[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 28 (Thursday, March 6, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H790-H795]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     DEFINING DEVIANCY, UP AND DOWN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Mr. Speaker, let me say I think the gentleman from 
California has a wonderful idea and I am certainly pleased to be a 
cosponsor of his bill.
  I wanted to talk today about something that occurred in this Chamber 
yesterday, something that was ridiculed by people that I consider to be 
radicals, dismissed by many in the media, called trivial by many 
observers, but in my mind we did something very significant yesterday.
  We have seen over the past 30 years that the radical revolution of 
the left has torn this country apart at the seams. We live today in a 
country, as the Speaker says, that has 12-year-old children on drugs, 
15-year-olds shooting each other, and 18-year-olds graduating from high 
school with diplomas that they cannot even read. America has lived in a 
valueless society that our radical policies of the past 30 years have 
created.
  In 1994, there was a shift back to the center, and yesterday I 
believe that Congress passed a simple resolution that helped move us 
back to the right direction where our Founding Fathers wanted us to be.

[[Page H791]]

  So what was this dangerous piece of legislation? What was this 
supposedly unconstitutional resolution? What was this frightening 
document that the radicals said would spell an end to the separation 
between church and state and tear the Constitution apart at the seams? 
It was a very simple resolution that said a court in Alabama ought to 
be able to hang the Ten Commandments on the wall, the same way that the 
Supreme Court of the United States hangs the Ten Commandments on the 
wall in its building, just as we in this Congress every morning pledge 
allegiance and hear a prayer as we look up to the words ``In God We 
Trust,'' just as Americans for the first 200 years of this civilization 
were not afraid to acknowledge that God and faith played a key role in 
the founding of this country.
  Now, these radicals will tell you that this resolution we passed 
yesterday did violence to the Constitution and was something that the 
Founding Fathers would never agree with. They would also tell you that 
they were the ones that would have to step in to protect the 
Constitution, and yet I think it is very instructive at this point to 
look back at what the father of the Constitution said regarding the Ten 
Commandments. The father of the Constitution was also the fourth 
President of the United States, James Madison. And while drafting the 
Constitution, Madison said,

       We have staked the entire future of America's civilization 
     not upon the power of government, but upon the capacity of 
     each of us to govern ourselves, control ourselves, and 
     sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

  So here we have the father of the Constitution telling us that the 
Constitution and American civilization was based upon the Ten 
Commandments of God. Here we have a situation where the Father of our 
country, George Washington, in his farewell address spoke to America 
and said, ``It is impossible to govern rightly without God and the Ten 
Commandments.''
  We had Founding Father after Founding Father writing the 
Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, who recognized that we 
were a country, one country under God, a country who knew its Judeo-
Christian heritage and did not run away from it.
  It is something they do not teach in schools, it is something the 
radicals do not want anyone to know about, but that is how it has been 
in this country until recently, until we had the radicals storm the 
streets in the 1960's and undermine our efforts across the globe, who 
in the 1970's stormed Washington and think tanks, and who in the 1980's 
took control of Hollywood and took control of the people making the TV 
shows that our children see, and who in the 1990's, unfortunately, took 
control of some of the highest seats of power in the United States of 
America.

