[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 52 (Friday, May 1, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4139-S4141]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  THE DEMOCRATIC AGENDA IN THE SENATE

  Mr. DORGAN. Let me talk about one last point, and that is the agenda 
of the Senate. The fact is, I come from a side of the political aisle 
in the Senate that does not control the agenda. The reason why is 
because we lost the election. The other side has more people, they 
elect the majority leader, and the majority leader decides the agenda 
of the Senate. I am not complaining about that. That is the way the 
Senate works and that is what the rules are.

  But we being a minority still have an agenda, and we still have 
certain rules in this Senate to work with to try to make certain our 
agenda is also considered. I want to mention just for a moment a couple 
of points in that agenda. I started out by discussing the Patients' 
Bill of Rights and the issue of health care quality in this country. We 
intend to see that there is a vote on managed care reform, the 
Patients' Bill of Rights, in this Congress.
  We also fully intend to see that a tobacco bill is brought up, and I 
think the majority leader now is going to a tobacco bill for 
consideration. We must as a country decide that this country will no 
longer countenance tobacco

[[Page S4140]]

companies targeting kids. You cannot addict 30-year-olds. Who reaches 
age 30 and says, ``What can I do to improve my life?'' and comes up 
with the answer of smoking? The tobacco companies addict kids. They get 
kids when they are 14, 15, 16 years old and addict them to nicotine. 
Those are the new customers for tobacco. By age 30, you know tobacco 
causes cancer and heart disease and a whole range of enormous health 
problems that threaten the American people. So almost nobody who is not 
addicted to nicotine by age 30 discovers that they could improve their 
life by starting to smoke.
  We must decide that we will not any longer in this country allow 
tobacco to target kids. The tobacco industry does not have that right. 
We have written a piece of tobacco legislation in the Senate Commerce 
Committee under the leadership of Senator McCain. It is a good piece of 
legislation. It is not perfect. I voted for it. I proposed some changes 
to it during the Committee's consideration, and I will propose some 
changes on the floor of the Senate as well. But overall it is a good 
piece of legislation.
  Senator McCain should be commended for his leadership. And the 
product of his leadership will be brought to the floor of the Senate. 
We need a wide open debate on that. This Congress must pass a tobacco 
bill. And we ought to do it soon.
  We did just discuss education on the floor of the Senate and, 
frankly, many of us are dissatisfied. Obviously, we did not get what we 
wanted from that debate. The way that debate was structured, we had 30 
minutes on this side of the aisle--30 minutes--to discuss an issue of 
substantial national importance, and that is the decay of America's 
school infrastructure.
  We proposed that the Federal Government just provide some help with 
respect to the interest costs on bonds that are used to build or 
modernize new schools. That is a significant priority, in my judgment. 
Yet the Senate said no, the priority should be to give tax subsidies, 
the bulk of which will go to kids who go to private schools.
  Last Sunday, I was in Fort Yates, ND, on the Standing Rock Indian 
Reservation, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school there. The 
elementary school has roughly 150 students, but it is closed now. If 
you go into the school building, you will see there is no carpeting, 
and the ceiling tiles have been removed. The lights were leaking PCBs, 
which is a carcinogen. And all the kids had to be removed from the 
school. That was February 13. The kids--these are mostly Indian 
children--are going to school in a gymnasium. The air is stale in this 
gymnasium, and there is no air-conditioning or ventilation that moves 
the air around.
  They have created classrooms by putting in big, make-shift plywood 
dividers that are not anchored to the floor. You just touch the 
dividers and they go back and forth. In some cases, the children are 
sitting on the bleachers and trying to do their classwork. And the 
noise from the 100-some kids in this gymnasium creates just a din. And 
that has been the quality of their education since February 13.
  And so one can talk about whether the condition of our schools 
matters. The school I just spoke of happens to be a BIA school. It is 
the responsibility of this Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 
It is not the responsibility of some local school district. It is our 
responsibility.
  Up the road 45 miles, I was in a school that I have mentioned a 
couple of times, the Cannon Ball Elementary School. This is a public 
school, although it happens to be on an Indian reservation as well. 
Nobody here in this Chamber would want to send their children to that 
school. There are 140 kids, plus teachers and staff, and only two 
bathrooms and one water fountain in the school. Part of the school is 
90 years old and has been condemned. The choir room, which is a former 
janitor's closet, has to be abandoned once or twice a week because 
sewer gas seeps in and they cannot continue to have kids in that room. 
Nobody here would say that would be a good place to have their children 
attend school. It is a public school, but it does not have any money 
because its tax base is so poor.
  So what do school officials do when large parts of the school has 
been condemned, kids are crammed into a classroom 12 foot by 8 foot, 
with not 1 inch between their desks because it is so crowded, and with 
twice as many kids scheduled to go into that classroom the next year? 
What they will do is split that class up, and they will put them in a 
big, open room. One teacher will teach two classes at the same time, 
going back and forth between the two groups of kids.
  And you can say, well, school construction is not important or it is 
somebody else's job. That school district does not have the capability 
ever to build a new school on its own because it simply does not have 
the tax base to support a bonding initiative. The cost of building a 
new school of the size that is needed is about $2.5 million. Yet the 
maximum bonding capacity of that school district, because it is on 
Indian land and its tax base is so small, is only $750,000.
  So 140 children--mostly Indian children--will continue to go to a 
school that none of us would want our kids to attend unless we do 
something to help them. The teachers at the school there are wonderful. 
The administrator is a wonderful man. They do a terrific job under 
tough circumstances. But those kids deserve better than that. When 
those kids walk through that schoolroom door, they deserve better than 
that.

