[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 82 (Thursday, June 12, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H3793]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   MORE ON THE EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Wicker] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WICKER. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted that we have gone ahead and 
passed the supplemental bill today. I supported it, and there can be no 
question now as to our commitment to supporting the flood victims and 
the other needs that were contained in the bill.
  My party and my political philosophy were forced to make a tactical 
retreat today. We abandoned two very key portions of this supplemental 
bill, and I want to address those in the time that I have today, Mr. 
Speaker.
  First of all, we were trying in this bill to fashion a way to prevent 
another Government shutdown. The shutdowns of late 1995 and early 1996 
were regrettable. The American people told us that they did not want 
that again. And in the legislation that passed earlier, we had a 
provision saying that if Congress and the President at the end of the 
fiscal year are unable to come to a resolution, then automatically the 
appropriation bills would be funded at 100 percent of the previous year 
until something could be worked out on a permanent basis.
  I feel that that was reasonable. I am sorry we had to abandon that 
because of the President's veto. But I state to my colleagues and to 
the American people, Mr. Speaker, that it was a worthwhile goal. It was 
important and it had everything to do with the bill that we were 
discussing this week.
  The second major issue was the issue of the census. The American 
people might ask us, Mr. Speaker, what does the census have to do with 
an emergency spending bill? It has everything to do with the future of 
our country. It has everything to do with abiding by the Constitution.
  There are people in the administration, people in the Commerce 
Department, in the Bureau of the Census, who want to count about 90 
percent of the people in the year 2000, and then guess at the other 10 
percent. We are told by congressional studies that those guesses could 
be off by as much as 35 percent. In other words, a group of 100 people 
might be counted at 65. They might be counted at 135.
  The Constitution of the United States, Mr. Speaker, says that there 
shall be an actual enumeration, an actual enumeration. That is what the 
Constitution says. That is what the Founding Fathers said when they 
fashioned the Constitution. I do not apologize for standing up for the 
Constitution, for standing up for an issue which is central to the 
franchise of voters.
  Then one more point I want to make to the response to some of the 
accusations that were made by my friends on the other side of the 
aisle.

                              {time}  1745

  They say we do not need to put riders on appropriation bills. We do 
not need to appropriate money and then hold a gun to the President's 
head with these extraneous legislative riders.
  For 40 years my friends on the Democratic side of the aisle utilized 
this tactic. It is a legitimate exercise of the constitutional power of 
the purse. It is within the prerogative of the House of Representatives 
to initiate spending bills and to put requirements on those spending 
bills to make sure the money is spent according to the will of the 
American people and according to the will of this House. It is part of 
our responsibility.
  As long as that power of the purse is here in this body, whether 
Democrats are in the majority, as they were for 40 years, or whether 
Republicans are in the majority, there will continue to be legislative 
riders. I want to point that out. We were fighting for important 
things, important principles that affect the future of this country.
  I will be happy to yield to my friend from Florida.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Mississippi, 
and I thank him for all his hard work on this.
  I hear what the gentleman is saying, and I know a lot of Americans 
hear what the gentleman is saying. It is deeply troubling to me to hear 
year in and year out from the other side talking in self-righteous 
tones that we are doing these awful things that have never been done 
before; talking about how we are gutting Medicare, and then a year 
later they vote 36 to 3 to support the same provisions that we were 
doing a year ago.
  Now, supposedly, we are victimizing flood victims, who were fully 
funded through the State, anyway. And now we hear how we should have 
sent the President a clean CR. And I guess that is what is most 
troubling, when I hear the President get on the TV talking about this 
great need for a clean CR. What was clean about this CR?

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