                              {time}  1345

  It is very frightening to me, and it is very frightening, because 
what they have sought to do and I think what they have accomplished is 
doing something called defining deviancy down and defining deviancy up. 
And those are a couple of catch phrases that Senator Moynihan created 
and also a columnist named Charles Krauthammer created. To do that, 
what you try to do is you try to make the conventional seem radical and 
you try to make the radical seem conventional.
  So we find ourselves 30 years later in a civilization where the words 
of Madonna, that life of Larry Flynt, and the acts of Dennis Rodman are 
glorified and take the place of the words of Washington, Jefferson, 
Lincoln, and fill this valueless void that used to be filled and made 
complete by our Judeo-Christian heritage. It is a dangerous situation, 
it is a dangerous situation for my 6-year-old boy and my 9-year-old 
boy, and yet all they will tell us is that there is something called 
the separation between church and state.
  Mr. Speaker, this debate is not about religion. This debate is not 
about morality. This debate is not about Christianity. This debate is 
about America's proud heritage. I am more afraid, much, much more 
afraid of intolerance of ideas and of political correctness than I am 
of letting Americans know what their proud heritage has been and what 
it will be once again.
  Mr. Speaker, we can build a bridge to the 21st century. I have got no 
problem with that. I just have a problem with radicals that would want 
to disconnect us from our proud heritage in the past that made America 
the greatest country in the history not only of Western civilization 
but in the history of this world.
  My friend from California is here who has been talking about this for 
years. He has almost been like a voice crying in the wilderness while 
many people here did not want to talk about it while the radicals had 
control of power.
  I yield to the gentleman from California.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. I appreciate the gentleman's comments. When we talk 
about the Judeo-Christian heritage of our country, and let us remember, 
by the way, there are many people who agree with the Judeo-Christian 
tenets, for example, are in the Muslim community as well. This is not 
an attempt to try to force any type of religious prayer or religious 
concept on others. But what we do and what today we are faced with is 
that those people who stand for certain values and certain traditions 
find themselves under attack.
  One of the greatest parts of the Judeo-Christian heritage is a 
concept called individual responsibility, that you are responsible for 
your actions and that you will face that responsibility before God. And 
so really, individual freedom is part of that Judeo-Christian heritage 
that we talk about. That is where it ties into our Founding Fathers, 
who believed that freedom of religion was a right that they would fight 
for. That has been so turned around and so disfigured today that what 
we have got are people who are trying to express their own religious 
beliefs are being told, in the name of separation of church and state, 
in the name of the Constitution to shut up.
  How many times do we have to hear the ACLU and others say, you cannot 
put a manger scene in front of city hall, before we start saying to 
ourselves, something is wrong here. Whose freedom are we talking about? 
The freedom of someone who wants to just express a belief in God, 
whether it is a manger scene or a Star of David during a time of 
religious importance to one of the great faiths of our country. There 
is nothing wrong with having them be able to express themselves, and we 
Christians or Jews or Muslims express ourselves that way. But we have 
the left wing who is committed to use the force of law to prevent 
people in our society from expressing their religious beliefs using the 
separation of church and state as a hammer to prevent us from 
expressing ourselves.
  In my part of the country out in Orange County, the Boy Scouts of 
America are spending tens of thousands of dollars in order to defend 
themselves against what? Defend themselves against some liberal left-
wing parent who is trying to force the Scouts to take God out of the 
Scout oath because his children do not want to say ``God.'' Because his 
children do not want to say ``God,'' it should not be in the Scout 
oath. This is absolutely an attack on the freedom of those people in 
the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. Yet where is the outcry in 
this? Where are the people who supposedly believe in freedom of speech?
  The greatest threat today against people who believe in God, whether 
they be Christians, Jews, or Muslims, is the U.S. Government coming 
under the domination of atheists who want to suppress people's 
expression of their own religion.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. The gentleman has touched on something, we have seen 
it on local school boards, he has touched on something that we have 
seen up here for too long now. What that is, is people parading around 
in a politically correct cloak that will tell us in the name of 
tolerance that they have a right to be intolerant, that they have a 
right again to preach this valueless void, where Jews, Christians, 
Muslims cannot express their views.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not fear my 9-year-old boy, who is in public 
schools, hearing somebody who is of the Muslim faith speak. I do not 
fear my 9-year-old boy hearing an orthodox Jew speak to him or to his 
class or a Catholic or a Pentecostal or a Baptist. I do not fear that. 
America, according to Jefferson, who the radicals are now calling 
radical, according to Jefferson, America is the free marketplace of 
ideas, where the strongest ideas survive. Yet what they want to do is 
this sort of moral leveling, where there is this valueless

