[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 34 (Monday, March 17, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1023-H1030]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      AGENDA OF THE 105TH CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Gingrich] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I rise to describe what the Congress has 
been doing and what I believe it will be doing in the near future, 
because as we enter the Easter recess at the end of this week, Members 
will be going home, and I think it is fair for our constituents to ask 
us where are we going, what is this Congress going to be like, and what 
have we achieved on behalf of the American people.
  There are five basic messages that I think House Republicans in 
particular can take home, but a number of Democrats can agree with 
these messages. I think in a broad way, this is a principled 
bipartisanship that outlines a direction that most Americans will want 
to go in.
  First, we have developed and unveiled a 2-year agenda, creating a 
better America for ourselves and our children, and I will talk about 
that agenda in just a moment.
  Second, we are focusing on keeping our children and communities safe 
by winning the war on drugs as a top priority for this country.
  Third, we are committed to lowering interest rates and creating 
better jobs by producing a balanced budget this year.
  Fourth, we have as an objective ending the Internal Revenue Service 
as we know it. We want to help the taxpayers save time and money by 
providing real tax relief, simplifying our needlessly complex Tax Code, 
and reforming the Internal Revenue Service.
  And fifth, as proof that what we are working on can be achieved, 
welfare reform is a success story. The 104th Congress, by passing 
dramatic, bold welfare reform, has made a difference and the facts 
prove it. That gives us reason to hope that we are going to be able to 
work in 1997 and 1998 on other reforms that will be of similar 
importance. There, I might mention education as an example of an area 
that we truly want to work on.
  Let me start by describing the agenda that will create a better 
America for ourselves and our children. The House Republican majority, 
led by the majority leader, the gentleman from Texas, Dick Armey, and 
by the policy chairman, the gentleman from California Chris Cox, 
developed a number of items which we believe will outline for the 
country 13 major areas of improvement. I would like to outline the 
steps we are taking, because I think they illustrate a firm, balanced 
agenda for developing a better future.
  The first area is balancing the budget. We believe it is vital to 
pass a balanced budget amendment. We were saddened to see the other 
body fail by one vote, but we believe at an appropriate time this House 
should bring up the balanced budget amendment again, and I think if it 
passes in this House, as it probably will, when we send it to the other 
body maybe we will be developing the momentum and popular support to 
then get that one final vote that is missing to send it on to the 
States.
  But a balanced budget is vital, first, because it is morally wrong 
for us in peacetime to spend our children's and grandchildren's money. 
It is just plain not right. We have the same obligation to set 
priorities, to set limits, to have discipline in our Federal budget 
that every family and every business has in their own budgets.
  In addition, passing a balanced budget will lower interest rates that 
will improve the economy, increase the number of jobs, improve take-
home pay. Think about a college student who graduates with a balanced 
budget. They will save over $2,100 in repaying an $11,000 loan over 10 
years. That is over $2,100 that that college graduate can save because 
interest rates will be higher lower.
  Or imagine a couple buying a new house. They could save up to $37,000 
on a 30-year mortgage for an average-priced house. That is, literally 
they could pay for one child's college education just with the savings 
from a lower interest rate from a balanced budget.
  Or imagine a family buying an average-priced new car. They could save 
$975 over 4 years in lower interest payments on the average new-priced 
car.
  Our point is that there is a moral case, there is a practical case, 
there is a self-interest case for balancing the budget. In addition, 
when you have deficits and you borrow more money, interest payments go 
up. The interest payments, when John F. Kennedy was President in the 
early 1960's, were about $6 billion a year. This year the interest 
payment will be $245 billion. That is, the average American will pay 
more in taxes to pay interest on the debt than they will pay for the 
Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps combined.
  So balancing the budget ultimately leads to lower taxes through lower 
interest rates and less payment on the debt, and our hope would be 
eventually through a balanced budget to actually begin to pay down the 
national debt.
  But this is not just a constitutional amendment. We are committed to 
bringing spending in line with our commitment to balance the budget by 
the year 2002 without raising taxes. In fact, we want to be able to 
focus on saving money in Government so we can lower taxes so the 
American people have more take-home pay and a greater ability to create 
new jobs and new opportunities.
  We have asked the President to submit a balanced budget. The first 
budget that was sent up was apparently a mistake. It is about $62 
billion in deficit in the year 2002, which is our target year for 
balancing the budget. So we have asked the President, since he came 
right to this room and promised 12 times in the State of the Union, on 
12 occasions he said he was for a balanced budget, he had a balanced 
budget plan, so we have asked him to submit a balanced budget that 
would allow us to begin the process of passing a balanced budget.
  In addition, we believe we need to overhaul the budget process. It 
frankly does not work very well. We think there are steps that can be 
taken that allow us to control Government spending and to reduce taxes 
better with more cooperation between the executive branch and the 
Congress, and we believe that requires reforming the budget process.
  Finally, we think that when the President asks for additional 
spending for emergencies or for overseas activities by our military, 
that that should be paid for at the same time we are passing it. We 
think that the age of credit card financing, where we just charge more 
and charge more and charge more, is over. If we are going to spend more 
money in one area, we should have the discipline to set priorities and 
spend less money in another area, so we are going to insist that 
supplemental spending bills be paid for on a pay-as-you-go basis.
  Our second goal after balancing the budget is to improve learning for 
all

[[Page H1024]]

Americans. I want to commend the chairman, the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania Bill Goodling, and the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce, which is doing a tremendous job in a project called 
Operation Crossroads.
  They are looking at all the Federal programs for education, they are 
looking at, with the oversight subcommittee chairman, with the 
leadership of the gentleman from Michigan, Pete Hoekstra, they are 
going out and have already held nine hearings asking what works; where 
are the best schools in America? Where is the best inner city school 
for poor children? Where are the best charter schools? Where is the 
best math education? Where is the best science education?
  They are trying to determine how can we improve Federal education 
assistance so we get more resources to teachers and students for 
classroom learning while keeping fewer resources in Washington.

