[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 118 (Wednesday, September 9, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H7480-H7485]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                PRESSING ISSUES THAT STILL FACE CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we just returned to Congress from a recess. 
We have 5 weeks of working time left, unless there is some extended 
Congress before the election. I doubt that very seriously.
  I also have heard the news today that the Ken Starr report has been 
delivered to the House of Representatives, and a process is going 
forward by which the Committee on Rules will determine what will happen 
to that report and how it could be handled. I am sure that is going to 
absorb a large part of our time.
  There are items on the agenda that have been on the agenda all year 
long and all during this session of Congress that I hope will not get 
lost. I think it is very important that the American people, in their 
commonsense wisdom, understand that there is no need for us to suddenly 
go on holiday with respect to the pressing issues that face the 
Congress.
  There are still overcrowded schools, schools with coal-burning 
furnaces. There is still a need for some kind of relief from every area 
of government, including the Federal Government, for school 
construction in our big cities. There is still a need to have money to 
lower the ratio of students to teachers. There is still a need for the 
wiring of our schools for technology, to bring them up to the point 
where they can train young people for jobs that do exist. There is 
still a need for increasing the minimum wage.
  There are a lot of things that mean a lot to ordinary people, and we 
should not put them in the deep freeze in order to spend all of our 
time on the one issue of the President's private life and the Ken Starr 
report.
  I have been asked a couple of times today why the black community so 
solidly supports the President. In poll after poll, no matter how you 
ask the question, whether you are talking about the job performance of 
the President or his personal life or any other matter related to the 
President, you generally get a high approval rate in the African 
American community.
  Certainly I think one of the reasons for that, and I do not pretend 
to know all of the answers, one of the reasons for that is because we 
are oriented toward the issues and the problems, and we would like to 
see the problems and the issues dealt with. We would like to see some 
of the problems solved and resolved.
  Additional polls of African American parents in big cities have shown 
that large numbers of African American parents are now supporting 
vouchers for education as an alternative to the public school system. I 
think that the two kinds of responses are related; that the large 
numbers of African American parents supporting the vouchers in the 
school system, it is evidence of a kind of desperation, a kind of 
fatalism that has set in, that they do not believe anything is going to 
change in the public school system. They do not think the supporters 
are there among elected officials.
  In New York City we had a surplus of nearly $2 billion in the budget, 
and not a penny was spent to deal with the pressing problems of school 
construction, including removal of coal-burning furnaces. At the same 
time, in New York State they had a similar $2 billion surplus, and the 
Governor turned down a legislative request or vetoed a legislative 
request for $500 million for school construction.
  So wherever parents in inner city communities look for some relief 
from the conditions, it appears that government officials are not 
interested, or have decided to deliberately abandon or ignore the needs 
of children in our inner city schools. We are talking about millions of 
children.
  The same conditions that exist in the crowded New York City schools 
exist in many other big cities. Children are forced to eat lunch at 10 
o'clock because there are so many, they have to have a relay in the 
cafeteria, and they have to start early in order to get three or four 
teams in, three or four sessions in the cafeteria where youngsters eat. 
Coal-burning furnaces are definitely a threat to every child's health 
who sits in the school, because the dust that you do not see is still 
getting into the lungs of young children.

[[Page H7481]]

Things that bad are not being addressed by our elected officials at 
various levels.
  The despair about change relates to the support for President 
Clinton. The one person who has articulated and set forth a program 
which would address these issues, if he had the cooperation of the 
Republican-controlled Congress, is President Clinton.
  Across the board, when affirmative action was threatened, and 
hysterical forces surrounding the President were counseling him to 
abandon affirmative action, it was President Clinton who came up with 
the statement and the strategy that we should mend affirmative action 
and not end it.
  In very serious matters that affect peoples' lives, including the 
minimum wage, which does not cost the government anything, an increase 
in the minimum wage would not cost the government anything, the 
President supports an increase in the minimum wage. Most of the people 
in my district would appreciate very much the government taking that 
step, which will not cost the government anything, but recognizes that 
the prosperity that we enjoy should be shared.
  We could pull up a very good list of concrete reasons why African 
American people, who the large majority of them are poor, or poor 
people in general, support this President. We want to see a focus on 
the duties and functions of government, that government has certain 
duties and functions, and we would like to see a decrease in the 
obsession with the private life of the President.
  I issued a statement this afternoon to get on the record, since I see 
a lot of people want to get on the record, and I suppose it would be 
prudent to back out now, since the Starr report is here, and wait and 
see what the Starr report has to say, but I choose not to do that.
  I very strongly feel that government has invaded an area of 
individual privacy here, and some of us should marshall all of the 
energy and resources at our command to fight this kind of intrusion by 
government, because if they can do it to a President, there is no other 
individual in this Nation who is not also subject to that kind of 
intrusion into their private life.