[[Page H792]]

void where nothing is right, nothing is wrong, nothing is black, 
nothing is white, nothing is legal, nothing is illegal.
  We are seeing that manifest in the papers every day when officials in 
this administration continue to talk about moral revelancy, moral 
equivalency: Hey, nothing is right, nothing is wrong; I know what the 
law says, but it is not really important.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman will yield further, we have more 
people being told they cannot put a traditional manger scene in front 
of city hall or at the school yard during Christmas time. At the same 
time, these same people, by the way, are insisting that we are engaged 
in censorship if we refuse to let the NEA, the National Endowment for 
the Arts, give grants to people who blatantly attack religion, 
blatantly attack other people's faith. It is okay to subsidize it, but 
it is wrong for us to put up a manger scene to respect the birth of 
Christ or to have a Star of David to reflect our worshiping on Passover 
or some of the other religious holidays that we have.
  This has come to the point where the Boy Scouts of America, for 
example, as I said, not only, people are trying to force God out of the 
Scout oath. Here is one of the most decent organizations in the history 
of our country, who has done more to help young people through these 
hard times in their life, when they are coming into adulthood than 
Scouting, the young men and young women of our country teaching great 
values. Now they are having to spend tens of thousands of dollars, 
just, No. 1, to keep God in the Scout oath and, No. 2, to have 
standards so that they will have standards so that scoutmasters have a 
certain moral standard.

  There have been a lot of attacks on the religious right, and I will 
say that I do not attack other people's beliefs, but one thing I demand 
is that my beliefs that I hold true should not be attacked as well and 
we should have a right to express it. The religious right more often 
than not is simply saying and representing a group of Americans that 
have a set of beliefs and just want to believe that for their own 
family. And they are saying the Federal Government should not force us 
to accept another standard which we believe to be immoral.
  And the Boy Scouts of America, it has to do, and I will be flat out 
about it, the hiring of homosexuals as scoutmasters. That is their 
right as a private organization to do that. And I believe that, if they 
did not have that standard, a lot of parents would not permit their 
children into the Scouts and to go out under adult supervision of 
someone who is sexually attracted to someone of the same sex. But that 
is the right of that organization.
  In San Diego, in California, they said the Boy Scouts could not even 
use school facilities. They could not use the school facilities which 
their tax dollars are paying for unless they were willing to take the 
ban off hiring homosexuals as scoutmasters. In other words, they have 
to eliminate their moral standards. This is ridiculous. This is an 
attack on their rights.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. What radicals do is, and what they have done by 
defining deviancy down as up, is radicals attack conventional beliefs, 
they attack the foundation of this Republic, the views by our Founding 
Fathers, because that is the only way they can seem less radical. They 
attack the Ten Commandments as being radical and unconstitutional even 
though the father of our Constitution says that America's civilization 
is based on the Ten Commandments. They attack the Boy Scouts, saying it 
is a radical organization.
  They attack the Christian right. I have never heard them attack the 
Christian left. I will be really honest. It is so politically correct 
to attack the Christian right that many people who agree with the 
Christian right do not come close to them because they have been the 
third rail of American politics for some time, touch them and you die.
  If I stand up and support something that the Christian right is 
doing, then I am immediately a member of a suspect class, much as in 
the past those on the left were seen as members of the suspect class. 
It is a modern version of McCarthyism.
  Let me read one thing and then I will yield further to the gentleman. 
I want to read something that Robert Bork wrote in a great book called 
``Slouching Towards Gomorrah.'' I think this explains why radicals have 
been able to get away with what radicals have gotten away with for the 
past 30 years and why they have made the conventional seem radical.
  Bork writes on page 7 of ``Slouching Towards Gomorrah'':

       Modern liberalism is powerful because it has enlisted our 
     cultural elites; those who man the institutions that 
     manufacture, manipulate and disseminate ideas, attitudes and 
     symbols. Universities, churches, Hollywood, the national 
     press, print and electronic, foundation staffs, the public 
     interests, organizations, much of the congressional 
     Democratic party, and some of the congressional Republicans 
     as well and large sections of the judiciary, including all 
     too often a majority of the Supreme Court.