                              {time}  1415

  Our goal is to help the teacher in the classroom and the student in 
the classroom rather than to build more and more bureaucracies. We 
believe that by this examination in Operation Crossroads of what works 
and what does not, we can begin to sort out the Federal programs.
  There are approximately 720 Federal education programs. They spend 
about, they have spent over the years over $539 billion in education. 
Our goal is to shrink the number of bureaucrats in Washington, take the 
savings, get them back home to the local school district, have them 
spent with the local student and the local teacher so that the parent, 
the student, and the teacher are affecting education.
  In addition, one of our goals is to enhance local and parental 
control of education. It is very important to recognize that real 
learning occurs where the student is. It does not occur at the State 
department of education. It does not occur at some regional office. It 
does not occur at the Federal department in Washington. It occurs in 
the school where the teachers are and it occurs at home. That is why we 
think it is important to strengthen parents and we think it is 
important to strengthen local control so that people who actually have 
hands-on experience with the students are in a position to work in 
education.
  Finally, we intend to cut education redtape and excessive bureaucracy 
and work with local teachers to help children master the basics. We 
think it is very important, and we agree with the President when he 
said that every child should be able to read by 8 years of age. We 
would have added they should be able to read English, which would save 
a great deal of money on bilingual education. We think it is important 
for every American child to have an opportunity to participate in the 
fullness of our culture, to be able to get the best possible jobs. We 
think that requires mastering English, and we think that requires a 
focus on reading and on writing and on basic math. We think every child 
at a fairly early age should be able to go to the store and buy 
something without being cheated because they are able to do the math to 
check exactly what they were charged and what they paid.
  We also believe that by focusing on the basics we can strengthen 
young people so that they are then in a position to continue to learn 
all of their lives because we recognize that lifetime learning is an 
essential in the information age, and we recognize that every young 
person is going to have to grow up in a world where they may have seven 
or eight or nine jobs in the course of their lifetime. Each of those 
jobs is going to require new learning and new experiences. They may 
move to many cities. Those are going to require new learning and new 
experiences.
  So we are committed to lifetime learning. We believe you begin by 
examining, out of the 720 Federal programs, which ones work, which ones 
fail, which ones have too many bureaucrats in Washington, how can we 
shrink the amount of redtape, get the money back home and help teachers 
and students and parents where the real learning occurs.
  Our third goal is to strengthen America's families. First we want to 
pass the Working Families Flexibility Act, which will permit working 
mothers and fathers to take time off using overtime for family and 
medical emergencies and other personal needs. This essentially 
recognizes that in the modern age very often people want time as much 
as they want money. It allows you to earn 1\1/2\ times off or 1\1/2\ 
times income, whichever you want. So if somebody has a need to go and 
see their child in the ballet or go visit with the teacher or be in a 
situation where they need to go take care of a parent who might have a 
health problem, this program, the Working Families Flexibility Act, 
would allow people to take their overtime and turn it into time off, 
more free time to be with their family if that is what they prefer.
  If they prefer to continue to get paid time and a half in cash, they 
could get paid. This creates greater flexibility and greater choice for 
workers and allows families to decide which do they need more, more 
money or more time. We believe that the Working Families Flexibility 
Act is a key step in the right direction.
  In addition, we will take steps to end partial birth abortions. It is 
very clear from the testimony we have had in the last few weeks that 
many Members of Congress were misinformed a year ago when one of the 
leading advocates of abortion suggested that partial birth abortions, 
these are abortions performed very late in pregnancy and they are 
performed in a way that the child is basically born except for their 
head and then their brains are taken out. It is a very gruesome 
procedure, and it is one which virtually no one defends. Yet we had 
been told it was very rare; it happened only in very unusual cases. Now 
we have had testimony that that information was false, that in fact it 
is fairly common and it often happens involving healthy babies and 
healthy mothers. We believe it is important when a child is that close 
to being born that they be protected and that this particular 
procedure, which is particularly gruesome and inhuman, be ended. That 
vote will be, I believe, this week.
  We are working to end this kind of partial birth. We also are working 
to expand the availability of adoptions. We think that adoption is a 
dramatically better answer than abortion. In the last Congress we 
passed adoption tax credits to give people some money to encourage them 
to be able to adopt a child. We are going to continue to work to have 
the adoption process streamlined because we believe that nothing will 
be better than to have someone decide that, rather than have an 
abortion, find a loving couple that wants to raise a child and help 
them in the adoption process. We also believe that helps fight child 
abuse and child neglect and helps take children out of foster homes and 
get them into homes where there are loving couples that want to adopt 
them.
  We also believe it will strengthen American families if we protect 
the rights of people of faith. For too long God has been driven from 
the public arena. We believe it is important that people be in a 
position where they can talk openly about their faith and where they 
are not subject to religious persecution. I should note on this subject 
that not only is it a challenge sometimes here at home but that we have 
seen a tremendous upsurge in the last 5 years of religious persecution 
of all faiths around the world and that we have an obligation to be 
vigilant in our commitment to the right of people to worship God in 
their own way and to protect their right to worship.
  We also want to strengthen America's families by protecting 
retirement security. We want to expand the number of individual 
retirement accounts that are available. We want to remove the kind of 
impediments that block expanded pension coverage, and we want to make 
sure that workers have a chance to earn greater retirement savings. Let 
me suggest that every citizen should look at the new program in 
Michigan, where Gov. John Engler has passed with the State legislature 
a new pension program that I think begins April 1 which allows the 
State employee an individual personal pension account that they 
control, that they invest, that they are vested in, that allows them to 
follow what is happening in the market and allows them to be involved 
in earning more money.