  A little second grader named Rosie Two Bears asked me when I was in 
the classroom, she said, ``Mr. Senator, will you buy me a new school?'' 
Well, I can't buy her a new school, but part of the debate about the 
education agenda ought to be is school construction important and is 
this a national problem and is there something we can do, at least at 
the margin, to say this is a priority? Is it a higher priority than 
giving a tax credit to somebody who wants to send their child to a 
private school? I think so. At least it ought to be, but we only had 30 
minutes to make that case. And we didn't have the votes, unfortunately, 
to prevail on that amendment.
  Our point is that we have an agenda that relates to the center of 
what most people are concerned about and we want that agenda considered 
by the Senate. Most people are in their homes in the evening and 
talking at the dinner table. They are asking themselves pretty routine 
questions about life. How did the job go today, how is your job, do you 
have a job that pays well, has decent security? Do you have benefits? 
So how is the job? Or how about health care? Do grandpa and grandma 
have access to health care? How about the kids; do they have access to 
health care? What about the neighborhood; is it safe? Are the streets 
safe to walk in?
  Jobs and health care and education. What about our kids? Are they 
going to good schools? Are we proud in the morning when we send them 
off to schools? Those are the central issues--schools, health care, 
jobs, safety and security, crime. Those are the central issues that we 
must debate on the floor of the Senate.
  We have developed an agenda under the leadership of Senator Daschle 
and many others in our caucus. We don't believe we have the exclusive 
ideas that represent all the best ideas or the only ideas. We 
understand there are plenty of other people in this Chamber that have 
ideas of their own, some of which might fit better than the ideas we 
have, but we believe that the topics I just discussed are the central 
topics that relate to how most people live every day, and most of the 
conditions they have every day, and we very much want to see all of 
these topics --the agenda that the Republicans have and the agenda that 
the Democrats have--brought to the floor of the Senate for a full 
debate and have the American people weigh in on that discussion and 
tell us what they think is important.
  As we continue holding hearings and developing the agenda here in the 
Congress, I hope that agenda brought to the floor of the Senate will 
reflect the agenda we think is important. I say again, we fully intend 
to pursue this agenda with great vigor. For those who now suggest that 
they will keep it off the floor of the Senate--managed care reform, for 
example--I say to them we will be awfully annoying for a long time 
because we insist it come to the floor.
  Let me make another point that I think will represent a significant 
area of priority debate in this Congress, and that is there are these 
folks who stand

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up at the desks in the Senate and the House of Representatives and talk 
about the surplus, what we should do with the surplus. In fact, some 
are talking about how large a tax cut they can give this year to deal 
with the budget surplus. There is no budget surplus. There isn't a 
budget surplus. We have made wonderful progress in wrestling the budget 
deficit to the ground, but there is not a budget surplus unless you 
save the Social Security revenues for the purpose they were intended to 
be saved for.
  I say to all of those who are rushing to embrace their favorite tax 
cut plan, President Clinton said it in the State of the Union Address, 
and we still believe it, save Social Security first. When people, from 
their paychecks, make a payment to the Social Security trust fund in 
the form of a tax that is dedicated to be used only for one purpose, do 
not misuse it. Don't use it as other revenue. Don't count it as part of 
your budget calculation. Save it in the trust fund and save Social 
Security first. That is the responsibility of this Congress.
  All of those folks who have ideas either to provide tax breaks or to 
spend the money that doesn't exist, I say to them you have and we have 
a responsibility to save Social Security first. When we get to a budget 
debate on a budget conference report, we will once again, I assume, 
have that kind of contest about what ought to be done with respect to 
this budget.
  I say as emphatically as I can, you do not have a budget surplus 
until you have made whole the Social Security funds and kept the 
promise to the American people to save Social Security first.
  I yield the floor.

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