                              {time}  1945

  The statement I issued sums it all up for me: As a Member of 
Congress, I am sorry that there is an escalating hysteria that may lead 
to the religious lynching of a great President. President Clinton has 
gone farther than he should have been asked to go in offering a public 
statement about his intimate personal life. In view of the fact that 
absolutely no one has charged that a national security issue is 
involved in this matter, all further government inquiries should be 
dropped. The Nation has in no way been placed at risk. Certainly 
nothing took place which touched on bribery, treason, or high crimes 
and misdemeanors.
  For those who continue to expand their detailed probe and to pass 
judgment through the prism of their hypocritical, Victorian values, we 
concede their right to wallow in their Peyton Place preoccupations. 
There is, however, a profound difference between crimes and sins.
  It is of utmost importance that we acknowledge and support the spirit 
of our Constitution which discourages the state from investigating 
private morality and affirms the right of every American, even the 
President, to separately negotiate his sins with his God.
  This intrusion on the President's private life bodes ill for the 
future. Every politician is fair game. It bodes ill for ordinary people 
if government at this level is allowed to move in a way which really 
knocks down the separation of church and state, because the church, the 
religious institutions are responsible for private morality and for 
sin.
  If we are going to invade that domain and become the arbiters of who 
is sinful, who has done what wrong, and who should be punished, then we 
are on our way to something similar to the Taleban government in 
Afghanistan. The extreme of what we are doing now can be seen in the 
way the Taleban behave. You get on that course of giving government the 
power to interfere, to regulate, to get into the minute details of 
individual lives and determine who is sinning and who is not, then we 
can get into a situation where a government like the Taleban government 
is justified. They determine. They decide women should not only cover 
themselves in public; they should not go out in public too much. They 
determine that women in Afghanistan could no longer hold positions of 
any kind in the government. They determined all that on the basis of 
their concept of what is moral. The government and the religion are 
one.
  That is the way we are headed in a country which prides itself on 
separation of church and state. Why is the state spending millions of 
dollars in order to pursue what is probably someone's sin? Not 
probably; we have reached the point where the President has admitted, 
apologized, et cetera. It is a fact. A sin was committed in accordance 
with the standards of this Nation and the standards of the President 
himself. So sin is what we are talking about. Where are the high crimes 
and misdemeanors? Where is the bribery or treason or anything of that 
kind?
  I would like to certainly see the Starr report as soon as it is 
available to Members of the House. I certainly will read it and I will 
be looking for a statement on bribery, treason, or high crimes and 
misdemeanors. Where is it in that Starr report? Why are we even going 
to bother with the report if it does not contain charges of bribery, 
treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors?
  I think that in 5 weeks it is expected that the President will become 
paralyzed, that nothing of substance will be done. I am hoping that the 
common sense of the American people will send a message to this 
Congress and send a message to the commentators and the reporters, the 
media, and the press. They have driven this thing very hard. They have 
looked at the response of the American people and decided they will not 
accept it, that they are going to change it. So the press and the media 
have become a force for changing people's minds. They are going to make 
us believe that this is the most important issue in the world.
  One reporter, one veteran reporter who covers the White House, said 
this is the most important story because it is a human story. There are 
a lot of human stories. Jerry Springer has a lot of human stories on 
every day. Pulp magazines are full of human stories. If we are going to 
consider human stories to be stories about sex, then there are many of 
those human stories.
  I do not think the intimate sex lives of human beings are 
particularly the kinds of things that define human beings. Animals of 
all kinds have sex. Why does the human story have to be related to a 
sexual relationship? Why can the human story not be about the fact that 
the human beings in Northern Ireland cheered the President as a hero? 
They cheered the President as a hero because they have faced life-and-
death issues. They have faced life and death. They have died. They know 
this President went out of his way, an uncommon procedure of an 
American President, and became intimately involved in the negotiating 
of the peace that Senator Mitchell brokered, that led to the present 
situation.
  They know this President has been intimately involved in a life-and-
death matter and lives will be saved, important things are going to 
happen as a result of his intervention. They understand what President 
Clinton meant when he called this Nation an ``Indispensable Nation.'' 
And I think the President in certain situations has seen himself as the 
indispensable person to make things happen. In the case of Northern 
Ireland, this was the case.
  In the case of the rescue of Haiti from a bloodthirsty, armed 
occupation by its own army where people counted bodies every morning 
when they came out to go to work, the President, against public 
opinion, public opinion was running two to one against intervention in 
Haiti, on the floor of the Congress two-thirds of the Members of 
Congress were against intervention, but the President made a decision 
and he freed the people of Haiti. He took the bloody yoke off of Haiti. 
That legacy will stand. As a result of his actions in Haiti, the 
President, I think, found himself and understood the kinds of decisions 
he would have to make in the future.
  It was possible, because he made a definite, right decision in Haiti, 
it was possible for him to follow through in the case of Bosnia and 
Yugoslavia and make similar decisions. The public