  People do not realize this. That is why one cannot turn on the news 
at night and get the straight news, because the same people, and they 
do not want you to say this. They want to revise history. They tried to 
revise the words of Jefferson and Madison and Lincoln. They want to 
revise what they did in the 1960's. The same people who marched in the 
streets in the 1960's and according to the North Vietnamese generals 
after the war, won the war for North Vietnam. That is their words, not 
mine. Those same people in the 1970's, in the 1980's and 1990's went 
straight to these areas, these cultural institutions where they could 
continue to shape and manufacture ideas and continue to make the 
conventional seem radical.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Your basic point about those of us expressing 
another view becoming beaten down, I will have to say, I just expressed 
something a few moments ago about the hiring of homosexuals by the Boy 
Scouts. Let me say that I personally never criticize people's personal 
lives. I do not. I will answer to God for my personal life and I have 
my own set of beliefs. I just will not criticize people for their 
personal lives. But let me say, I demand the right for myself and for 
others to have the right to make those value judgments and to make 
those stands and to express them.
  But I can tell you right now, I will be attacked by saying the Boy 
Scouts have a right to set their own standards, I will be attacked as 
if I am advocating an attack on somebody else. In reality, it is the 
opposite. It is the people with more traditional values who are under 
attack.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. And you would be called a bigot because you do not 
sit back and say absolutely nothing. Again it is not an issue of 
intolerance, it is not an issue of whether I am going to judge somebody 
for the life they live. That is up to them. That is what America is 
about. But at the same time private organizations have a right to make 
private decisions.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. They have an obligation.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. They have an obligation. But again this is what has 
happened to us over the past 30 years, why we have been cowed, why we 
have been beaten down. Every time we try to speak up for values and 
beliefs that we hold dear and that our Founding Fathers hold dear, we 
are attacked by extremists in an extreme manner. We are called bigots, 
we are called racists.
  I was just in an education hearing where I simply said that I believe 
that parents and teachers and school board members should have a bigger 
say in their education than bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

                              {time}  1400

  This person testifying, supporting the President, the President's 
proposals, basically said that if we left it to the States, then we 
would have handicapped children locked in closets, that we would have 
private schools taking control who did not care about handicapped 
children, who did not care about children with dirty clothes, who did 
not care about all these other things.
  Now I have got to tell you we have not stood up and said enough is 
enough, and I can tell you as a Baptist who went to a Catholic 
parochial school I am insulted, and I am not afraid to say it any more, 
I am insulted by radicals attacking us, telling us that we do not care 
simply because we want to give power to parents instead of give power 
to bureaucrats, and it is

[[Page H793]]