  I think it is going to be a very big step in the right direction 
toward giving the pensioner control rather than

[[Page H1025]]

having a union-controlled pension fund or a State Government-controlled 
pension fund or a corporate-controlled pension fund. We are looking for 
ways that you can control the money you are saving for your retirement. 
We believe that most Americans want to have that right to be able to 
make sure that they are investing their money wisely so they know how 
much money they really have for their own retirement.
  In addition, we will continue to work to make the Social Security 
trust fund safe and secure. It is currently sound, well into the next 
century. We believe it is possible to work to continue to make Social 
Security safe for everyone who is currently on it.
  Our fourth goal is to increase family income by lifting the burden of 
excessive taxes from working Americans. We believe that we should 
eliminate if possible or at a minimum significantly reduce taxes on 
savings and investment. We want more jobs and better jobs. We want 
Americans to have the best technology and the best science in the 
world. That requires that we have the kind of savings and investment 
that allows our laboratories to produce the best, that allows our 
factories to buy the best, that allows new companies with new ideas to 
start up. That is the only way to have the highest income in the world. 
That is why we believe it is vital to reduce the penalty on savings and 
investment. We favor strongly either eliminating or significantly 
reducing any kind of capital gains penalty because we want people to 
have an incentive to save and to invest because that way they are going 
to create the jobs for the future so their children have even better 
jobs with even better take-home pay so they can save even more. That 
has been the cycle of prosperity that has made America work.
  In addition, we want to pass tax relief that strengthens and 
encourages American families. We believe that it is vital for American 
families to have a $500 per child tax credit. We are going to do 
everything we can this year to both balance the budget and move toward 
a tax credit for children. We think that is the best way for parents to 
then decide how to spend the money on their own child rather than 
having higher taxes to hire a bureaucrat in Washington to then decide 
how much of the money after their salary and expenses should go back to 
take care of their child. We are trying to shift resources back into 
the family by increasing family take-home pay.
  We also believe that we should either repeal or substantially reduce 
death taxes. Why should someone work all of their life, build a small 
business or a family farm and then find the government taxes are so 
high that, when they die their family is going to have to sell that 
farm or sell that business just to pay the taxes. We think, if you work 
hard and you already paid taxes on the money, you should not have 
double taxation. We think it is wrong to say that, if you die, that 
your entire family business is going to have to be sold just to pay 
government taxes or your entire family farm is going to have to be 
sold. So we believe we should dramatically reduce or if possible 
eliminate the death taxes.
  For all Americans, we think that we should dramatically simplify tax 
laws in order to end the Internal Revenue Service as we know it. You 
may have read recently that the Internal Revenue Service had a $4 
billion computer project which failed. It turned out that, even when 
you spent $4 billion, the Internal Revenue Code was so complicated that 
they could not make it work. I think the message is not to build a $6 
billion computer, it is to dramatically simplify the Internal Revenue 
Code. That is going to take some serious work. We have asked the 
President to submit to the Congress a proposal for tax simplification. 
We believe it may be possible for as many as 40 million Americans to no 
longer have to file their income tax. That is American taxpayers who 
are currently filing.
  We believe it should be possible to dramatically decrease complexity 
so that the IRS office can give the same answer everywhere in the 
country. As you probably know, today if you call different IRS offices, 
you often get a different answer to the same question. So it is very 
hard to know exactly how to fill out some of the more complex parts of 
the code. So we are committed to dramatically simplifying the tax law 
in order to end the IRS as we know it and to get to a much simpler 
system with much less Government intrusion.
  Finally, we believe the Internal Revenue Service itself should be 
audited. After all, it has 110,000 employees. You can compare that with 
the Border Patrol, which has about 5,500 employees, or with the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, which has about 7,400 employees. So that 
110,000 people working for the Internal Revenue Service, they just 
failed completely with a $4 billion computer project. And it is very 
clear that we need to have a thorough management audit, not just a 
financial audit but a management audit of exactly how the Internal 
Revenue Service is run and exactly why it has had these major 
management problems.
  Our fifth goal is to improve access to quality health care. We 
believe it is possible for every American to have dramatically better 
health care because science is moving us into an era where the 
breakthroughs in scientific knowledge are going to be quite remarkable. 
The fact is the research, much of it done by the National Institutes of 
Health, others done by universities and private corporations, by 
research centers, that research is beginning to give us, in the human 
genome project, a level of knowledge about how humans operate which is 
greater than anything we have ever seen before. In fact, it is fair to 
say that in the next 20 to 30 years, we will have a level of knowledge 
that would have been unimaginable just 20 years ago. We are entering 
what one scientist called the age of molecular medicine, a period where 
our knowledge of our body is going to be so dramatic and our ability to 
look at birth defects, to look at cancer, to look at a variety of 
issues is going to be a dramatic change.
  In that framework, we want to start by working on health care for 
senior citizens. We want to start by saving Medicare from impending 
bankruptcy. Even though we in the Congress have been talking now for 2 
years about the danger of Medicare going bankrupt, we still do not have 
an adequate solution. We are working with the President. He has sent up 
some ideas. We hope if he submits a balanced budget proposal, he will 
have even more ideas for how to save Medicare.
  We believe it is important to save Medicare by increasing the number 
of choices available for senior citizens so that they have the same 
right to choose as do their children and their grandchildren. We 
believe it is important to fight fraud and in part to at least 
experiment with giving senior citizens a financial incentive to help us 
fight fraud.
  We believe it is important to create provider-sponsored networks 
where doctors and hospitals get together to compete with health 
maintenance organizations so we can have lower-cost, competitive 
choices so senior citizens are not trapped by any one kind of care. We 
also believe it is important to give senior citizens the same right to 
have a medical savings account as their children and grandchildren do. 
That is a program where you get a fairly high deductible. But if you 
take good care of yourself and if you watch your health, you get to 
keep all the money you save, if you do not in fact spend all of your 
deductible.

