[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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