[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 79 (Wednesday, June 17, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H4641]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    CONGRESS HAS BETTER THINGS TO DO

  (Ms. SLAUGHTER asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise this morning to discuss very 
briefly the controversy that has arisen about the Independent Counsel's 
office and the recent magazine article which asserts that he has leaked 
consistently to the press.

                              {time}  1030

  Mr. Speaker, the people in my district, the 28th District of New 
York, tell me on a consistent basis that they have simply had enough. 
And if there are requests now for money to investigate Mr. Starr, who 
is investigating everybody else, I say that on behalf of the people of 
the 28th Congressional District that we have had enough and this would 
be good money after bad, coming to absolutely nothing.
  The 5-year investigation by this independent counsel's office which 
started with Whitewater and ends with heaven knows what has gotten us 
nothing but the concern of the people in the United States that we do 
not have anything more important to do in Washington, and a concern, I 
think, throughout the world that we also are not doing anything very 
important here.
  But, Mr. Speaker, there is much to do. I have a bill, H.R. 306, which 
would protect every person in the United States from discrimination in 
their health insurance because of their genetic makeup. We have 200 
bipartisan sponsors and over 125 outside groups that probably 
collectively include almost half the population of the United States. 
But we have been totally unable to get a hearing on this bill.
  It is absolutely critical that we do protect the genetic privacy and 
information of Americans because we are on the cusp, at the beginning 
of this new century, of having an entirely new way of providing health 
care and learning more about ourselves than we were ever able to know 
before.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues in this House to demand that we 
have a hearing on this bill. We have filed a discharge petition that we 
are hoping that all Members, on a bipartisan basis, will sign so that 
before the end of this session we will have an opportunity to discuss 
and to pass this bill to protect all of us because, believe me, all of 
us have genes, to protect all of us against the loss or the change in 
rates in terms of our health insurance.

                          ____________________