                              {time}  1430

  It is now being offered in the private sector. We believe it should 
be offered to senior citizens and that it has very many opportunities, 
particularly for folks who want to have more control over their own 
lives and who are willing to look at the cost of medical care and to 
look at the cost of medicine. We think there are big savings to be made 
through medical savings accounts.
  In addition to saving Medicare so it does not go broke, we want to 
improve it. We believe it is important to promote wellness through 
enhanced disease research and to improve Medicare preventive benefits, 
for example, diabetes and breast cancer screening. We think it is very 
important to recognize that the current model of the Health Care 
Financing Administration, which is the Government agency that runs 
Medicare, does not put enough emphasis on wellness and on preventive 
care.
  Diabetes is a topic I am particularly interested in because my 
mother-in-law is 81 and she is diabetic, and because she has really 
managed her diabetic care and she has watched her

[[Page H1026]]

blood sugar and she has watched her insulin, she has in fact been able 
to take pretty good care of herself. Yet the tragedy is that of the 16 
million Americans who have diabetes, 8 million do not know it. They 
will not learn it until they have had it for 6 or 7 years, and they 
begin to get sick enough that they show up at the doctor and the doctor 
then tests them and discovers they have diabetes.
  If we can find somebody early enough and if we can teach them how to 
take care of themselves, the evidence is that we may be able to save 
between 80 and 90 percent of the people who go blind, so that they can 
retain their sight and continue to see. Think of that. Think about a 
program where by early screening and early prevention and early 
education, 80 to 90 percent of the people who go blind because of 
diabetes would be able to keep their sight. We believe at least half 
the people who lose their kidneys or have severe heart disease or lose 
their feet to amputation, at least half would be able to avoid those 
problems.
  Imagine you could wave a magic wand, and by preventive care and 
education and a focus on wellness, you could stop half the people in 
the next 10 years who will lose their kidneys due to diabetes. You 
could stop half the people who will have their feet amputated. You 
could save half the people who will end up in intensive care with 
severe heart disease.
  That is the opportunity that an aggressive, active diabetes program 
in the short run gives us, and then beyond that, beyond the focus on 
prevention and wellness and education there is the opportunity for 
continued research at the National Institutes of Health, where I 
particularly want to commend Chairman John Porter who has done just a 
magnificent job over the last 3 years of really making sure that we 
continue to fund health research at the most basic levels, which is 
going to pay off for every American.
  But to go back to diabetes, let me give just a couple of numbers 
because they are so startling. One out of every three American Indians 
suffers from diabetes. What a tremendous opportunity to improve health 
among American Indians by really working on preventive care and 
education in diabetes. Some 19 percent of the people on Medicare suffer 
from diabetes, and 1 out of every 4 dollars in Medicare cost is spent 
on people who have diabetes. It is a tremendous opportunity for a 
better quality of life, a tremendous opportunity to save resources for 
the taxpayer, and it is the right thing to do.
  In addition, we want to improve the quality and coverage of Medicaid. 
We have been working with the Governors to develop more flexibility so 
each Governor can apply to their State the local solution that will let 
them serve the widest number of people in their State. It is important 
to remember this is a big country, there is no simple answer that 
solves everybody, and so we have an obligation to reach out and to do 
everything we can to make sure that the Governors have the flexibility, 
so that Tennessee is different from Nevada and Maine is different from 
California.
  Each State ought to have the opportunity to spend their Medicaid 
money as intelligently as possible so they can then cover more people 
and in particular extend coverage to children. We believe as many as 3 
million children could be covered by Medicaid who currently are not 
covered because the system is being run too much from Washington, with 
too much red tape and with too many bureaucrats.
  In addition to that, we believe that private citizens should have an 
expanded access to medical savings accounts. Right now the total number 
you can have in the whole country is 750,000. We think that that is an 
unrealistic cap. We believe if you want to have a medical savings 
account, which is a system where you basically pay a fairly high 
deductible, you are paying a much lower insurance premium because you 
are taking the risk of paying maybe as much as $2,000 or $3,000 in your 
deductible. But if you do not spend it, you are then in a position to 
put it away in a savings account so it begins to work for you and it 
adds up over the years.
  It is getting very wide-range approval. It leads people to start to 
shop for their medical care. They do not automatically just go in to 
any doctor, automatically just take any prescription drug. They begin 
to look at what does it cost and where can I get it less expensively 
and what is at stake, just like any other marketplace, and it has a 
dramatic impact on cost.
  We believe that it is going to be a system where people, those people 
who are willing to take the time, who want to engage in preventive care 
and wellness, and who are willing to shop for the best possible health 
care are going to find medical savings accounts very desirable, and we 
do not think that they should be limited to only 750,000 in a country 
of 260 million people.
  Finally, we want to improve access to quality health care by 
modernizing the Food and Drug Administration to speed up approval of 
medical advances that save lives. Whether it is medical technology or 
medical devices, or whether it is prescription drugs or the brand new 
breakthroughs in biotechnology, we are entering an age of dramatic 
change in health care.
  The faster we can get to the market, to the customer or the consumer 
and to the sick person, the best possible medicine, the best possible 
medical technology, the best possible biotechnology and the best 
possible medical devices, we are not only going to have better health 
care in America, we are also going to have a bigger American work 
force. Because in most of those areas, if we can get the Food and Drug 
Administration to certify products in a reasonable length of time, we 
have an opportunity to dramatically expand jobs in America selling 
better technology, better devices, better biotechnology and better 
medicine all over the world. We have a real interest in overhauling and 
modernizing the Food and Drug Administration.
  Our sixth agenda goal is to increase economic growth and create more 
jobs through regulatory reform.
  We recognize that with Washington bureaucrats engaged in regulations, 
many of them years and years out of date, that it is time to adopt 
commonsense regulatory reforms based on the principles of flexibility, 
consensus, private property ownership, free enterprise, local control, 
sound scientific evidence and the latest technology. We think that 
there is all too much time and money tied up in Washington red tape 
that could be used looking at creating more jobs, competing better in 
the world market, and having new scientific developments.
  We want to protect the public, to make sure the Government does the 
policing necessary, for example, for safe food, for clean water, for a 
healthy environment, for public health, but at the same time we 
recognize that there are an awful lot of bureaucratic regulations that 
either are not necessary or are more expensive than their benefit, or 
are just outmoded. They might have made sense 25 years ago but they do 
not make sense today.
  We want to apply sound science, we want to look at new ways of doing 
things, and what we want to do is have a better approach where we have 
the right incentive. We think it is possible to have commonsense 
regulatory reforms that allow small business and the private sector to 
create more jobs, which is particularly important, as I will discuss in 
a minute, when you get to welfare reform, because we need more jobs in 
America if we are going to take all the folks who are leaving welfare 
and make sure they can go into the private sector work force.
  In addition, we want the money spent on scientific research and on 
investment in new technology and new machinery rather than on red tape 
and regulations, so that Americans can have the best jobs in the world 
with the highest take-home pay, so that we can have the best quality of 
life.
  We are also going to work toward introducing competition into the 
American electricity marketplace. Just as introducing 
telecommunications reform over the last 10 years has brought down the 
cost of long distance telephones, just as we have seen competition both 
in airlines and in trucking bring down the cost of transportation, we 
believe that we can get to a marketplace where anybody who produces 
electricity can sell it and anybody who wants to buy it can purchase 
from a wide range of people.
  There are a lot of hearings that have to be held, but I particularly 
want to commend Chairman Dan Schaefer of