time that we stopped being cowed by these radicals that have destroyed 
this country over the past 30 years. It is time that we say enough is 
enough.
  Mr. Speaker, I will yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. PAUL. Yes, I find your conversation very interesting, and it 
reminds me of a incident that occurred not too many years ago.
  I am a physician. I graduated from medical school in 1961, and at 
that particular time they decided that saying the Hippocratic oath was 
no longer necessary, and I did not recite the Hippocratic oath at my 
graduation.
  But when my son graduated there in 1988, they allowed us to come back 
to say the Hippocratic oath. We were given that chance to come back 
because they were saying it once again, and I was very interested in 
this, so I went to his graduation, and at the ceremony they were 
reciting the Hippocratic oath. And lo and behold, when I looked 
carefully at it, it was not the same oath. They had changed the clause 
on abortion. It did not say that you should not use an instrument to do 
an abortion. They merely said you should follow the law, whatever the 
law is.
  So I thought that was a interesting little story to support your case 
that truth seems to be easily revised in this day and age.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I thank the gentleman. And revisionism occurs all 
the time, and we are told that our Founding Fathers were racists and 
bigots and that they were radicals and that is--you know, that did not 
happen before 1994. It is very interesting that Jefferson was the hero 
of liberals until 1994, and then a group of us got elected quoting 
Jefferson, saying the government that governs least governs best, and 
suddenly he was not a useful hero. In fact, we had people actually 
writing op-eds this past year saying that the Jefferson Memorial needed 
to be taken down brick by brick by brick because he was a racist and 
because he was a radical.
  Mr. Speaker, that just shows how desperate revisionists are. They 
would say the same thing of Abraham Lincoln if we quoted Lincoln too 
much, and I want to quote Lincoln because I am sure that if a 
President, sitting President today, said these words, he or she would 
be called a radical. Abraham Lincoln said this in 1863 in a 
proclamation.
  He said we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other Nation 
has ever grown, but we have forgotten God. Intoxicated with unbroken 
success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of 
redeeming and preserving grace and too proud to pray to the God that 
made us.
  My gosh. If we said that, we would be called radicals, we would be 
called extremists, and now what they will tell us is that this is about 
religion, that you are trying to make everybody a Christian or a Jew or 
a Muslim. It is not the case. This fight is not about establishing a 
religion because that is unconstitutional, and I am against it 100 
percent. What this is about is reconnecting our children and our 
grandchildren with their heritage.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to the gentlewoman from North 
Carolina.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, you know I agree in what you are saying and 
being able to speak what you think, and I appreciate your quoting 
Lincoln because he is also one of my heroes. And it kind of ties in 
with a couple of things that I wanted to mention this afternoon, you 
know, and this is really kind of in view of our bipartisan retreat that 
is coming up. I kind of wanted to remind people, making an appeal that, 
you know the words of the great American philosopher, Pogo: We have met 
the enemy, and he is us.
  I think there are few of us who have been entrusted with the honor of 
serving in this great institution that are unaware of the low esteem in 
which we are corporately regarded today. And you know sometimes in the 
interest of reelection, flawed egos or some purposes of political or 
personal gain, we abuse our privilege and we dishonor our predecessors 
and slight our fellow Americans and weaken our Nation, and you know it 
has been true that there have been scoundrels in the past that have 
thrown shadows over this great noble body. But you know we have gotten 
to the point where there is a great deal of distrust and cynicism out 
there in what we do and what goes on here, in the way we treat one 
another.
  And so I guess I am just saying that, you know, we claim to trust 
God, and in His name I would like to ask us to really reason together 
for the good of all and, you know, let us respect one another and 
tolerate one another's differences and not get upset when somebody says 
something that they deeply believe, but try and work together and stop 
destroying one another and lift one another up and endeavor to achieve 
the height of leadership the American people not only deserve but that 
they expect of us. And let us seek to be a credit to our Nation and 
proper example to our world and a joy to our God, and I believe that 
Lincoln who have agreed with that. Do you not?
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I certainly do, and I certainly appreciate your 
words because I guess this is what has disappointed me over the past 2 
years more than anything else.
  There are Members here who I disagree with on practically every 
issue, Members like Ron Dellums of California. He is on National 
Defense. I do not think I could find anybody on the issue of national 
defense that I disagree with more. I do not think I could find anybody 
on several other issues that I disagree with more. Quite frankly, I 
think his views are not the best views for America's future. The same 
with Barney Frank from Massachusetts. But I have got to tell you I can 
talk to Barney Frank of Massachusetts, and it helps me as a 
conservative, talking to a liberal who I disagree with to see whether 
my views are correct or to see whether I am taking an easier path than 
I should be taking.
  The same thing with Ron Dellums. I had a great talk with Ron Dellums 
when we first got here. He came over, he walked over from that side of 
the aisle, over here where a lot of us were sitting, young Republicans 
who had just gotten elected, and we talked for a while. And he said to 
me, he goes: ``You know,''--he said, ``I don't understand why all you 
young guys are Republicans, why you're all conservatives. It doesn't 
make sense to me. Explain it to me.''
  And I said to him, I said, ``Well, you know, Congressman, when you 
look on this side of the aisle, your views were shaped in the 1950's 
and 1960's. You saw a Republican majority that supported public 
discrimination, that supported a lot of the things that happened in the 
Southeast, where I am from, that were morally repugnant, and the party 
of Vietnam and Watergate. When I look on your side of the aisle, I 
think of where I was in 1979, 1978, 1979, 1980, when I first started 
becoming politically involved, or in my mind watching TV, and as I was 
about to start college, and I see the party of the Iran hostage crisis. 
I see the party of Jimmy Carter. I see the party of 21-percent interest 
rates. I see the party of a failed liberal policy that has bankrupted 
this country.''
  So we come from two different worlds, but we can still respect each 
other, and Ron Dellums, always a gentleman, said to me, said something 
like, ``That is really deep, man,'' or whatever Ron said, and we 
respect each other. I think most everybody in this Chamber respects Ron 
Dellums.
  When Ron was over on the Committee on National Security as chairman, 
hardly any Republicans and most Democrats agreed with him, but when I 
first got here and I started saying, well, how is this Member and how 
is that Member, when we talked about Ron Dellums, they said, ``Hey, 
don't say anything bad about Ron. He may be out there in left field 
ideologically, but at the same time the guy is fair.''
  And so we can disagree without being disagreeable. We can get on the 
floor, and we can debate in the strongest terms possible, and we need 
to do that without becoming personal in our attacks.
  Mrs. MYRICK. I think that is true, and that is one thing that has 
been missing, and it is a good point that you make because this place 
is such a busy place that you do not take time to build those 
friendships and you do not take time to walk across that aisle and get 
to know somebody else, and I think that has been a big mistake and I 
hope that all of us can start to do more of that sharing and really try 
and reach out, and have our disagreements because you are going to have 
to disagree philosophically. We will have a lot of