[[Page H7482]]

opinion polls were running two to one against intervention in Bosnia, 
intervention in the whole Yugoslavia-Serbia-Croatia situation. But the 
President felt that we were the indispensable nation, the indispensable 
element that had to become involved, and he made that decision.
  The children dying while they were running to go to the well, all the 
horror stories that we saw in connection with Sarajevo, the genocidal 
death pits, all of that would be going on still if it had not been for 
the fact that this President made a decision that as an indispensable 
nation and as the indispensable leader at this point that he was going 
to take action, and he led us into Bosnia.
  It so happens that I disagree with the length of time we have spent 
there and the amount of money that we have spent there, but the 
decision was vital in order to turn the situation around. So Bosnia, 
Serbia, Croatia, all of those elements are still struggling.

  Mr. Speaker, I do not think the United States should stay there 
forever to help them put things together. I think the horror is gone 
and they will never go back to the horror. I think all the fighting 
factions there are glad to be relieved of the need to perpetrate one 
horror after another against one another. This President, he has a 
legacy there that no one can take away.
  Mr. Speaker, I think that those who press the issue of destruction of 
the legacy of the President by his personal actions, it is one argument 
being used by the press and the heavy-handed commentators that seem 
persuasive to a lot of people. How can he go down in history? How can 
he salvage anything for the next 2 years with all of the present 
exposure of his personal life?
  Well, I think we ought to go way back in American history and 
recognize some things that people do not like to talk about. One of the 
greatest American Presidents, I certainly would place him in the top 
three or four American Presidents, was challenged in his first term by 
the press and a journalist that actually had been a friend of his, 
named James Calendar. He wrote a story and started a whole series of 
stories about the life of Thomas Jefferson and the fact that Thomas 
Jefferson had a slave mistress who had several children by Thomas 
Jefferson. This is not a rumor. There are newspapers and cartoons and 
factual evidence. It happened.
  James Calendar made the charge in the article. The other papers 
picked it up. The cartoons ridiculed Jefferson for his black bride. All 
kinds of pressure was brought to bear on Thomas Jefferson in his very 
first term. This is a President who served 8 years. In his first year, 
these were the kind of pressures that were unleashed on Thomas 
Jefferson.
  Without going into an argument about whether they really were his 
kids or not, or whether he was really involved with Sally Hemings as 
charged, the pressure was there. The story was there. The Chief Justice 
of the United States Supreme Court, who was a distant relative of 
Jefferson's and did not like him, he chimed in until one of the 
newspapers stated that the Chief Justice had several children by slave 
mistresses also, and then he backed away.
  But it was a big scandal. I am not going to go into much greater 
detail. It just so happened that there is a very interesting ending. 
The woman, Sally Hemings, who was supposed to be Jefferson's mistress, 
stayed at Monticello when Jefferson left the presidency. She stayed for 
30 years. Sally Hemings and the President were in the same house. Only 
Sally Hemings was ever fingered and pointed out to be a mistress of 
Jefferson.
  But the important thing is that Jefferson went on to effect the 
Louisiana Purchase. Where would the Nation be if there had been no 
Louisiana Purchase, the opening up the direction of the West, the 
removal of Spain and France who were lingering around the edges of the 
United States, dying to establish some kind of beachhead? All of that 
was swept away in one fell swoop.
  The Louisiana Purchase, which was engineered by Thomas Jefferson 
almost alone, because there was no great debate about what to do, he 
outmaneuvered Napoleon. Napoleon wanted Jefferson and the United States 
to get involved in the war in Haiti and expected the United States to 
come to his aid. Jefferson refused to do that. Napoleon lost the war in 
Haiti and he expended a great deal of funds in the process and was 
broke. So he sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States at a 
very, very bargain price. But Jefferson maneuvered all of that, despite 
the fact that he had been put under great pressure in his first year. 
They went away. The charges and the people who attempted to ridicule 
him finally shut up.
  Throughout the course of the entire ordeal, Thomas Jefferson refused 
to comment at all. He never said a word one way or another. The 
American people at that time, the ordinary people out there, the 
innkeepers, the carpenters, and the various ordinary workers out there, 
who adored Thomas Jefferson, were never that concerned. It was always 
the press, always the cartoonists who pressured and pressed to get 
answers about the private life of Thomas Jefferson.
  So, Mr. Speaker, he was one example. I can give many others where the 
legacy, the individual legacy is not injured by the personal life. The 
ability to achieve things is not injured by the personal life of public 
people.
  It is quite amusing to hear people talk about a legacy being 
destroyed because of private behavior. We would have legacies destroyed 
right down through American history of quite a number of other 
presidents. I heard the other day on National Public Radio an irate 
listener call up and said somebody tried to tarnish George Washington, 
was smearing George Washington in order to protect Bill Clinton. I do 
not think it is a smear of George Washington to point out that there 
was at least one factual account of an extramarital relationship and 
rumors and some historians talk about other things. Remember, this is a 
George Washington who refused to be crowned the king. This is the 
George Washington who would not run for a third term.

