got a little closer to a majority. They finally realized over 
there that this is going to pass. They figured out that the gentleman 
from Michigan [Mr. Bonior] and his motions were eventually going to get 
enough votes, and they were going to be left in the short.
  So, after blocking and delaying and ducking for over a year, they 
finally brought the bill to the floor. We passed actually a pretty good 
bill. I might add that my colleagues on this side of the aisle added 
some very good provisions with respect to small business that I think 
added to that bill and made it more acceptable and workable for the 
small business community. I applaud them for that action. But it took 
almost 1\1/2\ years to get that done because they just do not 
understand or sense or feel the agony of having to work for $4.25 an 
hour. You cannot raise a family on $4.25 an hour. That is less than 
$8,500 a year. What happens when people make $4.25 an hour? They end up 
working two jobs, three jobs, a lot of overtime.
  When they do that, they are not home when their kids get home from 
school. They are not there to teach them right from wrong. Father is 
not there for little league or soccer practice. He is not there for 
dinner conversations. Then the whole fabric of civil society starts to 
unravel and the social pathologies, delinquencies, gang violence, 
drugs, all these things get manifested and blown up to the point where 
they become serious social problems in our society.
  So the minimum wage, while it may seem simple and it may not affect a 
lot of people, it affected 10 million people, most of them adults, 
about 66 percent of those adults and most of those women with children. 
It was important because it was a symbol that this Congress wanted to 
say that, when you work, you ought to be rewarded for your work and 
that work was better than welfare.
  As we move people off welfare, we have got to be able to pay them 
decent wages so they can maintain themselves and their families. But 
our colleagues on this side of the aisle spent a good part of the year 
deciding that was not going to happen.
  Of course, the Republican leadership on this side of the aisle 
eventually voted against the minimum wage altogether at the end anyway. 
The gentleman from Texas [Mr. Armey] voted against it, the majority 
leader. He said he would fight it with every fiber of his being and he 
did. He lost, but he voted against it at the end.
  I suspect we should commend him for it, because he lived up to his 
word; but it was not with his help that we were able to provide an 
$1,800 increase in salary a year for these 10 million American workers 
who need it in order to raise their families and live a decent life. It 
is still too low, but we made some efforts to increase it for the first 
time in 40 years. I think those folks who supported that ought to feel 
good about that. The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Boehner], the caucus 
leader, the conference leader in the Republican Party, he voted against 
it. The gentleman from Texas [Mr. DeLay], their No. 3 person, the whip 
voted against it.
  So as we get ready to wrap up this Congress, and we are coming very 
close to that, Mr. Speaker, we probably have a couple, 3 weeks left 
here. I must say it has been quite a disappointment. But we have been 
able to withstand a lot of the onslaught by the Republican majority on 
the Medicare front, the Medicaid front, education, the environment, and 
some of these worker issues. But the people will speak, as they do 
every 2 years. They will have the opportunity to make a judgment on 
whether they approve of the work of this Congress or whether they do 
not approve of the work of this Congress.
  I am anxious to take this case to the American people and to my 
district. I think what we have seen in this Congress is a squandering 
of a lot of valuable time to deal with the issues that people really 
care about, the issues that folks talk about around the kitchen table.
  What do they talk about? Do they talk about, as the gentleman from 
Connecticut [Mr. Shays] said last night on the House floor, proxy 
voting? Is that important for the American people? He got up here and 
made a little speech last night about how proud he was of getting rid 
of proxy voting. I agreed with him, I supported that. But that is not 
what people talk about.
  What they talk about is pensions. They talk about how they are going 
to afford to get an education for their kids to go to college. They 
talk about whether their drinking water is safe. They talk about what 
kind of job and what protections they have on their job. They talk 
about things that affect them on a daily basis.
  What they want is an opportunity to be successful, and what we need 
to do is provide them the opportunity so they can be successful 
themselves, not have to worry about that pension going kerplooey on 
them after 20 or 30 years of work. We ought to make pensions portable, 
that is what we ought to be doing instead of letting corporations come 
in and raid pensions.
  Mr. Speaker, we ought to make it portable so that if you move from 
this job one year to another job, you carry your pension with you and 
it builds up. It is an easy thing to do. It is not that complicated. 
But that is what we ought to be focusing on. We ought to be focusing on 
the opportunities for their

[[Page H10101]]

children to go to college. It is expensive to go to college, anywhere 
between $10,000 and $15,000 a year if you are going away. Some places 
it is as high as $20,000 and $25,000. Those families cannot afford 
that.

  What are we doing about it? What we ought to be doing, as the 
President has suggested and we have suggested, is providing about a 
$10,000 tax deduction for these families to send their kids to school. 
That would help. That is something that they could get excited about.
  And leave those student loans alone. They are there for a reason. 
They work. Education is the best investment we can make in this 
country. It has historically been so. In my lifetime it started after 
the Second World War with the GI bill. They made a huge difference in 
the human resource potential and capability of this country.
  The National Defense Act that occurred a decade or so later made a 
big difference. So we put student loans into effect so students could 
afford to go to school without having to pay exorbitant interest rates 
once they left school. Now in this Congress an attempt to roll back 
student loans. I guess what irritates me about that is a lot of the 
newer Members on the Republican side of the aisle got through college 
on student loans. Phil Gramm got through school on students loans. Newt 
Gingrich got through college on student loans. In fact if it was not 
for student loans they would not be where they are today, which is the 
only good reason from my perspective to be against student loans. A 
little joke, but nonetheless, they want to pull the ladder up now and 
not let anyone else climb it.
  That is not the way I think the country ought to operate. We work 
best when we pull together as a community, each helping one another, 
making opportunities for each other, not alone, not as rugged 
individualists, but working as a community. It is what really is great 
about America, the sense of community, going into neighborhoods across 
this country and watching all the activities that occur.
  George Bush was absolutely right. Maybe he did not use the best 
phrase, but remember when he said he was excited about this thing 
called 1,000 points of light. I thought it was a pretty good phrase, 
but a lot of people made fun of it. What he was talking about was 
community. He was talking about folks coming together at the PTA, the 
little league, the ethnic clubs, the sports groups, the folks that work 
the Habitat for Humanity crowd, all these different organizations out 
there doing things, giving to the community, giving to others, being 
creative, the Rotary, the Lions, the religious organizations. It is 
really what this is all about. It is pulling together, people pulling 
together, not individuals doing it on their own.
  It takes a community today to raise a child. It starts in the home. 
It starts with the parents. Of course, they are the core, but it takes 
more than that. It takes safe streets, it takes good schools. It takes 
great teachers. It takes a lot of things to make this work. We have got 
to get back to that. We have got to get back to that.
  In conclusion, let me just say, Mr. Speaker, I hope that this next 
Congress, whomever is in charge, and I hope it is us, but we will find 
out in about 2 months, will adopt this sense of community and this 
spirit that has brought us forward over these past 200 years in this 
country, because it really is what is at the heart of America.
  If we do that again, I think we will hopefully become a more 
collegial body and work together to talk about the issues that are so 
important to the American people, the things they talk about at the 
kitchen table, at the picnic table, the things that are really 
important to them, and get away from this whole notion that the world 
revolves around line item vetoes or proxy voting or unfunded mandates.
  I mean, some of these things may procedurally be important to do, but 
really, it is not really where folks want us to laser in on their 
problems. They want us to focus in on the things that they care about: 
their education, their pensions, their health care, their wages. Those 
are the things that matter. And their families, their families, making 
sure that the family works together, stays together, operates as a 
unit.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I wish you a good evening.

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