[[Page H794]]

differences; that is the way it is. But it does not mean that you 
cannot establish those friendships, and I commend you for doing that.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina, and I 
agree with her. We do need to establish these friendships, and at the 
same time we do not need to create this false, bland bipartisanship 
where nobody is afraid to speak their mind because the American people 
might be upset that two independent minds in the free marketplace of 
ideas disagree with each other. Do not be afraid when you turn on C-
SPAN and somebody is pointing across the aisle to somebody else and 
talking about how they disagree. That is how we move forward as a 
country, two competing ideas. Unfortunately many of us on the 
conservative side have been quiet for too long.
  Early on in the Bork book he quotes a poet, William Butler Yates, in 
a great poem called ``The Second Coming,'' and the last line talks 
about the beast slouching toward Bethlehem. The book is obviously 
called ``Slouching Toward Gomorrah,'' but this is what Bork highlights, 
the part where it says the best lack all conviction while the worst are 
full of passionate intensity. For too long the best have lacked all 
conviction, the best have remained silent as this country has gone down 
a radical left path that our Founding Fathers would have been 
absolutely horrified in, a path that dooms our children.
  It is not just cultural. It is economic, too. You know, we have got a 
$5.6 trillion debt, and we still do not have enough people in this town 
with the willpower to spend only as much money as we take in.
  So what does that mean? It means that our children are going to be 
burdened with an incredible debt as they grow older.
  My 6- and 9-year-old boys 20 years from now are going to be paying 89 
percent of every dollar they make to the Federal Government, and that 
was not a Republican that came up with that. That came from Senator Bob 
Kerrey's independent commission on entitlement reform, you see, because 
these baby boomers who are slouching toward retirement will overwhelm 
the system too soon.
  You know, back in the 1950's there were 15 people working for every 1 
person on Social Security. Today there are 3 people working for every 1 
person on Social Security. And 20 years from now when baby boomers are 
retiring, there is going to be 1 person working for every 1 person on 
Social Security. So that means our children will not have 14 others in 
a pool to help pay the beneficiary their benefits that were promised to 
them. We will only have 1 person working for every 1 person on Social 
Security, and I have got to tell you the prospects are bleak if we do 
not have the moral conviction and the moral courage to step forward and 
save our children's future, and ensure them the same American dream 
that our parents and grandparents tried to pass on to us.
  One member of our historic freshman class of the 104th Congress is 
the gentleman from South Carolina, who has been looking into how we can 
make Social Security solvent for our senior citizens without 
bankrupting our children, and there are going to be a lot of different 
ideas. We may not agree on what is the best approach, but I can tell 
you that in the free marketplace of ideas the only way that we can move 
forward with an agenda that can save our children and save our 
grandparents from economic calamity is to debate in the free 
marketplace of ideas and hopefully do so without people demagoging and 
trying to scare our eldest citizens.