                              {time}  2000

  Nobody can take away from George Washington the nobility and the 
greatness of those kinds of actions regardless of what the historians 
pinpoint.
  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is among the greatest of the three or four 
greatest Presidents. The man who probably has to be credited with 
stopping Adolph Hitler from ruling the world. Very few intellects, very 
few imaginations, very few courageous spirits can match Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt. Yeah, he made a few mistakes here and there. He interned the 
Japanese at the beginning of World War II.
  Every President makes mistakes. He did not move fast enough, as fast 
as he could have, to integrate the armed forces. There are a lot of 
mistakes. But when you measure the mistakes against the achievements, 
there is no question about the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will 
ever be taken away. Nobody can ever deny him his place of one of the 
greatest American Presidents.
  But it is a fact that he had some extramarital relationships in his 
public life, more than one. It is a fact. They are not disputed. It did 
not mean that he could not meet day after day and night after night 
with Winston Churchill in the early days when the United States 
declared war on Germany and Japan when Churchill came over here. It did 
not mean he could not rise to the occasion whatever his personal life 
was like, whatever he was doing in his personal life. It certainly did 
not mean that publicly he could not perform.
  This notion that they go together or the human story must be told 
because the human story tells us what a person is all about is a soap 
opera notion. It is soap opera.
  I think the private domain sometimes can be legitimately invaded. I 
think Presidents ought to report on their health correctly. I think the 
French are right and that Francois Mitterand, when it was disclosed 
that Francois Mitterand, the President of France, had cancer before he 
died, he died of cancer, the French appointed investigators to find out 
when did he know that he had cancer, how serious was it. They felt it 
was an important thing to know.
  Was he incapacitated and unable to carry out the business of the 
state. That is all they wanted to know. They did not want to know about 
his mistress and his children by his mistress. But they thought it was 
important to

[[Page H7483]]

know what kind of person with what kind of mental capacity was, or 
physical capacity was in charge of the state.
  There are some things a state should know. There are things that the 
state may also disapprove of. But the fact that the state disapproves 
of certain kinds of private behavior does not mean the state should 
become the prosecutor, the arbiter.
  I mean, where is the church, where are the priests, where are the 
ministers, where is their function if we are going to have the state 
become the agency for monitoring sin and regulating sin?
  I want to read some excerpts from a column that appeared in the New 
York Times yesterday by Anthony Lewis. And I think the very strong 
statement here is one that I certainly would agree with 100 percent, 
and I invite you to get a copy of the Anthony Lewis column of September 
8, 1998.
  It starts as follows:

       Senator Joseph Lieberman struck a cord in the country 
     because of the way he criticized President Clinton's 
     behavior. He ground no political ax. He was not holier than 
     thou. He gave us no prurient sanctimony. Simply and directly, 
     he expressed what most people feel: Sadness and outrage.
       But on one point he went too far when he said that no 
     President today can have a private life. The reality is it is 
     in 1998 that a President's private life is public, Senator 
     Lieberman said. Contemporary news media standards will have 
     it no other way.

  I am quoting from an article by Anthony Lewis.

