[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 80 (Tuesday, June 10, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H3647]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    WHAT IS A PERCEPTION'S REALITY?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this debate on 
TV and decided to come over and get involved a little bit. I heard the 
Beatles' name brought up earlier, and listening to this debate, I am 
reminded of another Beatles' line out of Strawberry Fields Forever. 
``They say living is easy with eyes closed; misunderstanding all you 
see.'' And then of course the hook is all about how nothing is real in 
Strawberry Fields.
  Well, nothing is real in this debate either. It reminds me so much of 
what happened over the past couple of years where we had Medicare come 
up first, and how we Republicans hated our grandmothers and senior 
citizens because we wanted Medicare to increase at 7.2 percent but the 
President and the Democrats, who loved our grandparents so much more 
than us, wanted it to increase at 7.3, 7.4 percent.
  Today, I think we voted on the bill in Ways and Means where it passed 
something like 30 to 3, a similar bill to what so many people were 
attacking before.
  Now it is flood victims. It was also children. We hated children 
because we only wanted the School Lunch Program to go up 4 percent 
instead of 6 or 7 percent.
  Now we are talking about flood victims, talking about how we want to 
hurt the flood victims. Of course, as happened during the Government 
shutdown when the President vetoed bill after bill after bill that we 
sent him, what people did not recognize was that it was the President 
who was vetoing the bills. It was the President who vetoed this bill 
today.
  So the President, of course, was handed a wonderful, wonderful issue. 
It was put in his lap. And I have to wonder how we Republicans keep 
stepping into it and making these mistakes, but we do because we 
actually think that we should debate on the merits instead of on 
political points.
  Which brings me to point two. The fact is that this crisis has been 
created for political purposes. What we do not hear is the fact that 
FEMA is funded, at least through this month. And we also saw in an AP 
report about a month ago, when this debate first started coming up 
before the Memorial Day break, when the President needed an issue, what 
he did, because the agencies were funded through this time period, he 
actually pushed up, he forward-funded, according to the AP articles, 
requirements so he could say, gee, these people are not getting their 
money.
  So the President pushed the dates up for funding so he could create a 
political crisis, and that is what he did. And so now the President can 
get out and once again be compassionate and be the one that loves flood 
victims when Republicans supposedly hate flood victims.
  So let us keep a list now. It is senior citizens, it is young 
children and it is flood victims. I guess the Democrats believe a 
sucker is born every day.
  I can tell my colleagues that I constantly have hurricane victims in 
my district. I understand how this situation works, and certainly I 
feel compassion for the people that have been suffering this crisis.
  In another area that, again, maybe nothing is real, or maybe as Henry 
Kissinger says, ``In politics, what is a perception's reality,'' we 
keep hearing people say just give us a clean bill, just let us fund the 
flood victims, that is all we really need, when, in reality, if 
somebody would pick up the New York Times this morning and read in the 
New York Times that this so-called clean flood bill, where we needed 
$750 million to actually fund the flood victims, ended up being an $8.4 
billion monstrosity.
  Now, I want to know where were all these self-righteous people when 
these emergency parking garages were being put in this bill; when, 
according to the New York Times article, we threw in, as ``an emergency 
funding'' a theater, with theater renovations. And they went and asked 
the guy who owned the theater, is this theater really an emergency, and 
he said, well, we had a couple of pipes that leaked last year.
  The fact is that we have shoved, these same people who are now 
screaming give us a clean bill were the same people, both sides, 
Republicans and Democrats, that were shoving as much stuff into this 
so-called emergency appropriations bill as they could. And yet now they 
come back and they whine about how they need a clean bill. Well, that 
did not seem to concern them that much before.
  Also, we shoved in money for apple orchardists. I guess they were so 
shocked and stunned by the visions they saw on TV that they were not 
able to attend to their apple orchards. Maybe that requires funding in 
this emergency appropriations bill.
  If we read the New York Times article, we can see that these 
arguments about how they just want a clean bill is disingenuous. 
Everybody has gathered around the table and thrown all they could on 
there.
  Finally, we should talk about what this issue is all about. It is 
about a continuing resolution issue, where we wanted to avoid letting 
the President do what he did before, vetoing appropriation bill after 
appropriation bill, and then coming out and going I will not let the 
Republicans do this, that, or the other.

                              {time}  2115

  Again, it is disingenuous. This CR is the only way we ensure that we 
continue funding FEMA and other agencies at 100 percent without the 
President vetoing these bills time in and time out, without using flood 
victims for political purposes.
  I say, let us get to the facts of the matter and let us stop using 
the flood victims as political pawns.

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