                              {time}  1415

  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina [Mr. 
Sanford] for a few minutes, and if he could, to discuss one of his 
proposals.
  Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.
  In our limited time I will not really go into a proposal we are 
working on, but what I would like to do for just a few minutes is talk 
about the problem that is before us, because as the gentleman 
suggested, we have a very considerable problem if we do nothing. There 
is the old saying of hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil, the 
three monkeys. That seems to be the way Congress is at this point 
approaching Social Security. It is the most important program we have 
in this country and it is absolutely vital that we save it.
  To save it, we have to begin, as the gentleman suggested, by talking 
about it. What is interesting about this problem is not what 
Republicans have said, not what Democrats have said, not what Ross 
Perot has said, but what the trustees for the trust fund itself have 
said; that if we do nothing, Social Security will go bankrupt in 2029, 
and it will begin to run deficits around 2012 when those baby boomers 
begin to retire, such that either we have to look at raising payroll 
taxes by about 16 percent, or cutting benefits by about 14 percent, or 
growing the deficit by roughly the same number.
  What I hear from folks back home in the district is, Mark, I am 
struggling. The idea of raising my payroll taxes by another 16 percent 
makes no sense to me. When I talk to seniors, they say, Mark, I am 
struggling. The idea of cutting my benefits by 14 percent is not an 
option.
  What is really interesting are the demographics behind what is 
driving this change. They are, one, that people are living longer. When 
Social Security was created in 1935, the average life expectancy was 62 
years of age. Today it is 76. Every year that I grow older I hope it 
keeps moving in that direction, but it creates real strains on a pay-
as-you-go system, which is what our system is right now.
  The other demographic problem that is headed our way, and again it 
is, I guess, a mixed blessing, is that we have gone from having big 
families on the farm to having relatively few families today. As my 
colleague, the gentleman from Florida, suggested, again, when Social 
Security was created there were 42 workers for every retiree. By 1960 
there were, or 1950 rather, there were around 16 workers for every 
retiree. Today there are 3.2 workers for every retiree. We are well on 
our way to having two and then one worker for every retiree.
  Again, that is a demographic phenomenon we are not going to change. 
For me to suggest to my wife--we have three little boys--Jennie, what 
do you think, another six or seven children and I think we can maybe 
help to solve this Social Security problem, is not going to fly. So we 
are looking at demographic trends we cannot change.
  That leaves us with a number of, I think, crazy options. We can wait 
and do nothing and let Social Security go bankrupt, which I do not 
think is an option. We can wait and do nothing and raise payroll taxes 
by 16 percent. I do not think that is an option. We can wait and do 
nothing and cut benefits by 14 percent. I do not think that is an 
option. We can grow the deficit by roughly 14 to 16 percent. I do not 
think that is an option. We can lower life expectancy or change 
fertility rates. Those are not options.
  That leaves us with one option. That one option is letting people 
invest their own money in their own savings accounts and letting that 
grow and compound over time.
  Einstein was once asked, what is the most powerful force in the 
universe? His reply was, compound interest. It is amazing what you can 
end up with at the end of a working lifetime if you put a little bit 
away into your own account that politicians cannot get their hands on, 
again, over a working lifetime.
  I just wanted to touch for a few minutes on the problem. I will be 
back on many other visits to talk about many of the benefits that would 
come with change, or our specific ideas on the subject. But I did not 
want to interrupt my colleague, the gentleman from Florida, for more 
than just a couple of minutes.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Let me ask the gentleman quickly, I know the 
gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann] has been talking about taking 
Social Security off budget. What we mean by that is right now I think 
Social Security is running about a $62 billion, $63 billion surplus.
  When we get together and talk about balancing the budget, one of the 
ways we do it is say, we have $63 billion over in that trust fund. Why 
do we not do a little accounting trick and shift it over, and that will 
make our job $63 billion easier when they know they cannot get their 
hands on that anyway.
  Unfortunately, there is a conspiracy of silence on both sides of the 
aisle with Congress and the President, because it is in the President's 
best interest to try to balance the budget. He

[[Page H795]]