       Must every President from here on live with a press driven 
     downward by competition and morbid curiosity? Beyond that, 
     can no President ever again be assured of confidence in his 
     talks with advisors? Must every President look at his Secret 
     Service guards as potential witnesses?
       I cannot imagine any ordinary person who wanted to live 
     under such conditions. Total exposure or the fear of it would 
     put an intolerable strain on us.
       Privacy is an essential ingredient of civilized human 
     existence. The reason was explained in a superb article last 
     month in the London Times Literary Supplement by Thomas 
     Nagel, professor of philosophy and law of New York 
     University.

  I am still quoting from Anthony Lewis' column.

       To quote Professor Nagel, ``each of our inner lives is such 
     a jungle of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and impulses that 
     civilization would be impossible if we expressed them all or 
     if we could all read each other's minds. Just as social life 
     would be impossible if we expressed all our lustful, 
     aggressive, greedy, anxious, or self-obsessed feelings in 
     ordinary public encounters, so would inner life be impossible 
     if we tried to become wholly persons whose thoughts, 
     feelings, and private behavior could be safely exposed to 
     public view.''
       Professor Nagel correctly saw the destruction of 
     Presidential privacy as part of a larger trend, quote, ``a 
     disastrous erosion of the pressures but fragile conventions 
     of personal privacy in the United States over the past 10 or 
     20 years. We are in the age of letting it all hang out and of 
     rewards for exposing others.''
       We can't limit the choice of political figures to those 
     whose peculiar inner constitution enables them to withstand 
     outrageous exposure or those whose sexual lives are pure are 
     simon-pure, Professor Nagel wrote.

  It is important to understand that the Clinton case is special. Last 
February, I wrote, to quote Anthony Lewis,

       President Clinton was on notice, years of notice, that his 
     sexual behavior was in issue. If he ignored the warnings and 
     then went on television to deny the truth, he will be judged 
     by the American people in those terms, and should be.
       But in general, we as a country are better off not knowing 
     about the private lives of our leaders and not lusting to 
     know. Would America be a better place if the supposed sexual 
     adventures of John F. Kennedy lately retailed had been 
     reported at the time? If the press, which in those days was 
     far more restrained, had published the material leaked by J. 
     Edgar Hoover about Dr. Martin Luther King's sexual straying?
       The great Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello in the play 
     ``Right You Are If You Think You Are'' showed the price of 
     community pays when it is driven by gossips to find out the 
     truth about people's private lives. It is not an accident 
     that both Linda Tripp and Kenneth Starr justify their 
     relentless behavior as demanded by the truth.
       We should not ferret out the secrets of private lives; 
     least of all should we do so by the terrible power of the 
     criminal law. My hope and belief are that, however the 
     Clinton story ends, the country and Congress will see to it 
     that never again will a prosecutor thus damage the 
     Presidency. For the good of the country, a President needs 
     what Justice Brandeis call the right to be let alone, the 
     right most valued by civilized men.