[[Page H1027]]

the subcommittee that will be looking into this and Chairman Tom Bliley 
of the Committee on Commerce, who are going to be leading extensive 
hearings into the question: Can we reduce the cost of electricity? The 
estimates are we could save the consumer possibly as much as $60 
billion by lowering the cost of electricity through competition. We 
need to look at it carefully, we need to make sure that we know what we 
are doing because it is a big, complicated topic, but competition in 
the electric marketplace might save you, the consumer, $60 billion a 
year in lower electric bills, and that is something that we have to 
look at very, very seriously.
  We also want to encourage greater competition in financial services 
by modernizing outdated regulations. We now live in the age of the 
worldwide market. We see on our television the Tokyo Exchange, the 
Shanghai Exchange, the Frankfurt Exchange, the London Exchange, Mexico 
City. We recognize that through the Internet and through international 
financial electronic transmissions, money moves worldwide literally in 
nanoseconds. A million dollars can be in New York at this second, in 
Hong Kong a minute later and in Seattle a minute after that.
  So we need to modernize our financial services and recognize that we 
adopted many regulations in a different era when different things 
happened, but that now with the computer and the Internet we have a 
whole new need to rethink how we provide the best financial services at 
the lowest cost to maximize the American public's opportunity to use 
finances and to save and borrow at the lowest possible cost.
  We also are encouraging State and local governments to review all 
existing unfunded mandates. The last Congress took a major step forward 
by ending future unfunded mandates. We said no longer could Congress 
pass a requirement, that is what a mandate is, without paying for it; 
that we were not going to be able to say to a local county government 
or a local school board or a local city or a State, ``You are going to 
have to raise your taxes to pay for something this Congress has 
required but refused to pay for.''
  But what we did not do is go back and look at the existing mandates. 
So in meetings with mayors, with State legislators, with county 
commissioners and with governors, we have been urging them to review 
the current list, find the ones that make no sense, find the mandates 
that are very, very expensive and do not meet any kind of rational 
cost-benefit test, find the mandates that are based on bad science, 
bring them to us, and we hope this year to be able to repeal the least 
effective and most expensive of the unfunded mandates.
  Finally, we want to ensure full compliance with the Results Act to 
force government to meet set performance standards. We believe it is 
important that government not just measure input, how many billion 
dollars do we spend in a department, but that government measure 
output: What do we get for our money? If we have spent $579 billion in 
Federal aid to education, why have scores gone down? If there are 14 
different literacy programs, which ones are effective and which ones do 
not get the job done? If we spend $3 billion a year on drug 
rehabilitation, which drug rehabilitation programs work and which ones 
do not? We think this is a very, very important area for us to be 
reviewing.
  Our seventh area is to fight gang violence and drugs. We want to 
prevent juvenile crime and target gangs and hard core juvenile 
offenders, and we are working with President Clinton on a Juvenile 
Justice Act that we hope will lower the amount of violent crime among 
young people and give us a better chance to have safe neighborhoods. We 
also want to renew our commitment to stigmatized drug use, to say 
flatly, as Nancy Reagan said it, ``Don't do it.'' ``Just say no'' 
worked.
  We are challenging the news media and the commercial networks and the 
cable channel operators to put anti-drug ads and antidrug messages on 
the air. We believe we have to fight drugs on MTV and on VH-1, and we 
have to fight drugs at the local level with local parents and local 
schools.
  We are also calling on the Clinton administration to provide a 
strategy for winning the war on drugs, and we want to restore the 
needed resources for the war on drugs. We passed a bill last week out 
of this House which draws the line very clearly. We are committed to 
saving our children from a drug culture which threatens to destroy 
them. We have had 5 straight years of increased drug use in this 
country. For 5 straight years, more and more young people have been 
using drugs, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and the modern marijuana is 
much stronger, much more addictive and much more dangerous than the 
drug of 25 years ago.
  We are faced with a great challenge. We believe it is vital to have a 
strategy to win the war on drugs, and we are prepared to work with the 
Clinton administration on winning that war.
  Our eighth goal is community renewal and investment. We want to help 
people move from poverty to prosperity by enacting community renewal 
initiatives. Here I want to particularly commend on a bipartisan basis 
Congressmen J.C. Watts and Jim Talent and Floyd Flake, who have worked 
together on a bipartisan basis to develop a community renewal 
initiative. I also want to commend Senator Dan Coats and Congressman 
John Kasich, who have developed ideas on tax credits for volunteers to 
be involved in volunteerism and to donate to charities, because I think 
it is very important that we get more money to charitable 
organizations, and particularly to faith-based charities which we 
believe have the best possible chance to help people.