says he is going to balance the budget, and he has a balanced budget 
plan. It is $62 billion out of whack. If we add the $62 billion surplus 
in Social Security that he is counting on to cook the books, it is $120 
billion in red. The same thing with the Republicans.
  If we have the courage, and I pray that we still do, if we have the 
courage to come forward with a plan to balance the budget, and yet if 
we shift $62 billion over from a Social Security trust fund in an 
accounting trick that we cannot use, then we are $62 billion short.
  So I support the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann]. Does the 
gentleman from South Carolina support the gentleman from Wisconsin's 
proposal?
  Mr. SANFORD. I do. As we both know, it will not save Social Security 
in the long run, because we have this giant demographic shift coming 
our way as the baby boomers begin to retire in 2012, and there are 730 
million. They are about double the size of the generation before and 
double the size of the generation after.
  In other words, it will not save us from that avalanche of graying in 
America, if you want to call it that, that is headed our way, but it 
would certainly be a step in the right direction. And most importantly, 
as the gentleman suggests, if Washington is to be trusted, we have to 
have, in essence, honest accounting.
  For us to say a trust fund, but it is not really a trust fund, is not 
honest accounting. For us to use Social Security moneys to in essence 
mask the size of the real operating budget here in Washington again is 
not an honest accounting. What I hear from folks back home in my 
district say is that they would like to see honest accounting, and they 
would like trust fund money to stay in its trust fund.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. When you talk about honest accounting, and talking 
about trust, I have to tell the gentleman, his job is going to be made 
more difficult, the job of the gentleman from Wisconsin is going to be 
made more difficult, and this institution's job is going to be made 
more difficult in this area and the entitlement area in general, 
because of the shameless display we saw over the past 2 years of those 
who would attack us because were trying to keep Medicare solvent.
  The gentleman talked about the trustees. They told us that Medicare 
was going bankrupt. So we had a group of people step forward with a 
bold proposal, and the Speaker of the House, who has been fodder for 
every political campaign over the past 2 years, the Speaker actually 
had the courage to step forward and say, I know Medicare is the third 
rail of American politics, I know we are not supposed to touch 
entitlements; but it is dying and we had better fix it now. If we do 
not fix it now, we are going to have to pay for it later, and it is 
going to be seniors and middle-class taxpayers who take the biggest hit 
if we do not fix it now.
  So we stepped forward and we had the courage to do something 2 years 
ago. Unfortunately, we paid for it in political terms, because there 
were others that used that against us.
  I have to say that if I could do anything this session, it would be 
to once again instill in the hearts and minds of all these people the 
courage to step forward and do what has to be done to make Medicare 
solvent, to make Social Security solvent; because all these other 
issues about cutting a program 2 percentage points or 4 percentage 
points, or increasing school lunch programs 4 percentage points instead 
of 6 percentage points, they are irrelevant.

  In the long run, they are irrelevant economically, because it is 
Medicare, it is Social Security, it is Medicaid that is expanding at 
such a rapid clip that it is going to overwhelm all of us, it is going 
to overwhelm this Congress, and it is going to create an economic 
meltdown if we do not do something about it.
  Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. I 
appreciate him letting me borrow a little of his time.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I thank the gentleman, because it does really play 
into what we were talking about before, and that is talking about 
creating a civilization that is more connected, more closely connected 
to the views of our Founding Fathers, to the views of Washington and 
Jefferson and Lincoln, than to the cultural views of what happened in 
the 1960s or what is happening now: The life of Larry Flynt or the 
words of Madonna or the actions of Dennis Rodman.
  We have to step forward and not be afraid of our past but embrace our 
past, embrace the ideals of our Founding Fathers who said, ``We have 
staked the entire future of the American civilization not on the power 
of government, but on the capacity of Americans to live and govern and 
control themselves according to the Ten Commandments of God''; or the 
ideals of Jefferson, who said that the government that governs least 
governs best.
  Those are not radical ideas. Those are ideas for the 21st century. 
Those are ideas that are going to overwhelm the liberals anyway, that 
are going to overwhelm the radicals anyway. We are moving from an 
industrial age to an information society, where information 
disseminates, and just as the agrarian age had a decentralizing impact 
and the industrial age had a centralizing impact, the Information Age 
once again is going to empower the individual.
  We in Washington should get out of the way and let individuals live 
as they choose to live, let individuals study as they choose to study, 
let them worship as they choose to worship, let them spend their hard-
earned tax dollars as they choose to spend the money that they make, 
and we need to get out of their way and let them prosper.
  If we do that, we will once again be the great civilization that we 
once were. We will once again be what Abraham Lincoln spoke about when 
he said America was the last great hope for a dying world. We still 
are. We have just gotten off track in the past 30 years.
  And hopefully what we did yesterday, what we tried to do over the 
past 2 years, will begin to bear some fruit. We will create America, we 
will build a bridge to the 21st century also that will not be based on 
what happened over the past 30 years, but instead based on those great 
and lofty ideas that we find in the writings and words of our Founding 
Fathers.

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