  This is the end of the quote from Anthony Lewis in the New York Times 
on September 8. I invite you to get a copy for yourself. I think it is 
a brilliant statement there of what the present situation means in 
terms of overall civilization and our values in this civilization.
  I am not a lawyer or a legal scholar, but I really would like to hear 
a legal discussion of what the present situation means in terms of 
separation of church and state. If the state can invade the personal 
domain and personal behavior and charge itself to deal with people's 
sins, where are we going in terms of separation of church and state?
  I have heard all kinds of speeches made in the name of raising the 
flag of morality in America. There have been numerous reporters who 
have stated that the country's values have gone downward, and we have 
degenerated in terms of morality over the last 25, 30 years.
  I challenge that. I challenge that very much so. I challenge it first 
in terms of the fact that the private lives of several Presidents I 
mentioned, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, private lives of those 
people and the things that we might not approve of that happen in their 
private lives were known to members of the press and members of the 
establishment here in Washington. They were not so secret that they 
were not known.
  The fact that no one felt so morally compulsive as to come forward 
and make a public issue out of the private life of Franklin Roosevelt 
or the private life of John F. Kennedy, what does that mean? They were 
less moral? Maybe they were.
  Maybe our indignation and the fact that the press feels it has a 
right to discuss these matters and to pass judgment and to wage an 
editorial crusade to change the mind of the American people and make 
them prosecute the President for his sins, that is new. It evolved, as 
Professor Nagel said, in the last 10 or 20 years. Does that mean that 
we are more moral because we lay those issues out on the table?
  I heard a commentator on a C-SPAN show who spoke very forcefully 
about this moral issue, how we have to deal with saving the morality of 
America, how the children are watching, and we must set the best 
examples, all of which separately make a lot of sense. I think we 
should set the best possible examples as public officials. I think this 
scandal is very damaging.
  But the same commentator was asked a few minutes later, have you 
discussed this with your teenage children? He wants to save America. He 
wants to guarantee that the moral standards of the President and the 
public officials are the highest. But when he was asked have you 
discussed this with your teenage children, he said no. He said I have 
not. I am a little afraid to tackle that. I am afraid of what they 
might say. I am afraid.
  Here is a man who wants to save America, but he will not talk to his 
own children. If there is a moral problem in America, then the moral 
problem is parents who will not talk to their children about something 
they consider so important that they take very intense public positions 
about.
  He is a afraid. Is afraid that they might say we do not think it is 
that important. He is afraid. Let me not put thoughts in his mouth. I 
do not know what he is afraid of. But certainly the refusal to talk to 
your own children about it says a great deal about your convictions as 
to the morality of them.
  Are we afraid because children understand that people tell lies all 
the time? And when they hear adults railing about how awful it is to 
have a lie, a lie about something you have done, children, by the time 
they are teenagers, they are ahead of us.
  They have gone through the discovery that there is no Santa Claus. 
They know that storks do not bring babies, or you do not pick babies up 
in packages at the hospital. There are all kinds of little lies that 
have been told them that have been exposed. I assure you they are way 
ahead and listening all the time for those kinds of untruths, as 
innocent as they may be.

                              {time}  2015

  Children may know what was recently stated by a priest in a contest 
that was held. It was a big contest held about America's wisdom, and a 
priest was in the contest with three other contenders and he won.

[[Page H7484]]