                              {time}  1445

  I think it is possible to reform public housing. We think we can have 
dramatically better public housing where people have a better quality 
of life, more control over their neighborhood, a better way of living 
in a drug-free environment.
  We want to promote home ownership so people move from public housing 
into an opportunity to own a home, and I am very proud of my Habitat 
for Humanity pin, and the gentleman from California [Mr. Lewis] is 
particularly to be commended for working with Habitat for Humanity, and 
we hope to have this summer a house that Members of Congress will build 
here in Washington, DC, to prove our commitment and then go back home 
and work back home in building houses because Habitat for Humanity is 
the model example. It both grows the family and builds the house. It 
requires people to meet a test of character and hard work. It requires 
them to spend a hundred hours working to help build somebody else's 
house. It requires them to spend 300 hours working to build their own 
home. It requires them to take a 20-hour course in home ownership. 
Habitat understands that you have to worry about the people inside the 
building or the building will rapidly fall into disrepair.
  It is a tremendous concept, and the gentleman from California [Mr. 
Lewis] and the gentleman from New York [Mr. Lazio], chairman of the 
housing subcommittee, are working together. Congressman Lewis is 
chairman of an appropriations subcommittee, and they are working 
together on a range of housing reforms, and I must say that from early 
reports Secretary Andrew Cuomo seems to be moving in the right 
direction and have the right ideas, and we want to work with him in 
developing dramatic reform in housing in America.
  We also want to increase educational opportunity scholarships, and we 
want to have incentives to create jobs, and to help people in the 
poorest neighborhoods. You cannot move from welfare to work if there is 
no work, and so we are looking at opportunities, including enterprise 
zones and tax breaks and deregulatory steps to help small businesses 
and others provide more jobs in poor neighborhoods to help people move 
from welfare to work, and finally, as I said, we are working to promote 
charitable giving, both directly by saying people ought to do it and by 
creating a tax incentive led by the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich], 
and Senator Dan Coats.
  We also are working to rebuild America's transportation system to 
support the 21st century economy. The ISTEA legislation, the interstate 
transportation legislation, is very, very important. The gentleman from 
Pennsylvania [Mr. Shuster] and the Committee on Transportation and 
Infrastructure is going to be offering some major steps in the right 
direction to continue

[[Page H1028]]

to develop, but let me say I do disagree with one thing the President 
said last week when he proposed toll roads on the interstate system:
  I am against double taxation. Every time you buy a gallon of gasoline 
you are paying for the Federal highway program. Much of that money 
currently is hidden and not being spent in order to cover social 
spending that it was never designed to raise. We believe you should 
spend the money in the trust fund to build and modernize and repair the 
highways because you have already paid that tax when you paid for the 
gasoline. I think it is wrong to have you pay a toll tax on top of the 
gas tax that you are already paying.
  Finally we are committed to making Washington, DC, the finest capital 
city in the world. Every American should want their national capital to 
be a city they can be proud of, and I think it is vital that we work 
with the citizens in Washington, D.C. and with the delegate from 
Washington, DC, Ms. Norton. I commend in particular the gentleman from 
Virginia [Mr. Davis] who has done a tremendous job of working on this. 
Last year's chairman of the Committee on Appropriations' Subcommittee 
on the District of Columbia, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Walsh], 
who is a former mayor and council member back home in Syracuse, has a 
great understanding of what was needed and did a very, very good job, 
and now the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Taylor], the new 
chairman of the DC Subcommittee of Appropriations. This is very 
important for every American, I believe. We should be dedicated to our 
national capital being a capital we can be proud of, and we should work 
to make sure that with the help of the local citizenry that we can 
reform and rebuild.
  Our ninth goal is to reform the civil justice system. We think it is 
important that we send the signal that judges are appointed to 
interpret the law, not to make the law. We think the judicial activism 
where judges become petty dictators and they impose their opinion is 
dangerous and wrong. It is a violation of the constitutional separation 
of power. I am proud that the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Hyde], 
chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, is going to be holding 
hearings on judicial activism. It is an important topic.
  In addition, we need to reduce the time, expense, and burden of using 
our courts. It should not be so expensive to go to court that you 
cannot afford it, it should not be such an inconvenience that it is a 
major burden, and we need to make sure that it is easy to gain access 
to our court system.
  Finally, we should enact bipartisan product liability reform and 
other commonsense legal reforms, including protecting charities and 
local governments from abusive lawsuits. I hope we are going to be able 
to pass a Volunteerism Liability Protection Act before the Philadelphia 
summit on volunteerism. It just seems to me if you go out and you are a 
volunteer, you should not be a target for some trial lawyer, that there 
ought to be reasonable protections and reasonable caps, and as long as 
you are not grossly negligent, you should not have any dangers at all, 
and there is something wrong when you to try to help the Boy Scouts or 
help the Girl Scouts or be involved in the Salvation Army and it leads 
you to potential bankruptcy through some trial lawyer trying to make 
money off of your activities.
  So we hope to pass both bipartisan product liability reform and 
protecting charities from abusive lawsuits.
  Our 10th goal is to make our environmental protection efforts smarter 
and more effective. I used to teach environmental studies, and I 
believe deeply that we can have an effective environmental program, 
that we can secure biodiversity around the planet, that we can do a 
better job of using our resources, that we can have cleaner air and 
cleaner water, that we can clean up the toxic waste sites. The fact is 
today we are spending too much money on lawyers and too much money on 
bureaucrats and not enough money on engineers and not enough money on 
actual cleanups. We think we can reform that process so that we 
actually get better cleanups at lower cost faster.
  We also believe we can clean up the brown fields of our cities so 
they can be reused to create jobs by setting proper standards and 
proper commonsense regulations so that our cities can use the already 
industrial areas rather than forcing industry to go out to new green 
areas and tear down existing natural areas to build new factories. We 
think they ought to be able to reuse the areas that already exist in 
our cities, and today government makes that too difficult and too 
complicated.

