[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 113 (Tuesday, September 2, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8640-S8641]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
OPEN HOUSE TOWN MEETINGS
Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, in the absence of any other Senator on
the floor at the present time, I will utilize this occasion to discuss
the open house town meetings which I held during the course of the past
recess in August to share with my colleagues and those who may be
watching on C-SPAN 2 some of the observations that I found in traveling
in my State of Pennsylvania and in meeting with my citizens.
I make it a point to have meetings in every one of the Pennsylvania
counties as often as I can, and by the end of September, by the end of
this month, I will have covered all of my 67 counties, something that I
find very, very valuable.
What I do as a matter of format--and I think this is similar to what
many Senators do--is I make a very brief statement, as to what we have
done, and then I throw the floor open for questions. Usually I get
somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 questions. Regrettably, our mail
allocation has been cut down. In prior years, it had been possible to
send mail to our entire counties. That mail allocation has been reduced
so that it is not possible to send mail to all of the counties. This is
something which I think the Senate ought to give serious consideration
to revising. I believe that we ought to be frugal when it comes to
mailings which do have some political import, but where a Senator
himself or herself goes out into a community to appear to make a
presentation and respond to questions, I think that is the very essence
of our democratic process. To the extent that the mail notifies people
in a very direct way of the presence of a Senator coming into the
community, my sense is that is well worth doing.
The dominant theme that I found in traveling through Pennsylvania,
Mr. President, was a dissatisfaction or a distrust of government. There
is great cynicism in America today about what is going on in
Washington, DC. It is my sense that unless you go out and actually talk
to the people--and not just in shopping centers and not just casually,
as we have our social contacts during the course of a recess period--
that there is not a full understanding as to how much apathy, cynicism
and outright distrust of our Government there is. I noted the
Washington Post, on the 29th of August, just a few days ago, had on its
front page a survey which noted ``three out of four say they do not
trust the Government or its leaders to do what is right.''
My own findings would confirm that, as I have been in many open house
town meetings during the course of the past month and throughout the
past year. At one of my open house town meetings, one of the citizens
was wearing a cap that had the word ``militia'' printed on it. There
are many people in the militia in the United States today. How many
exactly, we do not know.
In my capacity as chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on
Terrorism, we had hearings concerning militias during the 104th
Congress. We had Colonel Olson from the Michigan militia come in and
speak in very unflattering terms about the Congress of the United
States.
There have been estimates into the millions as to how many militia
members there are.
And in one of my open house town meetings, the word ``revolution''
was used in expressing very grave disagreement with what the Government
was doing, on this occasion the importation of sludge from New York and
New Jersey to fill abandoned mines in Pennsylvania. And there is great
concern in my State, as there is I think in this country generally,
about limitations on so-called second amendment rights, and great
distrust as to what the Government is doing.
During the course of the past month, Ruby Ridge was again in the news
with a report by the Department of Justice. The report stated that
there would not be any prosecutions as to the investigation which had
been conducted by the Department of Justice. This investigation lasted
almost 2 years after it was initiated in the fall of 1995, a period of
time which I think is unwarranted on the facts as I know them.
I have had discussions with both the Attorney General and the U.S.
attorney in charge of that investigation and will talk about that in
some greater detail. After the Department of Justice report was issued,
the prosecuting attorney in Boundary County, ID, returned an indictment
against Special Agent Lon Horiuchi of the FBI on the charge of
involuntary manslaughter on the killing of Mrs. Vicki Weaver which
occurred in that confrontation back on August 21, 1992.
The DA for Boundary County returned the indictment of murder in the
first degree against Mr. Kevin Harris for the killing of Deputy Marshal
William Degan. The incidents which we have seen in Waco and in Ruby
Ridge have fanned, I think, really great distrust for the Government,
something which we are going to have to address in greater detail.
In my personal opinion, the Congress has not yet had appropriate
oversight hearings on Waco, notwithstanding the fact that we have done
something there. I think we have made a start on Ruby Ridge when the
subcommittee which I chaired back in September and October of 1995,
with 14 days of hearings, heard from about 60 witnesses and published a
150-page report. I intend to talk about that in greater detail on the
floor of the Senate when we have some time, perhaps yet this afternoon.
But I do want to comment about the grave concerns which I have found
in my State about distrusting the Government and how the Ruby Ridge
subject came up because it was very much in the news during the weeks
of mid-August, August 13, 14, and 15, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
And I was in western and central Pennsylvania, August 20, 21, and 22
when I was again doing open house town meetings.
I also found great concern in the open house town meetings I
conducted about the way campaigns are financed. And I believe that the
hearings we have had before the Governmental Affairs Committee during
the month of July have resonated more in America than many people
believed. It is unfortunate, I think, that there has not been more
television coverage because that is the way the American people get
most of their information these days.
Only Fox has carried them live, the Fox cable channel. And CNN has
covered to a slight extent, and C-SPAN has not covered them live but
has replayed them. And there are many people who watch C-SPAN.