  The question was: Is it always important to be honest and tell the 
truth; must we always be honest and tell the truth? And the priest was 
selected as having the best answer because he said it is not always 
important that we tell the truth. And he laid out a whole series of 
situations where innocent people would be hurt if we were to tell the 
truth.
  There is no absolute standard which says we must always tell the 
truth and that any lie is equal to any other lie. Goebbels' lying about 
the concentration camp is equal to somebody lying about their personal 
behavior. Moral standards are something that always relate to sex or 
relationships between men and women.
  Adolf Hitler would not allow his picture to be taken in short pants 
because he thought it was indecent. Adolf Hitler, responsible for more 
murders and more death and more suffering and more horror than this 
planet has ever experienced. No matter how far we go back, the scale of 
Hitler's murderous ventures cannot be matched, and yet he would not 
have his picture taken in short pants because it was immoral, obscene.
  Charles Keating, head of a savings and loan association out in 
Arizona which cost the taxpayers more than $2 billion when it went 
under, Charles Keating is a crusader against pornography. And yet he 
swindled the American people. Through the schemes related to the 
savings and loan association, he swindled us out of $2 billion. And 
when he could not get any more through the Federal Deposit Insurance 
Corporation, he went out into the lobby of his bank and sold securities 
to people without any Federal deposit insurance, and they lost 
everything. This is the kind of monster we are dealing with.
  Morality in America. Where was the press, where were the reporters 
and the editorials when the savings and loan swindle was exploding? I 
could not believe the degree to which the press, the media, ignored a 
swindle of the magnitude that the world had never seen before, the 
savings and loan association swindle.
  And there were other banks involved, too. The whole process by which 
they used the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover for the 
draining of billions of dollars from the banks was never treated by the 
press the way the private behavior of the President is being treated 
now. There was never any passion in the editorials. There were long 
stretches of silence.
  There were books that were written that suddenly disappeared. And 
even now it is difficult to get hard facts that are clear as to exactly 
how much money did the American taxpayers lose. The estimate is $500 
billion by some economists at Stanford University, that the savings and 
loan swindle in the end will cost the American taxpayers $500 billion.
  Now, the savings and loan swindle was the beginning of something 
which continues today. The savings and loan swindle was based on crony 
capitalism and banking socialism. The socialism part came because the 
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the American taxpayers' money, 
insured every depositor who had placed $100,000 or less in the bank. So 
it was a kind of socialist protection.
  The cronyism came because banks did not follow the regular procedures 
of lending. They lent millions of dollars on the basis of friendship. 
Cronies. The crony capitalism and the banking socialism pattern that 
started with the savings and loan associations of America is exactly 
what happened in Mexico, only they did not have the safeguards of a 
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to the degree we have, so 
individuals in Mexico lost much more.
  It is the same pattern of Indonesia crony capitalism, where there are 
no real standards or real requirements for collateral or a sound 
business plan or all the things we would confront if we went to the 
bank to ask for a $10,000 loan or a $20,000 business loan. We would 
have to fill out reams of paper and go through a whole process. Well, 
there is a stratum in the business world where they do not do that. It 
is on the basis of friendship that loans are made.
  And the pattern that the savings and loan associations established, 
Mexico picked up on it, Korea was run the same way, Indonesia, all 
across the Asian Tiger countries we have this pattern of crony 
capitalism and government now stepping in to help bail the situation 
out, because government in these areas played a major role in providing 
the capital to the banks that did the lending to their cronies. 
Overnight, economies like Korea and Malaysia, boom.
  I visited Korea for a week and was in Seoul, the capital of Korea, 
and I was astonished at the number of office buildings. We visited 
about three office buildings, high-rise buildings, beautiful buildings 
on the outside. Inside the buildings, most of the offices were empty. 
They got the money to do the building and whatever the financing was, 
but they did not need the buildings.
  Just as during the savings and loan swindle days they had all these 
developments in Texas that the builders had gone and borrowed the 
money, made the first effort of digging foundations, doing a few 
things, and therefore it qualified for the loans. They were scot-free. 
They said that the developments failed for economic reasons. Nobody was 
convicted in most of these cases. They just walked off scot-free. That 
kind of crony capitalism, backed up by banking socialism, was never 
attacked as being immoral; the kind of day-after-day, relentless 
pursuit.
  On ABC, Cokie Roberts has been around for a long time. She has seen a 
lot of things happen in Washington. She ought to know better when she 
talks about this being one of the most important things in the world 
morally. Where were their voices during the savings and loan swindle? 
Immoral, costly, a lot of criminality took place, the Mafia made a 
mint, and the response morally was not there.
  Let me just sort of sum up what I am saying. A nation that cannot 
identify what is morally most important, cannot set priorities, cannot 
see that it is immoral at a time like this, when we have a budget 
surplus, to keep sending children to unsafe schools and overcrowded 
schools. It is immoral to send them to schools that have coal-burning 
furnaces. That is immoral, not to have the leadership being willing to 
invest in safety and health.
  It is immoral not to take this opportunity, when the money is here, 
to invest in education in greater amounts. A nation that cannot see 
that, a nation that prefers to spend $30,000 or $40,000 a year on a 
prisoner, a prisoner in a prison cell, and will not do anything about 
the expenditure of less than $5,000 a year on children who go to inner 
city schools is immoral. That is an immoral act.
  There are all kinds of judgments that need to be made about what is 
important and what is not important. What are we here for, for 5 weeks? 
Should we not do things that make a difference for people in the Nation 
or people anywhere in the world? For 5 weeks the power is here to do a 
great deal if we were to see ourselves as President Clinton described 
us in his inaugural address, if we were to see ourselves as an 
indispensable nation.

  We have all kinds of problems throughout the world. The economies are 
in serious trouble. That is obvious. The global warming now is pretty 
much a fact with a lot of implications. And with the tumultuous kinds 
of weather we have been having recently, if global warming is going to 
make that worse, we are in serious trouble. There is a whole lot of 
planning and a whole lot of leadership needed.
  We are the indispensable nation. We are the ones who at this point 
are economically most secure. We are the Nation that the world looks 
to. They value our leadership. The American colossus does not rule with 
armies, does not have to administer colonies. It is the goodwill of 
America.
  It is the fact that American men died on the beaches of Normandy to 
defend the concept of freedom. Our homes were not immediately 
threatened by Hitler. Those great sacrifices were made in the Battle of 
the Bulge and on the beaches of Normandy by people who had some 
idealism. And the country was driven by idealism. We get a return on 
that.
  The whole world, despite what we hear here and there, the whole world 
looks to America for leadership, admires America. We have terrorists 
who will hate us just because we are admired. We have many enemies, but 
to be admired means we are going to have enemies.