  We also believe in improving our existing conservation programs. We 
want to save every possible endangered species. We think it can be done 
in a practical commonsense manner with local leadership involved in 
local efforts to maximize the kind of diversity that we all want for 
our children and grandchildren.
  Our 14th goal is to rebuild a strong national defense to remain the 
leader of the world. We want to reverse the neglect of defense 
modernization, of high tech research and development and of the quality 
of life of veterans, service personnel, and their families. The fact is 
that this administration is underfunding defense, it is not modernizing 
the weapon systems, and it has cut the amount of money that would be 
spent on military service personnel and apparently has outyear cuts on 
veterans that will be horrendous in terms of cutting the quality of 
their health care and their services.
  We believe it is important that American men and women in uniform be 
the best trained, the best equipped, and the best prepared in the 
world. We are able to do what we do with very low casualties because 
our young men and women have the support of their country year in and 
year out in developing the best possible military. That requires 
investing in research and development and investing in defense 
modernization, and if we are going to keep a high quality force, they 
have to have a decent standard of living back home and a decent 
standard of living on their bases, and that requires the kind of 
modernization we need, for example, in terms of barracks and housing.
  We also though think that you should not just salute waste because it 
is in uniform. We believe that it is possible to improve efficiency in 
defense spending and to reduce bureaucracy. We are committed, if I 
might say this symbolically, to reducing the Pentagon to a triangle in 
terms of the amount of mid-level management. We think you could have a 
40-percent reduction in the mid-level managers in the Pentagon. We 
believe you could go to multiyear contracting and have a dramatic 
improvement in the ability to buy weapons, to buy fighter aircraft and 
ships and other things.
  There is no reason to buy a complex big system 1 year at a time that 
makes them the most expensive possible way to do it, and so we hope we 
will see a major shift toward multiyear contracting so we can buy the 
most equipment at the lowest cost to give our men and women the best 
chance to survive on the battlefield of the future.
  We also think it is important to expand the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization to ensure peace in Europe for future generations. We 
strongly support having Poland and Hungary and the Republic of Czech 
entered as soon as possible, hopefully by July of this year. We believe 
that Romania certainly deserves consideration, so does Slovakia. There 
are a number of places that we need to look at and realize that it is 
important for countries that want to be free, countries that are 
democracies, countries that seek only the right to associate themselves 
with a strong defense organization to protect their freedom 
collectively. We have every interest in being the allies of those kinds 
of countries.
  Finally, on defense it is vital that we protect American territory 
from missiles from terrorist states or from dictatorships. We need to 
be honest about the threat to this country. There are missiles today 
that can reach America and eliminate our greatest cities literally in 
30 minutes. Some of those missiles are held by states that may not be 
favorable to us. Within a decade other countries that we know are not 
favorable to us are going to have similar missiles. Whether the weapon 
of mass destruction is nuclear or chemical or biological, we are faced 
with a tremendous threat in the next 20 years. The time to begin to 
defend America from that threat is now. Just as Britain had to have the 
foresight to build radar in the 1930's to survive the Battle

[[Page H1029]]

of Britain, the time to prepare to defend ourselves is not when the 
crisis occurs, not when we are blackmailed, but now. And every 
evidence, I think, of every independent observer is that the threat is 
real, it is already here and that we should be building today a 
national missile defense system capable of protecting the United 
States, capable of protecting Europe and Israel, and capable of 
protecting our allies in the Far East, if necessary, so that no one who 
has a missile can think that with impunity they can blackmail the free 
countries of the world.
  Our 12th goal is to reform the United Nations. We believe that the 
United States should get full credit for its financial contributions to 
the United Nations, including military capabilities, facilities, local 
government services, and the security we provide. We believe that it is 
important that the American taxpayer have wasteful bureaucracy reduced 
at the United Nations and have the United Nations reformed in general. 
We believe it is important to control expanding U.N. troop deployments 
around the globe to ensure that U.S. troops are not placed under U.N. 
command and to improve the consultation with Congress.
  We are in a different world than the one of our Founding Fathers. We 
now have real-time 24-hour a day television news on CNN. We have an 
ability for something to happen in minutes all around the world. And so 
we need a better consultation process between the executive and 
legislative branches if, in fact, we are going to be able to continue 
to have the will of the American people expressed. We support the 
United Nations, but we think we have every right as its largest donor 
to insist on reforms in return for that support.
  Our 13th goal is to ensure the integrity of American elections. We 
have been very bothered by the number of cases of fraud, including 
voting by illegal aliens or voting by immigrants who are not yet legal. 
We have the evidence that as many as 10,000 convicted felons may have 
become American citizens last year, which is illegal; the evidence that 
there was an all-out effort in some communities to have government-
funded agencies registering people who were not American citizens. We 
think that preventing voter fraud and ensuring the voters of an honest 
election is very important.