Insomniacs are people who watch during the late hours of the night. You
can probably catch the Governmental Affairs hearings if you watch at
about 3 a.m. to see what is going on. But I found that many people have
been watching them and were very concerned about what is going on.
My view is that we ought to have campaign finance reform. And I voted
for cloture last year to bring the legislation offered by Senator
McCain and Senator Feingold to the floor. I believe that there is a
difficulty with that particular piece of legislation on calling for
television stations to give free time because I think that is a taking
of property without compensation required by the fifth amendment of the
U.S. Constitution.
But I have been working on legislation, some of which has been
motivated by what I have seen in the Governmental Affairs hearing. I
intend to talk about that as well, perhaps later this afternoon if
there are no other Senators on the floor who come to offer amendments.
I have also heard, Mr. President, considerable concern about what is
happening with Social Security and Medicare. And regrettably there has
been a practice of using those issues for campaign purposes, something
done by both political parties. I do not suggest blame in what has been
done in the campaign sense. But I think we would be better advised if
we tailored our representations a little closer to what the facts are.
But these open house town meetings are populated very significantly
by our senior citizens who have more time to come to the open house
town meetings. And perhaps there is greater interest among senior
citizens in what is going on in Government because of Social Security
and Medicare.
But people are questioning whether Social Security is really secure.
And
[[Page S8641]]
my view is that it is. They are questioning about what is happening
with Medicare. And I think the American people have not understood that
when we have considered changes in Medicare that we have not sought to
cut Medicare but instead to restrain the growth of Medicare. We have
looked at an increase in funding for Medicare in excess of 10 percent a
year. We have sought to reach compromise between Democrats and
Republicans to restrain the growth somewhere in the 7-percent range,
give or take a little. And that is two or three times the rate of
inflation. But if we are to maintain Medicare, we are going to have to
be able to pay for it and to contain the rate of growth on Medicare.
I am pleased that we have established in the recent legislation a
commission which will take up Medicare in some detail on a bipartisan
basis to try to give assurance to the public that what we are doing
here is sound governmentally and sound financially. It is not for
political scare tactics. We had the Commission for Social Security back
in 1983 which put Social Security on a solid basis.
We had then Senator Pepper as a Member of the House, a very
distinguished representative of senior citizens, someone the senior
citizens had a lot of confidence in. We had a slight increase in the
tax on Social Security and a slight delay in receiving benefits and put
Social Security on a sound basis back in 1983. And it is my hope that
we will be able to do that again.
People want to know about a trust fund, why we do not have Social
Security off budget. That I believe, Mr. President, is something we
ought to be doing. It is currently part of the unified budget so that
it makes the deficit appear smaller. But it really ought to be
segregated in a trust fund.
Similar concerns were expressed about the highway trust fund. Across
Pennsylvania, and I think reflective of America, people want the moneys
used for the gasoline tax to be used for the highway trust fund or mass
transit. Across my State, I hear enormous concerns about Continental 1,
a major highway, transcontinental highway, which will start in Toronto,
Canada, and go all the way to Florida. It picks up a stretch of highway
known as U.S. 219 in Pennsylvania where people are very anxious to have
that on the books. And we would have the money, if we use the highway
trust fund, for that purpose.
We had amendments narrowly defeated in both the Senate and the House
by 2 votes, I recollect, 216 to 214 in the House, and I know it was 51
to 49 here in the Senate where we attempted to allocate more funds for
highways. I hear concerns all over my State about the need for more
transportation funding. And the Mon Valley Expressway linking Fayette
County, Uniontown to Pittsburgh would be a bonanza to develop that
section of southwestern Pennsylvania which has been hit so hard by the
losses of the steel industry, the coal industry, and the glass
industry.
And all over the State there is this interest in highways. I can
personally attest, traveling around the back roads of my State, how
tough it is to travel, to get behind a big truck. It happens all the
time on a two-lane highway, and what had been planned as a 45-minute
trip takes an hour and 10 minutes. The infrastructure is so very, very
vital. We ought to be taking a much closer look there.
There are similar concerns on airports, as I traveled through the
State, where airports ought to be improved. Infrastructure would
improve job opportunities. Major corporations, companies want to settle
in communities which have access to air service.
I also heard grave concern about what is going on with the managed
care and with HMO's and with the issue of the so-called gag rule where
family doctors are not permitted to have a referral to a specialist. We
legislated on what was called the drive-by deliveries, requiring that
women giving birth spend at least 48 hours in the hospital. Further, we
have pending legislation on so-called drive-by mastectomies, where
women who undergo that very difficult operative procedure are not
ousted from the hospital. These complicated issues are obviously
matters which are better left without congressional micromanagement,
but something which we may have to get into, to some extent. But there
is grave concern as managed care move across America, that there be
fair access for the people who are insured and concern about HMO's
paying their fair share on medical education and the so-called DSH
proposals of disproportionate share for care for the indigent.
These are some of the items which I heard a great deal about as I
traveled through my State.
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