[[Page H7485]]

  So this great America of ours is at the pinnacle of its power and it 
is an indispensable nation and we ought to behave like an indispensable 
nation. Instead of being preoccupied with Peyton Place-type activities, 
we should look to where are we now and what can we do with our enormous 
power and wealth to make the world a better place for our constituents, 
to deal with some immediate problems.
  I do not want to have to go back to my constituents and say, look, we 
have no hope. The relief of the overcrowding schools, the coal-burning 
furnaces, these are relatively small things, but we are not going to 
get any help with them. I do not want the despair which drives people 
to choose vouchers, which is a ridiculous way to go because only a 
handful of children can ever be served through that method. And 
vouchers to private schools, there are just not enough out there. It is 
the public school system that will continue to educate most of our 
children and we have to stay with the public school system.
  We can experiment more with charter schools, which are public 
schools, there are a number of things we can do to try to improve the 
schools, but we cannot spoon-feed the process or put Band-aids on. We 
really need to do something dramatic about guaranteeing that every 
youngster has a clean, safe school with an atmosphere that is conducive 
to learning; that every youngster is in a classroom where the teachers 
are not overwhelmed because there are so many children.
  There are a lot of very small things that a mere stroke of the pen on 
some appropriations bills could put in place. But yet we choose not to 
live up to the calling or the responsibility that history has thrust 
upon us.
  I want to read, in closing, a statement that I made on February 4, 
1997, following President Clinton's inaugural address and I put it in 
the Congressional Record.

       Mr. Speaker, President Clinton's inaugural address was not 
     a State of the Union speech obligated to provide substance 
     for general proposals. Appropriately, the President used his 
     second inaugural statement to set a tone for the next 4 
     years, the prelude to the 21st century. America is a great 
     country blessed by God with wealth far surpassing any nation 
     on the face of the Earth now or in the past. The Roman Empire 
     was a begger entity compared to the rich and powerful 
     Americans. God has granted us an opportunity unparalleled in 
     history.
       President Clinton called upon both leaders and ordinary 
     citizens to measure up to this splendid moment. The President 
     called upon all of us to abandon ancient hatreds and 
     obsessions with trivial issues. For a brief moment in history 
     we are the indispensable people.
       Other nations have occupied this position before and failed 
     the world. The American colossus should break the historic 
     pattern of empires devouring themselves. As we move into the 
     21st century we need indispensable leaders with global 
     visions. We need profound decisions.

  I conclude with a poem of my own.

     ``Under God
     The indivisible indispensable nation
     Guardian of the pivotal generation
     Most fortunate of all the lands
     For a brief moment
     The whole world we hold in our hands
     Internet sorcery computer magic
     Tiny spirits make opportunity tragic
     We are the indispensable nation
     Guardian of the pivotal generation
     Millionaires must rise to see the need
     Or smother beneath their splendid greed
     Capitalism is king
     With potential to be Pope
     Banks hoard gold
     That could fertilize universal hope
     Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, King
     Make your star spangled legacy sting
     Dispatch your ghosts
     To bring us global visions
     Indispensible leaders
     Need profound decisions
     Internet sorcery, computer magic.
     Tiny spirits make opportunity tragic.
     We are the indispensable nation,
     Guardian of the pivotal generation
     With liberty and justice for the world
     Under God.

                              {time}  2030

  Instead of being preoccupied with a soap opera and the human story of 
one man's fragility, we should look to our role as the indispensable 
nation, we should look to our role as the generation within this 
indispensable nation that has a golden opportunity to turn things 
around.
  I started by saying that in the African-American community there is 
strong support for President Clinton despite all of the revelations. 
And I certainly know from firsthand information gathered in my district 
that it is very strong. I made it my business to question ladies of the 
church and find out where they stood.
  And I think there have been many reasons that have been said before 
why blacks support this President. We are afraid of what happens when 
he is no longer there. We appreciate the fact that he has stayed with 
the issues that matter most.
  But I think, also, there is a wisdom in the African-American 
community by these church ladies and other people who have been raised 
on the Bible. They know the legacy of King David is not wiped out by 
his weakness in connection with Bathsheba. They know that Sampson is 
still a symbol of strength despite the fact that he had a weakness and 
was vulnerable.
  They looked over the whole pattern of history and they know that the 
good that men do often dies with them, and it is not fair.
  We are in a situation now where trivialities may smother America, 
trivialities. We have opened Pandora's box. If a President's life can 
be invaded by the government, trivialities will smother us all. Who 
will be next and how many dramatic human stories will television have 
to play with along the way?
  I hope that for the next 5 weeks we can turn away from preoccupation 
with the personal life of one man and deal with preoccupation with the 
life of the Nation. We are an indispensable nation. We ought to behave 
like people who are a pivotal generation within this indispensable 
nation.

                          ____________________