  We also think that it is vital to preserve and protect the 
constitutional right to free speech. The efforts to make speech 
bureaucratic have failed. We need to really look at this question: 
Should the Government really have controls over what people can say? 
Should the Government really have the ability to tell you you cannot 
buy a television ad or a newspaper ad, you cannot say what you believe 
in? Is that not the opposite of what Americans stand for? So we are 
committed to protecting our constitutional rights to free speech.
  We also believe that union members ought to have the right to know 
how much of their union dues are spent on politics and how much are 
spent on representation, and we believe that the political part of 
their dues should only be taken out voluntarily with the written 
permission of the union member, that they should not be coerced into 
automatically paying political money to pay for an ad against the 
opponent they are going to vote for. We think it is not the American 
way to have somebody have to buy ads for their own opponent, but that 
instead political contributions should be voluntary. We also believe 
citizens should be encouraged to participate in grassroots political 
involvement, and we would require full and timely disclosure of all 
campaign contributions.
  So we believe that with the Internet it is now possible for every 
campaign at the end of business every day to file electronically all of 
its contributions for that day with the FEC and to have those 
contributions be made available to the public so that your right to 
know who is donating to a candidate would appear immediately and you 
could know that night if you wanted to look it up or the next day in 
the newspaper.

                              {time}  1500

  So my first theme, which was that we have a 2-year agenda, has been 
long because the agenda is long. Thirteen major areas:
  Balance the Federal budget;
  Improving learning for all Americans;
  Strengthening America's families;
  Increasing family income by lifting the burden of excessive taxes 
from working Americans;
  Improving access to quality health care;
  Increasing economic growth and creating jobs through regulatory 
reform;
  Fighting gang violence and drugs;
  Community renewal and investment;
  Reforming the civil justice system;
  Making our environmental protection efforts smarter and more 
effective;
  Rebuilding a strong national defense to remain the leader of the free 
world;
  Reforming the United Nations; and
  Ensuring the integrity of American elections.
  That is a powerful agenda. It covers, really, the three topics that I 
listed as the next three, keeping our children's communities safe by 
winning the war on drugs, which is really, I think, one of our highest 
priorities. When we realize the children who are being destroyed by the 
drug trade, when we look at the violence that is directly related to 
drugs, when we look at the child abuse and the spouse abuse that grows 
directly out of drugs, winning the war on drugs should be as high a 
priority as any priority this country has.
  I am very proud of the resolution we adopted last week, and of the 
leadership of the gentleman from Illinois, Denny Hastert, in offering 
the amendment, which really made clear our commitment is to win the war 
on drugs, to work with Mexico, to work with Columbia, to make sure that 
everybody who is committed to fighting the drug dealers is on the same 
team.
  As I said, we are also committed to lowering interest rates and 
creating better jobs by producing a better balanced budget this year; 
and we are committed to ending the IRS as we know it, to have tax 
relief, and to simplifying the tax system.
  But the other item I want to spend a moment on is welfare reform. I 
want to take a moment because not only is it very, very important to 
the country, but it is proof that the Republican Congress has 
succeeded. The 104th Republican Congress made a major commitment to 
reform welfare. It took us over a year. We passed welfare reform twice, 
and twice President Clinton vetoed it. The third time we passed it he 
signed it. It ends the 61-year-old Federal entitlement to welfare, and 
says if you are an able-bodied adult, you should have expectations of 
working.
  Our goal is to help people move from poverty to prosperity by moving 
from welfare to work. Because there was so much talk about reforming 
welfare, people began to hear about it on radio, on television, in the 
news media, and welfare recipients began to voluntarily come into the 
welfare offices and say to the welfare workers, I guess I am going to 
have to get trained. I guess I am going to have to go find a job.
  In 22 States welfare caseloads have already fallen by 20 percent or 
more. Think about that. The bill has only been in effect since January 
1, yet with the psychological momentum, the news media coverage, the 
conversation on the street in 22 States, they have already had a drop 
of 20 percent or more in the number of cases on welfare.
  By the way, because we block-granted the money, we gave the States a 
set amount of money that allows them now to have more money per welfare 
family; in fact, one estimate is that there will be 56 percent more 
money available for the families still on welfare to help with child 
care, with retraining, and with job placement. So we see this welfare 
reform as important, not important because of the poor in terms of let 
us get them off welfare so we do not have to pay for it, but important 
for the poor because it helps them become prosperous.
  Our goal is not to save the taxpayer, it is to save those in poverty. 
It is to make sure that every citizen has an opportunity to pursue 
happiness which, after all, in our Declaration of Independence, we say 
that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, 
among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So we are 
trying to get that Creator-given unalienable right to the welfare 
recipient so they get in the habit of going to work, they get in the 
habit of having a job, they get in the habit of

[[Page H1030]]

saving on their paycheck, they begin to acquire private property.
  Then maybe they work with Habitat for Humanity or, the other pin I 
wear, Earning by Learning, a program to help poor children learn how to 
read; and in a few years they are on the road to prosperity, to 
becoming middle class, to becoming normal Americans engaged in the 
normal business of going to work and studying, and engaged in the 
normal process of having a home and having a better future.
  We are committed. We think we proved with welfare that we can get a 
lot done. We are committed to continuing to work to get a lot done. I 
just believe, as our colleagues go home for the Easter break, that they 
are in a position to report on a very exciting agenda, to report on a 
very exciting success with welfare reform.
  We are in a position to work on the Crossroads project, visiting 
local schools and other programs of excellence, conducting town 
meetings on education. We have a chance to have a school superintendent 
survey to establish an education advisory board to meet with our 
Governor and our State superintendent of education to talk about 
educational excellence.
  I think we really have an opportunity on a bipartisan basis, and I 
hope every Democrat and every Republican will join in the Crossroads 
project, and contact Chairman Hoekstra and Chairman Goodling to work on 
how to improve education.
  I believe, based on the record of the last Congress, that we have 
proven that while it takes a while to get it done, if you keep working 
at it, it is amazing what we can get accomplished here in this 
Congress. We are going to build on our success with welfare reform, we 
are going to have more successes over the next 18 months.
  I just think starting this weekend, Members have a chance during 
their district work period to really carry out a message of 
opportunity, a message of hope, and a message of working together as a 
team on a principled, bipartisanship that gets good things done for 
America. That is my message for the Easter break that is coming up.

                          ____________________